Certain parts of the New Testament itself exhibit the combination of
Hebraism and Hellenism which characterizes the work of Philo. In the
sayings of Jesus we have the Hebraic strain, but in Luke and John and
the Epistles the mingling of cultures. Thus the Apostles seem to some
the successors of Philo, and the Epistles the lineal descendants of
the "Allegories of the Laws." In the Fourth Gospel and the Epistle to
the Hebrews especially the correspondence is striking. But there is,
in fact, despite much that is common, a great gulf between them. The
later missionaries oppose the national religion and the Torah: Philo
was pre-eminently their champion.
The most commanding of the Apostles, Paul of Tarsus, when he took the
new statement of Judaism out of the region of spirit and tried to
shape it into a definite religion for the world, "forgot the rock from
which he was hewn." As a modern Jewish theologian says,[355] "His
break with the past is violent; Jesus seemed to expand and
spiritualize Judaism; Paul in some senses turns it upside down." His
work may have been necessary to bring home the Word to the heathen,
but it utterly breaks the continuity of development. Paul himself was
little of a philosopher, and those to whom he preached were not
usually philosophical communities such as Philo addressed at
Alexandria, but congregations of half converted, superstitious pagans.
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