It is a distinct question in what form we are to conceive of Philo’s teaching as coming before him. The author of the Fourth Gospel was a thinker, but not a professed philosopher. So far as we can judge from the writings of his that have come down to us, we should not be inclined to credit him with much philosophical erudition. The idea that we form to ourselves of the Evangelist is not that of a great reader always poring over books. I find it hard to think of him as sitting down to a deliberate study of the Jewish scholar’s voluminous treatises. The mental habits of the two men are too different. The Evangelist has a shorter and more direct way of getting at the truth. He was more like the old Ionian philosophers, who looked up to the sky and out upon the earth, and set down the thoughts that rose in them in short loosely connected aphorisms. The author of the Fourth Gospel did not look so much without as within: he sank into his own consciousness, and at last brought out to light what he found there. He dwelt upon the past until it became luminous to him; and then he took up the pen. We will consider presently what sort of hypothesis we may form as to the process by which the Evangelist came to assimilate Philonian ideas, if he did assimilate them. But it may be well, first, to try to realize rather more exactly the extent of the agreement and difference between the two writers. 3. Points of Agreement with Philo. And, first, as to the agreement. I have said that Philo’s philosophy, in spite of its decorative exuberance and prolixity, is yet at bottom a system. And in the main outline of that system the Evangelist coincides with him. By the side of the Eternal, Philo has what he himself called ‘a second God’ (πρὸς τὸν δεύτερον θεόν, ὅς ἔστιν ἐκείνου λόγος Grill, _Entstehung d. vierten Evang._ p. 109); and this second God he called ‘the Divine Word.’ The Word was Himself God (καλεῖ δὲ θεὸν τὸν πρεσβύτατον αὐτοῦ νυνὶ λόγον, ibid.). The Word was the agent or instrument (ὄργανον) in creation (ibid., p. 110). The action of the Word is not infrequently compared to that of Light; and although it is nowhere said that the Word is Life[55], there are contexts in which the ideas of light and life appear in connexion[56]. In like manner there is a certain amount of parallelism for the idea of the Word coming to his own and being rejected; it is the Word that makes the mind receptive of good; there are some who may be fitly called ‘sons of God,’ and those for whom this title is too high may at least model themselves after the pattern of the Word. The parallels for the later part of the Prologue are slighter, until we come to the last verse (ver. 18). Philo fully shares the conception of the transcendence of God, and speaks of the Logos as His ‘prophet’ and ‘interpreter[57].’