Christianity as the conflation of LXX + Philo + Aristeas + bar Cochba narratives

One of the many names bandied about during Seminary studies is Philo (c. 20 BCE – 50 CE).  Philo was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher in Alexandria.  Philo used philosophical  allegory to attempt to fuse and harmonize Greek and Jewish philosophy.

Josephus makes a brief reference to Philo in Antiquities of the Jews.   He tells of Philo's selection by the Alexandrian Jewish community as their principal representative before the Roman emperor Gaius Galigula.  He says that Philo agreed to represent the Alexandrian Jews in regard to civil disorder that had developed between the Jews and the Greeks in Alexandria (Egypt). He also tells us that Philo was skilled in philosophy, and that he was brother to an official called Alexander the alabarch.  According to Josephus, Philo and the larger Jewish community refused to treat the emperor as a god, to erect statues in honor of the emperor, and to build altars and temples to the emperor.

Philo himself claims in his Embassy to Gaius to have been part of an embassy sent by the Alexandrian Jews to the Roman Emperor Caligula. Philo says he was carrying a petition which described the sufferings of the Alexandrian Jews, and which asked the emperor to secure their rights. Philo gives a detailed description of their sufferings, in a way that Josephus overlooks, to assert that the Alexandrian Jews were simply the victims of attacks by Alexandrian Greeks in the civil strife that had left many Jews and Greeks dead. Philo says he was regarded by his people as having unusual prudence, due to his age, education, and knowledge. This indicates that he was already an older man at this time (40 CE). Philo considers Caligula's plan to erect a statue of himself in the Temple of Jerusalem to be a provocation, saying, "Are you making war upon us, because you anticipate that we will not endure such indignity, but that we will fight on behalf of our laws, and die in defence of our national customs? For you cannot possibly have been ignorant of what was likely to result from your attempt to introduce these innovations respecting our temple." In his entire presentation he implicitly supports the Jewish commitment to rebel against the emperor rather than allow such sacrilege to take place. This reveals Philo's identification with the Jewish community.

In Flaccus, Philo tells indirectly of his own life in Alexandria by describing how the situation of Jews in Alexandria changed after Gaius Caligula became the emperor of Rome. Speaking of the large Jewish population in Egypt, Philo says that Alexandria "had two classes of inhabitants, our own nation and the people of the country, and that the whole of Egypt was inhabited in the same manner, and that Jews who inhabited Alexandria and the rest of the country from the Catabathmos on the side of Libya to the boundaries of Ethiopia were not less than a million of men." Regarding the large proportion of Jews in Alexandria, he writes, "There are five districts in the city, named after the first five letters of the written alphabet, of these two are called the quarters of the Jews, because the chief portion of the Jews lives in them." Other sources tell us that Caligula had been asking to receive the honors due to a god. Philo says Flaccus, the Roman governor over Alexandria, permitted a mob to erect statues of the Emperor Caius Caligula in Jewish synagogues of Alexandria, an unprecedented provocation. This invasion of the synagogues was perhaps resisted by force, since Philo then says that Flaccus "was destroying the synagogues, and not leaving even their name." In response, Philo says that Flaccus then "issued a notice in which he called us all foreigners and aliens... allowing any one who was inclined to proceed to exterminate the Jews as prisoners of war." Philo says that in response, the mobs "drove the Jews entirely out of four quarters, and crammed them all into a very small portion of one ... while the populace, overrunning their desolate houses, turned to plunder, and divided the booty among themselves as if they had obtained it in war." In addition, Philo says their enemies, "slew them and thousands of others with all kinds of agony and tortures, and newly invented cruelties, for wherever they met with or caught sight of a Jew, they stoned him, or beat him with sticks". Philo even says, "the most merciless of all their persecutors in some instances burnt whole families, husbands with their wives, and infant children with their parents, in the middle of the city, sparing neither age nor youth, nor the innocent helplessness of infants." Some men, he says, were dragged to death, while "those who did these things, mimicked the sufferers, like people employed in the representation of theatrical farces". Other Jews were crucified. Flaccus was eventually removed from office and exiled, ultimately suffering the punishment of death.

Philo’s attempts to explain Judean praxis in Greek terms contributed to Greco-Roman perception that they alone were worthy of inheriting such a “philosophy.”

This also suggests that “Paul’s” letters, as well as the gospel narratives were written after the bar Cochba revolt:  the failure of the revolt, and the dedication of the Temple to Jupiter indicated to the Greco-Romans who had read Judean text and had wanted acceptance into the Judean Temple cult that G-d was unhappy with how Judeans had behaved, and suggested to them that they were more fitting heirs to the text and to the contract it implied.

So they read the texts which had been written to incorporate bar Cochba into the Judean canon, and they read Philo, and they conflated the two with their reading of the LXX to create their own version of “real Judaism,” using Philo’s philosophical assessment of inheritance of text to support their actions.

Text supporting this to follow.