Philo as the source for virgin birth, "Passion" and Last Supper

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From “Who is the Heir,” 20:9:

The new good gift is inheritance of the wisdom which cannot be received by sense, but is apprehended by a wholly pure and clear mind.  Through this wisdom the best of all migrations becomes an established fact, the migration of the soul which passes from astrology to real nature study, from insecure conjecture to firm apprehension, and to give it its truest expression, from the created to the uncreated, from the world to its Maker and Father.

This would be understood by Greco-Romans who fancied themselves the guardians of “wisdom” and the true proponents of philosophy, to indicate that they were the “true” and proper heirs of the text.

21:100:

But it is not enough for the lover of wisdom to have high hopes and vast expectations through the oracular promises. If he does not know in what way he will attain the succession of the heritage, it irks him greatly;  so thirsty is he for knowledge and insatiate for it.  And therefore he asks “Master, by what will I know that I will inherit it?”  Now perhaps it may be said that this question is inconsistent with the belief ascribed to him.  It is the doubter, we may be told, who feels difficulties;  what the believer does is to cease from further questioning.  We must say, then, that the difficulties and the fact of belief are both there, but to not apply to the same subject.  Far from it.  He has believed that he will be the inheritor of wisdom;  he merely asks how this wlll come to pass.  That it will come to pass is a fact that he had completely and firmly grasped in virtue of the divine promises.  And so his Teacher praising the desire for learning which he shows, begins His instruction with a rudimentary lesson, in which the first and most vital words are “take me (Λαβε μοι).”

This particular passage provides us with the foundations of a few elements of Christianity:  the notion of “faith” as belief without doubt and without questioning;  the expectation that the promise will be delivered to the lover of wisdom (rather than to the heir stipulated in the text);  and, in terms of cultic praxis, we have the foundation for the communion ceremony of the Last Supper:  the Teacher (represented  to the proto-Christian church as Jesus), instructs the community to “take my body/blood.”

22:105 provides the grounds used by the early Church to dispossess Judeans from ownership of the text:

For vast is the number of those who repudiate the sacred trusts, and in their unmeasured greed use up what belongs to Another as though it were their own.  But you, my friend, try with all your might, not merely to keep unharmed and unalloyed what you have taken, but also deem it worthy of all carefulness, that He who entrusted it to you may find nothing to blame in your guardianship of it.

John 3:16 has its origins in 23:112:

When God willed to send down the image of divine excellence from heaven to earth in pity for our race, that it should not lose its share in the better lot, he constructs as a symbol of the truth the holy tabernacle and its contents to be a representation and copy of wisdom. For the oracle tells us that the tabernacle “was set up in the midst of our uncleanness” that we may have wherewithal to scour and wash away all that defiles our life, miserable and laden with ill fame as it is.

In 24:118-9, we have the origins of the notion of the “virgin birth” (which is conflated with the παρθενος of Isaiah):

For since genus in every case is indestructible, to the indestructible God will it be justly assigned.  And that is true too of one who opens the womb of all from man, that is reason and speech, to beast, that is sense and body.  For he that opens the womb of each of these, of mind, to mental apprehensions, of speech, to the activities of the voice, of the senses, to receive the pictures presented to it by objects of the body, to the movements and postures proper to it, is the invisible, seminal artificer, the divine Word, which will be fitly dedicated to its Father.

Further origins of the notion of the “virgin birth” can be found in 44:216:

For the One, alone and absolutely pure, has begotten the Seven, whom no mother bore, begotten by her by himself alone, and employing no other medium whatsoever.

We find documentation of Philo as the source for the Last Supper in 15:79:

The one extends his vision to the ether and the revolutions of the heaven;  he has been trained also to look steadfastly for the manna, which is the word of God, the heavenly incorruptible food of the soul which delights in vision.

