Divine Embodiment in Philo of Alexandria
In: Journal for the Study of JudaismSearch for other papers by Deborah Forger in
Current site
Google Scholar
Abstract
Because later polemics established Jews and Christians as binary opposites, distinguished largely by their views on God’s body, scholars have not sufficiently explored how other Jews in the early Roman period, who stood outside the Jesus movement, conceived of how the divine could become embodied on earth. The first-century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria often operates as the quintessential representative of a Jew who stressed God’s absolute incorporeality. Here I demonstrate how Philo also presents a means by which a part of Israel’s God could become united with human materiality, showing how the patriarchs and Moses function as his paradigms. This evidence suggests that scholarship on divine embodiment has been limited by knowledge of later developments in Christian theology. Incarnational formulas, like that found in John 1:14 were not the only way that Jews in the first and second century CE understood that God could become united with human form.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
-
Baer, Richard A., Jr. Philo’s Use of the Categories Male and Female (Leiden: Brill, 1970).
-
Bauckham, Richard. God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999).
-
Bauckham, Richard. “The Throne of God and the Worship of Jesus.” In The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism: Papers from the St. Andrews Conference on the Historical Origins of the Worship of Jesus, ed. Carey C. Newman, James R. Davila, and Gladys S. Lewis (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 43-69.
-
Bauckham, Richard. Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009).
-
Bauckham, Richard. “Moses as ‘God’ in Philo of Alexandria: A Precedent for Christology?” In The Spirit and Christ in the New Testament and Christian Theology, ed. I. Howard Marshall, Volker Rabens, and Cornelis Bennema (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 246-265.
-
Boccaccini, Gabriele. “How Jesus Became Uncreated.” In Sibyls, Scriptures, and Scrolls: John Collins at Seventy, ed. Joel Baden, Hindy Najman, and Eibert Tigchelaar (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 185-208.
-
Borgen, Peder. “Moses, Jesus, and the Roman Emperor. Observations in Philo’s Writings and the Revelation of John.” Novum Testamentum 38 (1996), 145-159.
-
Boyarin, Daniel. Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
-
Casey, Maurice. From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God: The Origins and Development of New Testament Christology (Cambridge: Clarke, 1991).
-
Cohen, Shaye J.D. The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
-
Collins, John J. Jewish Wisdom in the Hellenistic Age (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997).
-
Conway, Colleen. “Gender and Divine Relativity in Philo of Alexandria.” Journal for the Study of Judaism 34 (2003), 471-491.
-
Corn, Alfred, ed. Incarnation: Contemporary Writers on the New Testament (New York: Penguin, 1990).
-
Cox, Ronald. By the Same Word: Creation and Salvation in Hellenistic Judaism and Early Christianity (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007).
-
Cox, Ronald. “Travelling the Royal Road: The Soteriology of Philo of Alexandria.” In This World and the World to Come. Soteriology in Early Judaism, ed. Daniel M. Gurtner (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 167-180.
-
Crisp, Oliver. Divinity and Humanity: The Incarnation Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
-
Cross, Richard. “The Incarnation.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology, ed. Thomas P. Flint and Michael C. Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 452-475.
-
D’Angelo, Mary Rose. “Gender and Geopolitics in the Work of Philo of Alexandria: Jewish Piety and Imperial Family Values.” In Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses, ed. Todd Penner and Caroline Vander Stichele (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 63-88.
-
Dillon, John. “Preface.” In Philo of Alexandria: The Contemplative Life, The Giants, and Selections, trans. David Winston (New York: Paulist, 1981), xi-xiv.
-
Dillon, John. “Philo of Alexandria and Platonist Psychology.” In The Afterlife of the Platonic Soul: Reflections of Platonic Psychology in the Monotheistic Religions, ed. Maha Elkaisy-Friemuth and John M. Dillon (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 17-24.
-
Dunn, James. Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989).
-
Ehrman, Bart D. How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (New York: HarperOne, 2014).
-
Feldman, Louis H. Philo’s Portrayal of Moses in the Context of Ancient Judaism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).
-
Ferguson, Everett. Backgrounds of Early Christianity, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).
-
Fletcher-Louis, Crispin. “4Q374: A Discourse on the Sinai Tradition: The Deification of Moses and Early Christology.” Dead Sea Discoveries 3 (1996), 236-252.
-
Fletcher-Louis, Crispin. Luke-Acts: Angels, Christology and Soteriology (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997).
-
Friesen, Courtney J.P. “Hannah’s ‘Hard Day’ and Hesiod’s ‘Two Roads’: Poetic Wisdom in Philo’s De ebrietate.” Journal for the Study of Judaism 46 (2015), 44-64.
-
Gieschen, Charles A. Angelomorphic Christology: Antecedents and Early Evidence (Leiden: Brill, 1998).
-
Goodenough, Erwin R. By Light, Light: The Mystic Gospel of Hellenistic Judaism (Amsterdam: Philo, 1969).
