Philo/"Paul" on equality and sexuality, and Philo/"John" on the Word

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“Paul” derives his idea of equality from Philo. 

In “Who is the Heir” 33:164, Philo is clear about two significant issues: progeny, not sexuality, is the central matter in Genesis, and God works from the basis of equality:

Equality, too divided the human being into man and woman, two sections unequal indeed in strength but quite equal as regards what was nature’s urgent purpose, the reproduction of themselves in a third person.  “God made man,” he says, “made him after the image of God.  Male and female he made: not “him” but  “them.”  He concludes with the plural, thus connecting with the genus mankind the species which had been divided, as I said, by equality.

“Paul’s” shortlist of “do not,” in Romans, derives from Philo, 35:173:

The other set of five forbids adultery, murder, theft, false witness, covetousness.  These are rules forbidding practically all sins and to them the specific sins may in each case be referred.

As with “Paul,” Philo does not include homosexuality on the list.

The origins of John’s “Word,” which “was in the beginning” derives from Philo.  In 48:234, we find:

For the Word, or Reason of God, is a lover of the wild and solitary, never mixing with the medley of things that have come into being only to perish but its wonted resort is ever above and its study is to wait on the One and One only.  So then the two natures, the reasoning power within us and the divine Word or Reason above us, are indivisible, yet indivisible as they are they divide other things without number.  The divine Word separated and apportioned all that is in nature.

“Paul’s” aversion to the flesh we find in Philo 53:268-9:

For the passions of the body are truly bastards, outlanders to the understanding, growths of the flesh in which they have their roots…When pleasure rules, the temper is high flown and inflated, uplifted with empty levity.  When desire is master, a yearning for what is not arises and suspends the soul on unfulfilled hope as on a noose.