172 A History of Judaism
day but with some of the major works of Plato, in particular the Timaeus
and the Phaedrus. Quite how he gained this expertise is unknown. His
family would have been rich enough for him to have a tutor, but the
abstruse philosophy of Plato, who had written back in the fourth cen-
tury bce, was not popular in the first century ce, and Philo’s predilection
for his writings was idiosyncratic. Even more idiosyncratic was to be
Philo’s use of his philosophical learning. For he was to assert, at consid-
erable length and with much ingenuity, that the law of Moses, when
construed properly through allegory, must be understood as a version of
Plato’s philosophy – or, more precisely, that Plato and Moses had both
seen the same truths.
Philo wrote a great deal, and a great deal of what he wrote survives.
His works were preserved, mostly in their original Greek but in some
cases in a sixth- century Armenian translation and in Latin, through the
efforts of Christian copyists, for whom his interpretation of the Jewish
law proved useful. In the late second century ce, Clement of Alexandria
was the first Christian writer to cite Philo’s allegorical readings of the
Greek version of the Jewish Bible, the Septuagint, which was now also
the Christian Old Testament. A generation earlier, in the mid- second
century ce, mainstream gentile Christians had come under attack from
the influential and charismatic Christian teacher Marcion, who urged
them to discard the Old Testament altogether, since they no longer
wished to keep its injunctions literally as the Jews did. In response,
Clement, unwilling to jettison altogether the scriptures which earlier
Christians had cited as fulfilled in Christ, inaugurated a new way of
reading the Old Testament through Platonizing allegory. In this endeav-
our, the writings of Philo proved invaluable. By the mid- fourth century,
the Church historian Eusebius referred to Philo as ‘widely known to
very many people, a man of the greatest distinction not only among
those of our own tradition, but also among those who set out from the
tradition of profane learning’.^21
Philo’s allegorical interpretation of the Torah was intended to pro-
vide his readers with a true interpretation of the teachings of Moses,
who had ‘both attained the very summit of philosophy and ... been
divinely instructed in the great and essential part of Nature’s love’. So,
for instance, the dietary laws restricting which animals can be eaten
symbolize the way to acquire knowledge and hence choose virtue:
Of all the numbers from the unit upwards ten is the most perfect, and, as
Moses says, most holy and sacred, and with this he seals his list of the