-
Goodspeed, Edgar J. Die ältesten Apologeten: Texte mit kurzen Einleitungen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1914).
-
Hadot, Pierre. What is Ancient Philosophy?, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).
-
Hamori, Esther J. “When Gods Were Men”: The Embodied God in Biblical and Near Eastern Literature (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008).
-
Hamori, Esther J. “Divine Embodiment in the Hebrew Bible and Some Implications for Jewish and Christian Incarnational Theologies.” In Bodies, Embodiment, and Theology of the Hebrew Bible, ed. S. Tamar Kamionkowski and Wonil Kim (New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 161-183.
-
Helleman, Wendy E. “Philo of Alexandria on Deification and Assimilation to God.” Studia Philonica Annual 2 (1990), 51-71.
-
Himmelfarb, Martha. Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
-
Holladay, Carl R. Theios Aner in Hellenistic-Judaism: A Critique of the Use of This Category in New Testament Christology (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977).
-
Hurtado, Larry W. One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988).
-
Hurtado, Larry W. Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).
-
Hurtado, Larry W. How on Earth did Jesus Become a God? Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).
-
Kalkavage, Peter, ed. Plato’s Timaeus, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2016).
-
Knafl, Anne K. Forming God: Divine Anthropomorphism in the Pentateuch (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2014).
-
Lewis, Eric. “Diogenes Laertius and the Stoic Theory of Mixture.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 35 (1988), 84-90.
-
Litwa, M. David. We are Being Transformed: Deification in Paul’s Soteriology (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012).
-
Litwa, M. David. “The Deification of Moses in Philo of Alexandria.” Studia Philonica Annual 26 (2014), 1-27.
-
Litwa, M. David. “Becoming Gods: Deification and the Supernatural.” In Religion: Super Religion, ed. Jeffrey J. Kripal (Farmington Hills: Macmillan Reference, 2017), 89-103.
-
Long, Anthony A. Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1974).
-
Long, Anthony A. “Body and Soul in Stoicism.” In The Center for Hermeneutical Studies in Hellenistic and Modern Culture: Colloquy 36, ed. Edward C. Hobbs and Wilhelm Wuellner (Berkeley: Center for Hermeneutical Studies, 1980), 1-17.
-
Lorberbaum, Yair. The Image of God: Halakha and Aggadah (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 2004) [Hebrew].
-
Lorberbaum, Yair. In God’s Image: Myth, Theology, and Law in Classical Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
-
Maccoby, Hyam, ed. “The Vikuah of Nahmanides: Translation and Commentary.” In Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), 102-146.
-
Mackie, Scott D. “Seeing God in Philo of Alexandria: The Logos, the Powers, or the Existent One?” Studia Philonica Annual 21 (2009), 25-47.
-
Mackie, Scott D. “Seeing God in Philo of Alexandria: Means, Methods, and Mysticism.” Journal for the Study of Judaism 43 (2012), 147-179.
-
Mackie, Scott D. “The Passion of Eve and the Ecstasy of Hannah: Sense Perception, Passion, Mysticism, and Misogyny in Philo of Alexandria, De ebrietate 143-152.” Journal of Biblical Literature 133 (2014), 141-163.
-
Mason, Steve. “Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History.” Journal for the Study of Judaism 38 (2007), 457-512.
-
Mattila, Sharon Lea. “Wisdom, Sense Perception, Nature, and Philo’s Gender Gradient.” Harvard Theological Review 89 (1996), 103-126.
-
Meeks, Wayne A. The Prophet-King: Moses Traditions and the Johannine Christology (Leiden: Brill, 1967).
-
Mendelson, Alan. Secular Education in Philo of Alexandria (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1982).
-
Neis, Rachel. The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture: Jewish Ways of Seeing in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
-
Neusner, Jacob. The Incarnation of God: The Character of Divinity in Formative Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988).
-
Niehoff, Maren. “Circumcision as a Marker of Identity: Philo, Origen, and the Rabbis on Gen 17:1-14.” Jewish Quarterly Review 10 (2013), 89-123.
-
Nikiprowetzky, Valentin. “L’exégèse de Philon d’Alexandrie dans le De Gigantibus et le Quod Deus.” In Two Treatises of Philo Alexandria. A Commentary on De Gigantibus and Quod Deus Sit Immutabilis, ed. David Winston and John Dillon (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983), 5-75.
-
Philo. Philonis Alexandrini opera quae supersunt, ed. Leopold Cohn, Paul Wendland, and Siegfried Reiter. 6 vols. (Berlin: Reimer, 1896-1915).
-
Philo. Works of Philo, trans. Francis H. Colson, George H. Whitaker, and Ralph Marcus. 12 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929-1962).
-
Petersen, Anders Klostergaard. “Attaining Divine Perfection through Different Forms of Imitation.” Numen 60 (2013), 7-38.
