There can be no doubt that St. Paul was acquainted with, and influenced by, the views of the Alexandrine school. That he had read some of Philo’s works is more than probable. How much he drew from the writings of Aristobulus the Peripatetic cannot be told, as none of the books of that learned but eclectic Jew have been preserved.(8) In more than one point Paul departs from the traditional methods of the Palestinian rabbis, to adopt those of the Alexandrines. The Jews of Palestine did not admit the allegorical interpretation of Scripture. Paul, on two occasions, follows the Hellenistic mode of allegorizing the sacred text. On one of these occasions he uses an allegory of Philo, while slightly varying its application.(9) The Palestinian Jews knew of no seven orders of angels; the classification of the celestial hierarchy was adopted by Paul(10) from Philo and his school. The identification of idols with demons(11) was also distinctively Alexandrine. But what is far more remarkable is to find in Philo, born between thirty and forty years before Christ, the key to most of Paul’s theology,—the doctrines of the all‐sufficiency of faith, of the worthlessness of good works, of the imputation of righteousness, of grace, mediation, atonement. But in Philo, these doctrines drift purposeless. Paul took them and applied them to Christ, and at once they fell into their ranks and places. What was in suspension in Philo, crystallized in Paul. What the Baptist was to the Judaean Jews, that Philo was to the Hellenistic Jews; his thoughts, his theories, were— “In the flecker’d dawning The glitterance of Christ.”(12) The Fathers, perplexed at finding Pauline words, expressions, ideas, in the writings of Philo, and unwilling to admit that Paul had derived them from Philo, invented a myth that the Alexandrine Jew came to Rome and was there converted to the Christian faith. Chronology and a critical examination of the writings of the Jewish Plato have burst that bubble.(13) The fact that Paul was deeply saturated with the philosophy of the Alexandrine Jews has given rise also to two obstinate Christian legends,—that Dionysius the Areopagite, author of the Celestial Hierarchy, the Divine Names, &c., was the disciple of St. Paul, and that Seneca the philosopher was also his convert and pupil. Dionysius took Philo’s system of the universe and emanations from the Godhead and Christianized them. The influence of Philo on the system of Dionysius _saute aux yeux_, as the French would say. And Dionysius protests, again and again, in his writings that he learned his doctrine from St. Paul.