Philo’s Distinctions Between 'Ioudaioi' and 'Israel'

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Philo’s Distinctions Between 'Ioudaioi' and 'Israel'

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From
Jennifer Otto (2018) Philo of Alexandria and the Construction of Jewishness in Early Christian Writings, OUP, pp.11-13 (Introduction):


Who is a Jew? Philo’s Distinction Between Ioudaioi and Israel

... As Ellen Birnbaum has shown, the definition of Jewishness operative in Philo’s own thought is not as straightforward as modern readers might expect. In The Place of Judaism in Philo’s Thought: Israel, Jews and Proselytes, Birnbaum observes that Philo does not use the terms Israel (Israel) and Ioudaioi (Jews) interchangeably. Via word studies and a close reading of Philo’s treatises, she demonstrates that the two terms do not usually occur in the same treatise. Moreover, Philo employs the word Israel most frequently in the treatises that comprise his Allegorical Commentary, which Birnbaum contends was written with an elite, highly educated segment of the Jewish audience in mind. In these treatises, Philo interprets Israel according to its Hebrew etymology, which he then translates into Greek as horōn theon, “seeing God”.37 From this interpretation, he understands biblical references to Israel to designate individuals who possess an elite spiritual or mystical capability to experience a vision of God. This capability may be inborn or attained through philosophical study and practice. On the other hand, Philo writes of Ioudaioi in his Exposition of the Law, writings that Birnbaum suggests were intended for a more general Jewish readership. In these treatises, Ioudaioi are praised as the discrete social group that follows the laws of Moses and thus alone properly worships the one true God.

Theoretically, Philo opens both designations to individuals who were not born into the Jewish people. The “membership requirements” for the two groups, however, differ. Proselytes, Birnbaum claims, seek to become Jews, not members of Israel. She observes, “Philo mentions that proselytes leave behind mythical inventions, polytheistic beliefs, ancestral customs, family, friends, and country and come over to the one true God, truth, piety, virtue, the laws, and a new polity”.38 In contrast, “because the distinguishing mark of ‘Israel’ is its ability to see God, it would seem that anyone who qualifies—whether Jew or non-Jew—may be considered part of ‘Israel.’” Birnbaum continues, “Philo speaks quite admiringly of non-Jews like the Persian Magi and other unnamed sages from Greek and foreign lands. Although he never calls these people ‘Israel’ or speaks of them as seeing God per se, his description of them would lead one to think that they meet the requirements for belonging.”

According to Birnbaum’s reading, Philo has no concept of “Israel according to the flesh”; membership in Israel is determined purely by spiritual capability. Jews as a people therefore have no inherent claim to the title Israel. She contends,
Philo himself does not explicitly draw a connection between the vision of God and Jewish worship of Him. We may speculate that seeing God may lead one to worship Him in the Jewish way and worshipping God in the Jewish way may lead one to be able to see Him. Despite these possibilities, however, Jewish worship of God and the vision of Him are not necessarily connected. We therefore cannot determine precisely the relationship between those who see God—“Israel”—and those who worship Him in the Jewish way—the Jews. Although these two entities may overlap or be one and the same, the exact connection between them remains unclear.39


Birnbaum interprets Philo as effectively associating Israel with the ontologically superior spiritual realm and the Jews with the lower, corporeal realm, maintaining that there is no necessary connection between the two.

Although some have questioned whether the distinction between the categories of “Israel” and “Jew” in Philo’s thought are as rigid as Birnbaum suggests,40 Philo’s conceptual separation of the title “Israel” from Jewishness, and his subsequent association of that title with a mystical encounter with the divine, opens up possibilities for its appropriation by readers of the Hebrew scriptures who reject their halakhic and liturgical demands. Philo’s distinction between Israel (those who mystically “see” God) and the Jews (the people who worship God properly according to the law of Moses) held significant appeal for Clement, Origen, and Eusebius. In the chapters that follow, we shall see how this semantic distinction, rooted in Philo’s writings, continues to reverberate in the definitions that each early Christian author constructs for the terms Israel, Hebraios, and Ioudaios.41



(37) Philo, De Mutatione Nominum (On the Change of Names). 81.

