Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE – c. 50 CE), also called Philo Judaeus, was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher who lived in Alexandria, in the Roman province of Egypt.
Philo's deployment of allegory to harmonize Jewish scripture, mainly the Torah, with Greek philosophy was the first documented of its kind, and thereby often misunderstood. Many critics of Philo assumed his allegorical perspective would lend credibility to the notion of legend over historicity. Notwithstanding, when one actually reads Philo's works in both translated and original Greek forms, one finds Philo often advocated a literal understanding of the Torah and the historicity of such described events, while at other times finding allegorical readings more suited to the text.
Philo wrote that God created and governed the world through mediators. Logos is the chief among them, the next to God, demiurge of the world. Logos is immaterial, an adequate image of God, his shadow, his firstborn son. Being the mind of the Eternal, Logos is imperishable. He is neither uncreated as God is, nor created as men are, but occupies a middle position. He has no autonomous power, only an entrusted one.
Philo probably was the first philosopher who identified Plato's Ideas with Creator's thoughts. These thoughts make the contents of Logos; they were the seals for making sensual things during world creation. Logos resembles a book with creature paradigms. An Architect's design before the construction of a city serves to Philo as another simile of Logos. Since creation, Logos binds things together. As the receptacle and holder of ideas, Logos is distinct from the material world. At the same time, Logos pervades the world, supporting it.
Logos has the function of an advocate on behalf of humanity and also that of a God's envoy to the world. He puts human minds in order. The right reason is an infallible law, the source of any other laws. The angel closing Balaam's way (Numbers XXII, 31) is interpreted by Philo as manifestation of Logos, which acts as man's conscience.
Philo frequently engages in Pythagorean-inspired numerology, explaining at length the importance of religious numbers such as six, seven, and ten.
Philo affirms a transcendent God without physical features or emotional qualities resembling those of human beings. In Philo, God exists beyond time and space and does not make special interventions into the world because he already encompasses the entire cosmos.
Philo's notion is even more abstract than that of the monad of Pythagoras or the Good of Plato. Only God's existence is certain, no appropriate predicates can be conceived. Following Plato, Philo equates matter to nothingness and sees its effect in fallacy, discord, damage, and decay of things. This view enables Philo to combine the Jewish belief in creation with the Greek conviction about the formation of all things from the permanent matter.
Philo was more fluent in Greek than in Hebrew and read the Jewish Scriptures chiefly from the Septuagint, a Koine Greek translation of Hebraic texts later compiled as the Hebrew Bible and the deuterocanonical books.
The Septuagint translates the phrase מַלְאַךְ יְהוָה (Malakh YHWH, lit. '"Messenger of Yahweh"') as ἄγγελος Κυρίου (ángelos Kyríou, lit. '"angel of the Lord"'). Philo identified the angel of the Lord (in the singular) with the Logos. Peter Schäfer argues that Philo's Logos was derived from his understanding of the "postbiblical Wisdom literature, in particular the Wisdom of Solomon". The Wisdom of Solomon is a Jewish work composed in Alexandria, Egypt, around the 1st century BCE, with the aim of bolstering the faith of the Jewish community in a hostile Greek world. It is one of the seven Sapiential or wisdom books included within the Septuagint.