[Sidenote: Philo the mediator between Hellenistic and Jewish-Christian thought.] There probably is no other man who marks so well the fusion of Hellenic and Hebrew ideas and the transition from them to Christian thought as Philo Judaeus.[1552] He flourished at Alexandria in the first years of our era—the exact dates both of his birth and of his death are uncertain—and speaks of himself as an old man at the time of his participation in the embassy of Jews to the Emperor Gaius or Caligula in 40 A. D. He repeats the doctrines of the Greek philosophers and anticipates much that the church fathers discuss. Before the Neo-Platonists he regards matter as the source of all evil and feels the necessity of mediators, angels or demons, between God and man. Before the medieval revival of Aristotle and natural philosophy he tries to reconcile the Mosaic account of creation with belief in a world soul, and monotheism with astrology. Before the rise of Christian monasticism he describes in his treatise _On the Contemplative Life_ an ascetic community of _Therapeutae_ at Lake Maerotis.[1553] After Pythagoras he enlarges upon the mystic significance of numbers. After Plato he repeats the conception of an ideal city of God which was to gain such a hold upon Christian imagination.[1554] After the Stoics he proclaims the doctrine of the law of nature, holds that the institution of human slavery is absolutely contrary to it, and writes “a treatise to prove that every virtuous man is free” and that to be virtuous is to live in conformity to nature.[1555] He had previously written another treatise designed to show that “every wicked man was a slave,”[1556] and he held a theory which we met in the Enoch literature and shall meet again in a number of subsequent writers that sin was punished naturally by forces of nature such as floods and thunderbolts. He did not originate the practice of allegorical interpretation of the Bible but he is our first great extant example thereof. He even went so far as to regard the tree of life and the story of the serpent tempting Eve as purely symbolical, an attitude which found little favor with Christian writers.[1557] His effort by means of the allegorical method to find in the books of the Pentateuch all the attractive concepts and theories which he had learned from the Greeks became later in the Christian apologists an assertion that Plato and Pythagoras had borrowed their doctrines from Abraham and Moses. His doctrine of the _logos_ had a powerful influence upon the writers of the New Testament and the theology of the early church.[1558] Yet Philo affirms that no more perfect good than philosophy exists in human life and in both literary style and erudition he is a Hellene to his very finger tips. The recent tendency, seen especially in German scholarship, to deny the writers of the Roman Empire any capacity for original thought and to trace back their ideas to unextant authors of a supposedly much more