(38) Ellen Birnbaum, The Place of Judaism in Philo’s Thought: Israel, Jews, and Proselytes. Brown Judaic Studies (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1996), 196.

(39) Birnbaum, The Place of Judaism, 212.

(40) See Maren Niehoff, Philo on Jewish Identity and Culture (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 95 n. 84: “Such a radical distinction between Jews and Israel, however, is unwarranted. Statements such as ‘the suppliants’ race which the Father and King of the Universe and the source of all things has taken for his portion…is called in the Hebrew tongue Israel, but, expressed in our tongue, the word is “he that sees God”’ (Leg. 3–4) demonstrate the intrinsic connection between Jews and Israel.”

(41) In a broader study that also takes Philo into account, Graham Harvey considers the semantic ranges of the terms Jew, Hebrew, and Israel in Jewish writings from the Second Temple period and contends that similar differentiations were adopted by Christians. See Harvey, The True Israel: The Use of the Terms Jew, Hebrew, and Israel in Ancient Jewish and Early Christian Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1996).



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Philo and the Wisdom of the Greeks

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Later (pp.22-5)


Philo and the Wisdom of the Greeks

In modern scholarship, Philo often plays the role of the poster child of Hellenistic Judaism, that strain within the Diaspora that sought to accommodate itself to the philosophical convictions and literary forms of the dominant Greek culture. Although Philonic scholarship has begun to address the particularly Alexandrian and Roman aspects of Philo’s writings,75 it is his familiarity with the methods and traditions of the Greek philosophical schools that has drawn the most attention. The combination of Greek and Jewish elements in Philo’s thought has both fascinated and troubled many of his later readers. Previous generations of researchers devoted much energy to determining whether, in the words of Samuel Sandmel, “[Philo] was a Greek Jew, or, might one more properly speak of him as a Jewish Greek?”76 Lurking behind this question is the suspicion that Philo’s enthusiasm for Greek concepts brought him dangerously close to religious syncretism. That suspicion has sometimes been transferred to his Christian enthusiasts, as scholars have credited (or blamed) him with blazing a trail for philosophically inclined Christians like Clement and Origen to follow, teaching them how to read the philosophy of the Greeks in (or into) the Hebrew scriptures.77

Clement, Origen, and Eusebius agree with Philo’s modern commentators that the Alexandrian had mastered the wisdom and culture of the Greeks. It is hardly surprising that the Christians who took the most interest in Philo’s work also shared his intellectual background in the Greek philosophical schools.78 Although all four have been subject to charges of philosophical eclecticism, it is now recognized that eclecticism was itself a feature of the contemporary form of Platonism.79 The features that distinguish middle Platonism from previous Academic philosophy are first apparent in the writings of Eudorus, who, rejecting the Socratic skepticism that had marked the New Academy, credited the origins of his doctrine to the sixth-century philosopher Pythagoras.80 While incorporating the vocabulary of the Stoic and peripatetic schools into his own teaching, Eudorus vociferously defended God’s providential care for the material world and simultaneously affirmed the freedom of the human will to strive after likeness to God.81 In this “middle Platonism,” Philo and his Christian successors found a worldview that was, in their judgment, highly congruent with the teachings of their own sacred texts. This evaluation of Philo as presented by his Christian readers will therefore explore how those readers understood his training in Greek philosophy to impact his Jewishness. Of special interest is the way in which they relate Philo’s extensive immersion in Greek paideia, the education or culture that made a man truly Greek,82 to their defense of Greek literature’s role in Christian education.