-
Putthoff, Tyson L. Ontological Aspects of Early Jewish Anthropology: The Malleable Self and the Presence of God (Leiden: Brill, 2017).
-
Ramelli, Ilaria. Hierocles the Stoic: Elements of Ethics, Fragments, and Excerpts, trans. David Konstan (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2009).
-
Reinhartz, Adele. “The Vanishing Jews of Antiquity.” Marginalia Review of Books (2014). http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/vanishing-jews-antiquity-adele-reinhartz/.
-
Reiss, Moshe. “Adam: Created in the Image and Likeness of God.” Jewish Biblical Quarterly 39 (2011), 181-186.
-
Renehan, R. “On the Greek Origins of the Concepts Incorporeality and Immateriality.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 21 (1980), 105-138.
-
Runia, David T. Philo of Alexandria and the Timaeus of Plato (Leiden: Brill, 1986).
-
Runia, David T. “God and Man in Philo of Alexandria.” Journal of Theological Studies 39 (1988), 48-75.
-
Runia, David T.. “The Beginnings of the End: Philo of Alexandria and Hellenistic Theology.” In Traditions of Theology: Studies in Hellenistic Theology, Its Background and Aftermath, ed. Dorothea Frede and André Laks (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 281-316.
-
Schenck, Kenneth. A Brief Guide to Philo (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005).
-
Sedley, David. “The Ideal of Godlikeness.” In Plato 2: Ethics, Politics, Religion, and the Soul, ed. Gail Fine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 309-328.
-
Segal, Alan. “The Incarnation: The Jewish Milieu.” In The Incarnation: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Incarnation of the Son of God, ed. Steven T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, and Gerald O’Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 116-139.
-
Shaw, Teresa M. The Burden of the Flesh: Fasting and Sexuality in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998).
-
Sly, Dorothy. Philo’s Perception of Women (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990).
-
Smith, Mark S. “The Three Bodies of God in the Hebrew Bible.” Journal of Biblical Literature 134 (2015), 471-488.
-
Sommer, Benjamin D. The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
-
Sterling, Gregory E. “The Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series General Introduction.” In Philo of Alexandria: On the Creation of the Cosmos according to Moses—Introduction, Translation and Commentary, ed. David Runia (Leiden: Brill, 2001), ix-xiv.
-
Swinburne, Richard. Was Jesus God? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
-
Tobin, Thomas H. The Creation of Man: Philo and the History of Interpretation (Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1983).
-
van den Hoek, Annewies. “Endowed with Reason or Glued to the Senses: Philo’s Thoughts on Adam and Eve.” In The Creation of Adam and Eve: Interpretations of the Biblical Narratives in Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Gerard P. Luttikhuizen (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 63-75.
-
van Kooten, George H. Paul’s Anthropology in Context: The Image of God, Assimilation to God, and Tripartite Man in Ancient Judaism, Ancient Philosophy and Early Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008).
-
Winston, David. Logos and Mystical Theology in Philo of Alexandria (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1985).
-
Winston, David. “Philo’s Conception of the Divine Nature.” In Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, ed. Lenn E. Goodman (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 21-42.
-
Wolfson, Elliot R. “Judaism and Incarnation: The Imaginal Body of God.” In Christianity in Jewish Terms, ed. Tikva Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs, David Fox Sandmel, and Michael A. Signer (Boulder: Westview, 2000), 239-254.
-
Wright, Jessica. Brain and Soul in Late Antiquity, Dissertation (Classics Department, Princeton University, 2017).
-
Yonge, C.D. The Works of Philo Judeaeus, the Contemporary of Josephus. 4 vols. (London: Bohn), 1854-55.
-
Zurawski, Jason. “Philo’s Reading of the Phaedrus Myth: Breathing Genesis into the Platonic Text.” Paper presented at the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies Conference, Haifa, Israel, March 2011.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 850 | 174 | 20 |
| Full Text Views | 316 | 5 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 260 | 16 | 0 |
Divine Embodiment in Philo of Alexandria
In: Journal for the Study of JudaismSearch for other papers by Deborah Forger in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
Because later polemics established Jews and Christians as binary opposites, distinguished largely by their views on God’s body, scholars have not sufficiently explored how other Jews in the early Roman period, who stood outside the Jesus movement, conceived of how the divine could become embodied on earth. The first-century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria often operates as the quintessential representative of a Jew who stressed God’s absolute incorporeality. Here I demonstrate how Philo also presents a means by which a part of Israel’s God could become united with human materiality, showing how the patriarchs and Moses function as his paradigms. This evidence suggests that scholarship on divine embodiment has been limited by knowledge of later developments in Christian theology. Incarnational formulas, like that found in John 1:14 were not the only way that Jews in the first and second century CE understood that God could become united with human form.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 850 | 174 | 20 |
| Full Text Views | 316 | 5 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 260 | 16 | 0 |
