Scarcely anything is known with certainty about his life. He must have been born about B.C. 20 or thereabouts, for he took part in an embassy to Caligula in A.D. 40, when already somewhat advanced in years; he refers to this in his work, _De Legatione ad Cajum_, § 28[84]; it is also mentioned by Josephus,[85] who speaks of Philo as “a man eminent on all accounts, brother to Alexander the Alabarch, and one not unskilful in philosophy.” This is practically all that is known of him apart from what his works reveal of the man; but they do not contain any biographical details. Philo was a true Jew; he had an unbounded veneration for the Old Testament Scriptures, and especially for Moses and the Pentateuch; most of his works are concerned with this latter. Not only did he look upon the Hebrew Scriptures as having been verbally inspired, but he also believed this to have been the case with them in their Greek form. His veneration for the Jewish Scriptures, on the one hand, and his love for the philosophy of the Greeks on the other, led him to the conviction that both contained and witnessed to one and the same truth. He believed that the Greek philosophers had used the Old Testament writings, and these he explained on the allegorical system with such freedom that he was able to extract from them any meaning he desired; by this means his own philosophical system became a combination of Greek philosophy and Jewish theology.[86] Regarding the philosophy of Philo, his conception of God forms naturally the starting-point. Here he holds, on the one hand, that so absolute is the perfection of God, so transcendent is the divine majesty, and therefore so far removed from all that human thought is capable of, that God is simply inconceivable; man can really know no more than that God is; he cannot know _what_ God is. But, on the other hand, since He is perfectly good and all-powerful, since He is the Creator and Upholder of the world, the Final Cause of all that is or ever can be, it follows that there must be a ceaseless activity on His part; the world of His creation must occupy His thought and action. These twofold conceptions of God—the thought of His being outside of and above the world, immeasurably superior to it, and the thought that He is active in the world—are clearly incompatible one with the other. The way in which Philo sought to get over the obvious contradiction here involved, was by assuming the existence of intermediate beings. His teaching on this subject was not new, but it had never before been so thoroughly and systematically treated. These intermediate beings Philo called “powers” (_dunameis_); they are properties of God, and yet His servants fulfilling His will in the world. All these powers are comprehended in one, namely, the “Logos,” or Word of God; the “Logos” is also spoken of as the wisdom and reason of God, and the means whereby the world was created.[87] But both in respect of the “powers” just mentioned, and