Philo the Jew

Philo the Jew, an Alexandrian of the priestly class, is placed by us among the writers of the church because he wrote a book about the first church of Mark the evangelist at Alexandria, and in it he writes to our praise. He declares not only that there were such people there, but that they were in many provinces as well, and he calls their dwellings monasteries. From this it appears that the church of those who first believed in Christ was such as the monks now desire to imitate. That is, nothing was the private property of any one of them; none of them was rich and none poor; inheritances were divided among the needy; they had leisure for prayer and psalms, and for teaching and ascetic discipline as well. They were, in fact, as Luke declares the believers were at first at Jerusalem. [a]

They say that under Gaius Caligula he came to Rome, where he had been sent as envoy of his nation. When he came a second time, to Claudius, he spoke in that same city with the apostle Peter and became his friend, and for this reason he also adorned with his praises the followers of Mark, Peter’s disciple, at Alexandria.

There are distinguished and countless works by this man: On the Five Books of Moses; one book Concerning the Confusion of Tongues; one book On Nature and Invention; one book On the Things Which Our Senses Desire and We Detest; one book On Learning; one book On the Heir of Divine Things; one book On the Division of Equals and Contraries; one book On the Three Virtues; one book On Why the Names of Many Persons Are Changed in Scripture; two books On Covenants; one book On the Life of a Wise Man; one book Concerning Giants; five books That Dreams Are Sent by God; five books of Questions and Answers on Exodus; four books On the Tabernacle and the Ten Commandments. There are also books On Victims and Promises or Curses; On Providence; On the Jews; On the Manner of One’s Life; On Alexander; That Dumb Animals Have Right Reason; That Every Fool Should Be a Slave; and On the Lives of the Christians, which we spoke of above, that is, the lives of apostolic men, which he also entitled On Those Who Practice the Divine Life, because in truth they contemplate divine things and pray to God continually. Under other headings there are two books On Agriculture and two On Drunkenness. There are other monuments of his genius which have not come into our hands. There is a proverb about him among the Greeks: “Either Plato philonized, or Philo platonized.” That is, either Plato followed Philo or Philo followed Plato, so great is the likeness of their ideas and language.