In 25:125-6 we find Philo’s description of the sacrifices as it relates to the Last Supper:

Take me, it says, a heifer unyoked, undamaged, tender, young and fresh in spirit, a soul, that is, which can easily receive guidance and instruction and ruling;  take me a ram that is speech active in argument and fully developed, competent to analyse and refute the sophisms of controversialists and to provide its possessor with a safe and well-ordered life;  take me also the sense that dashes and darts on to the sensible world; the she-goat, that is; and take them all three years old, that is, formed according to the perfect number with beginning middle and end.  Take me a turtle-dove and a pigeon that is divine and human reason, both of them winged creatures, skilled by practice to speed upwards, yet differing from each other, as the genus differs from the species or the copy from the archetype.

And we would note that the Church supposed that Jesus crucifixion occurred when he was 33.

In 34:175 we find the bread used in the Last Supper, with an explanation for the twelve “disciples”:

Observe also the loaves set forth upon the holy table, how the twelve are divided into equal parts and placed in sets of six each, as memorials of the twelve tribes…

In 38:182 and 185, we find the description of the actual sacrifice as reinvisoned for the purpose of the Last Supper:

Marvellous too is the equal distribution of the sacrificial blood which the high priest Moses, following Nature’s guidance, made.  He took, we read, the half of the blood and poured it into mixing-bowls and the half he poured upon the altar to show us that sacred wisdom is of a two-fold kind, divine and human…On these bowls, the Word pours of the blood desiring that our irrational part should be quickened and become one in some sense rational following the divine courses of the mind, and purified from the objects of the sense, which lure it from their deceitful and seductive force.

In 51:255 we find not the foundation for calling the final days “the Passion:”

…it is Moses who bids eat the Passover and celebrate the crossing from passion “with haste.”

In 59:191 and 60:192, we find the foundation for distribution of the meal to the followers:

Further, the heavenly food of the soul, wisdom, which Moses calls “manna” is distributed to all who will use it in equal portions by the divine Word, careful above all things to maintain equality…We may find a similar example of this proportioned equality in what is called the Passover, which is held when the soul studies to unlearn irrational passion and of its own free will experiences the higher form of passion which reason sancetions.

The notion that Jesus intercedes  was resurrected and intercedes for humanity has its origins in 62:201:

I marvel too when I read of that sacred Word, which ran in impetuous breathless haste “to stand between the living and the dead.”…And indeed how could all that shatters and crushes and raptures our soul fail to be abated and lightened when the God-beloved separates and walls off the consecrated thoughts, which veritably live, from the unholy, which are truly dead?

In 62:205, we find:

To His Word, His chief messenger, highest in age and honor, the Father of all has given the special prerogative, to stand on the border and separate the creature from the Creator.  This same Word both pleads with the immortal as suppliant for afflicted mortality and acts as ambassador of the ruler to the subject.

German Protestant scholars opine that there is a single source for the synoptic Gospels.  They call this source “Q” for Quelle (German for “source).  They are both accurate and inaccurate.

The source for much of early Christian doctrine is in Philo, who Christian scholars like to refer to as a Jewish philosopher of the Stoic school.  The basic narrative of the Jesus chronicles derive from the Judean narratives of bar Cochba, the revolt and the limited success of the restoration of the sovereignty of Israel.

Why do Christian scholars not want to identify Philo as the source of Christian doctrine?  Why do they prefer to inflict on him the dual isolation of identification as “philosopher” and “Jew”?  Because while Philo wrote at around the same time that “Jesus” was running around Judea, Philo was not a proto-Christian.  Philo could not be made into a proto-Christian.  Having used his writings as the basis for constructing an otherwise foundationless cult, proto-Christians had to marginalize Philo, while not entirely eliminating him from the historical (not theological or dogmatic) canon.

The proto-Church read Philo as Jewish philosophy.  Since Philo referred to TaNaKh as “oracles,” the Greco-Roman understanding of the text as oracular was, in their eyes, validated.  This made it easy Greco-Romans to seek out a narrative that seemed to support their notion of their prophesied savior.  The Judean narratives that were aimed at incorporating bar Cochba into the Judean canon fit the narrative form sought by Greco-Romans.  Adoption of the narratives was made easier by the fact that Hadrian had expelled Judeans from Jerusalem and from Judea.

After conflating Philo’s philosophy into their reading of TaNaKh, it was a simple matter to redact Philo’s philosophy into “Paul’s” letters, thus providing a foundation for the claim that the prot0-Church had the support of “real” Judeans.