Person

Philo of Alexandria

Hellenistic-Jewish philosopher and exegete of first-century Alexandria whose allegorical reading of the Pentateuch, synthesizing Mosaic revelation with Platonic, Stoic, and Aristotelian categories, became the substrate of patristic Christian exegesis through its influence on Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Augustine, and the entire allegorical-Alexandrian tradition. Philo predates the Christian apologetic tradition by a generation but anticipates and supplies many of its key moves: instantaneous creation, the divine Logos as creative principle, the cosmos-as-temple ontology, and the figurative reading of the six creation days. He is the most important pre-Christian Jewish thinker for the development of patristic theology and arguably the first systematic philosopher of religion in the Western tradition.

Biography

Born c. 20 BC into the wealthiest and most prominent Jewish family of Alexandria. His brother Alexander Lysimachus was the alabarch (chief customs official) of Alexandria; his nephew Tiberius Julius Alexander became Roman procurator of Judea (AD 46-48) and prefect of Egypt (AD 66-69), embodying the political assimilation Philo himself resisted in his writings.
Education at the Greek gymnasium of Alexandria, the leading intellectual center of the Hellenistic world. Trained deeply in Plato, Aristotle, the Stoa, and the Pythagorean tradition while remaining devout in Torah observance.
AD 39-40, leads a Jewish embassy to Caligula in Rome to protest imperial demands for the emperor's image in synagogues. The mission is documented in his own Legatio ad Gaium. Died shortly thereafter (~AD 50).
Wrote almost entirely in Greek; never references the LXX as "the Septuagint" but quotes it extensively as authoritative Scripture.

Major works

The Philonic corpus is one of the largest single-author Hellenistic corpora to survive. Three principal classes:

Exegetical / philosophical commentaries on the Pentateuch:
De Opificio Mundi (On the Creation of the World), the seminal hexaemeral work
Legum Allegoriae (Allegorical Interpretation of Genesis), the showpiece allegorical commentary
De Cherubim, De Sacrificiis, De Migratione Abrahami, De Vita Mosis, etc., extensive treatments
Apologetic / political:
Legatio ad Gaium (Embassy to Gaius), the embassy to Caligula
In Flaccum, the Alexandrian pogrom of AD 38
Hypothetica (fragments), defense of Judaism
Philosophical:
De Aeternitate Mundi, on whether the world is eternal
De Providentia, on divine providence
Quod Omnis Probus Liber Sit, on freedom of the wise person

Key positions

Instantaneous creation (the hexaemeral move)

De Opificio Mundi §13, the locus classicus:

"He says that in six days the world was created, not that its Maker required a length of time for His work, for we must think of God as doing all things simultaneously, remembering that 'all' includes with the commands which He issues the thought behind them. Six days are mentioned, then, not because of the time the Creator needed, but because for the things coming into existence there was need of order."

The argument:

God's creative act is instantaneous and atemporal, duration does not apply to the divine act.
The six-day frame is a numerical-symbolic ordering, not chronological extension.
Six is the first perfect number (1+2+3=6 and 1×2×3=6), Pythagorean number-mysticism imported into the exegesis. Six expresses the ordered completeness of creation.
Time itself is a feature of created order, not a container in which creation occurs.

This is the foundation of the patristic instantaneous-creation tradition. Augustine's De Genesi ad Litteram, written some 400 years later, reproduces Philo's argument structure with minimal modification.

The Logos as creative agent

Philo develops a sophisticated doctrine of the Logos (λόγος) as the divine reason or word through which God creates:

The Logos is the intelligible pattern in the divine mind from which the sensible cosmos is fashioned (Platonic-Forms framework).
The Logos is the mediator between God and creation, God is utterly transcendent, the Logos is God's executive agent.
The Logos is called theos (in a qualified sense), prōtogonos huios ("firstborn son"), archē ("beginning"), eikōn theou ("image of God"), terminology that maps strikingly onto Johannine Christology.

The relationship between Philo's Logos doctrine and John 1:1-18 is one of the great scholarly disputes, direct dependence (older scholars), shared Hellenistic-Jewish milieu (current consensus), or independent convergence (minority). What is clear: Philo provides the Greek-philosophical vocabulary into which the early church poured Christological content. See Logos Christology, G3056 - logos.

Allegorical method

Philo systematized the allegorical reading of Torah that the Alexandrian Christian tradition (Clement, Origen) inherited and adapted:

Surface (literal) meaning preserved for the unlettered.
Deeper (allegorical, philosophical) meaning for the intellectually mature.
Biblical narratives carry hidden teachings about virtue, the soul, and the divine.

This method becomes the lens for Origen's De Principiis, Augustine's hermeneutical theory in De Doctrina Christiana, and the medieval quadriga (four senses of Scripture).

Cosmos as ordered temple

Philo treats the created cosmos as God's temple, a theme deeply embedded in Second Temple Judaism that re-emerges in John Walton's modern functional reading of Genesis 1 (Genesis Hermeneutics §4). For Philo, the structure of creation is liturgical-architectural: the cosmos has a holy of holies (heavens), a holy place (earth's surface), and a court (the visible regions), corresponding to the Mosaic tabernacle's structure.

Influence

On Christian patristic theology, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, and especially Augustine inherit Philo's hexaemeral framework, Logos doctrine, and allegorical method. Origen's library at Caesarea preserved the Philonic corpus; were it not for Christian copying, virtually nothing of Philo would survive (rabbinic Judaism remembered him minimally).
On Rabbinic Judaism, paradoxically thin. The mainstream rabbinic tradition that emerged after AD 70 (the Mishnah, Talmud) does not engage Philo. The Hellenistic-Jewish allegorical-philosophical tradition Philo represented effectively ended at Alexandria; later Jewish philosophy (Saadia, Maimonides) reconstructed similar moves independently from Arabic-Aristotelian sources, not from Philo.
On Christian biblical interpretation, through Origen and Augustine, Philo's allegorical method becomes the dominant patristic-medieval hermeneutic, only displaced (partly) by the Reformation's emphasis on the literal sense.