The question of the validity of Greek paideia was one element in a larger intra-Christian debate over how to make sense of the presence of true doctrines in the teachings of other peoples and whether to incorporate these foreign insights into their own worldview. At one extreme, Tertullian famously rejected all the wisdom of the nations as foolishness (using refined Latin to make his point —“Quid Athenae Hierosolymis?”), while 'Hippolytus of Rome'* sought to demonstrate that each “heretical” expression of Christianity took its root in the doctrines of a particular philosophical school.83 Clement, Origen, and Eusebius, however, employed a different strategy, claiming that all knowledge finds its source in the Logos, God’s Word incarnate in the person of Jesus, wherever it may be found. What was true was worthy of study, no matter its origins ... Philo’s Christian readers were influential arbiters of which texts, doctrines, and practices originating outside of the ekklēsia did indeed conform to the truth as revealed by the Logos ...

Jennifer Otto (2018) Philo of Alexandria, pp.22-5




(75) Especially in the work of Maren Niehoff, Philo on Jewish Identity and Culture, and Jewish Exegesis and Homeric scholarship in Alexandria (Cambridge: CUP, 2011).

(76) Samuel Sandmel, Philo of Alexandria: An Introduction (New York: OUP, 1979), 15.

(77) [...] R. P. C. Hanson contends..., “It was from Philo, too, that Origen derived his use of allegory, and from Philo very largely his conception of the Logos as teaching divine truths to the men of the Old Testament which they assimilated by means of a partly mystical and partly intellectual apprehension, and it was in imitation of Philo that he turned traditional Christian typology into non-historical allegory. We can therefore reasonably claim that the particular parts of Origen’s interpretation of Scripture which are irreconcilable with the assumptions of the scholars of today derive largely (but not solely) from sources extraneous to traditional Christianity, from a Platonic attitude to history and a Philonic attitude to Holy Scripture.” Allegory and Event (London: SCM Press, 1959), 368.

(78) The affinities between Clement, Philo, and the eclectic middle Platonism of the first century BCE to the third century CE have been well illustrated by Lilla, Clement of Alexandria. The influence of Platonism on Origen has been well-studied; important works include Henri Crouzel, Origène et la philosophie (Paris: Aubier, 1962), 20–49; Pierre Nautin Origène: Sa vie et son œuvre. Christianisme Antique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1977); Joseph Trigg, Origen: The Bible and Philosophy, 68–74; Peter W. Martens, Origen and Scripture: The Contours of the Exegetical Life (Oxford: OUP, 2012), 34–7. Mark J. Edwards emphasizes the discontinuities between Origen and the Platonic tradition in Origen Against Plato (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). Eusebius’s interest and skill in philosophy has been less generously assessed by modern scholarship; for a more generous evaluation, see Elizabeth C. Penland, “Martyrs as Philosophers: The School of Pamphilus and Ascetic Tradition in Eusebius’s Martyrs of Palestine.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2010.

(79) John Dillon, The Middle Platonists: 80 B.C. to AD 220 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977; revised and repr. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). On the eclecticism of Middle Platonism, see “‘Orthodoxy’ and ‘Eclecticism’: Middle Platonists and Neo-Pythagoreans,” in John M. Dillon and A. A. Long, eds, The Question of “Eclecticism”: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 103–25.

(80) Dillon, The Middle Platonists, 117.

(81) Trigg, Origen: The Bible and Philosophy, 68.

(82) Jeremy Schott’s definition of paideia is instructive: “While ancient Greek did not have a term that corresponds exactly to the English ‘culture,’ the term paideia approximates it. Often translated as ‘education,’ paideia refers simultaneously to the act and content of education and may best be rendered ‘acculturation.’ The signs of paideia, like the modern ‘culture’, are performative: one must learn and practice proper grammar, skillful rhetoric, and philosophy to become a ‘cultured’ member of society. Paideia was, theoretically, elective; no matter one’s ethnos, one could ‘become Greek’ by acculturating oneself through rigorous education and the mimetic practice of Greekness via writing, declamation, and other performances.” Schott, Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 6.

(83) Tertullian, Prescription against the Heretics 7; Hippolytus,* Refutation of All Heresies 1.

* some scholars think Hippolytus didn't write Refutation of All Heresies (and that its author/s is/are unknown)



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