This is the transcript of Restitutio episode 676: Two Powers in Heaven 3: Philo

This transcript was auto-generated and only approximates the contents of this episode.

Audio file
676 Two Powers part 3.mp3

Transcript

00:00
We're in a series on the two powers in heaven idea, and today we're looking at Philo.

00:06
He was a Jewish contemporary of Jesus and writing around 30 or 40 AD, lived in Alexandria, Egypt.

00:15
And amazingly, he left behind 46 books that still survive to this day.

00:22
Did Philo talk about the two powers in heaven?

00:26
What did Philo say about the logos?

00:30
Was Philo an early biblical Unitarian?

00:34
Get answers to these questions today in the Restitudio podcast.

00:42
Welcome to Restitudio, a podcast seeking to recover authentic Christianity and live it out today.

00:48
I'm your host, Shan Finnegan.

00:51
And before I start talking about Philo, I wonder if you could do me a little favor.

00:58
Can you subscribe to this channel?

01:00
It would help so much.

01:01
Also, if you want to know more about me and this podcast, you can visit our website, restitudio.org.

01:09
On to the show.

01:11
I want to begin with a quote from Christina Termini.

01:16
She's A Philo scholar who contributed to the Cambridge Companion on Philo, a super legitimate scholarly source on this subject.

01:25
Anyhow, here's what she said.

01:28
For many Jews, Philo among them, Hellenism did not constitute a threat to be rebuffed or something alien.

01:37
Greek was their mother language and Hellenistic categories and modes of thought as components of the dominant culture, furnished ideas and models that allowed for creative interpretation of the Jewish tradition.

01:51
Philo probably does not represent the typical Jew of the Diaspora.

01:56
Rather, he seems to express the viewpoint of a cultured elite, and his writings may also reflect the acme of a Jewish Hellenistic tradition in which exegesis and philosophy were deeply influenced both in form and in content by Greek models.

02:13
Philo accepted the worldview of Plato.

02:16
This is really the first thing you need to know about Philo.

02:20
He accepted the worldview of Plato.

02:23
He interpreted the Greek Old Testament in light of Plato's writings.

02:28
And yes, the Greek Old Testament.

02:30
We're not talking about the Hebrew Bible here.

02:31
Philo, so far as I could tell, did not read Hebrew.

02:34
Maybe he had a little bit of familiarity, but his references are all from the Greek version of the Old Testament, what we call the Septuagint today.

02:43
And that's what he writes in.

02:44
He writes in Greek.

02:46
And so he's Jewish.

02:47
but he's thoroughly not just writing and reading in Greek, he's enmeshed in a Greek way of thought.

02:55
And if you're educated in the Roman Empire in the 1st century, that means that you know Homer and you know Plato at the very least.

03:04
And Philo is a very strong Platonist, what we call a middle Platonist, because of the time period in which he lived so many centuries after Plato.

03:12
Now, to explain this, just imagine for a moment an astrophysicist reading Genesis chapter 1.

03:20
Say, for example, Hugh Ross.

03:21
If you ever heard of Hugh Ross, he is a famous astrophysicist who, upon reading Genesis 1, interpreted that in light of the Big Bang model.

03:33
he reads Genesis 1 in light of modern physics.

03:37
For better or for worse, whether you agree with that or not, Hugh Ross is going to squeeze Genesis 1 into that cosmological framework that he's inherited from his university days.

03:49
So with Philo, he's already committed to Plato's cosmology, just like Hugh Ross is gonna read Genesis 1 in light of Big Bang cosmology.

03:58
So Philo,

04:00
based on his cosmology, his worldview, which is shaped very much by Plato's dialogues, these books that many educated people would be familiar with in his world, but especially Philo in Alexandria.

04:12
And this is not my opinion, like he tells us this.

04:15
is very easy to see.

04:17
It's not contested or debated at all.

04:20
And so what does Philo do?

04:23
interprets not just Genesis, but the whole of the Greek version of the Old Testament in light of the worldview of Plato.

04:30
And this is really the first thing you have to know about Philo.

04:33
If you do not interpret Philo in light of Plato and the worldview of Plato and how Plato thought about God and creation, you are going to misunderstand Philo.

04:43
I guarantee it.

04:45
It would be like reading Hugh Ross a thousand years from now and not understanding 20th and 21st century

04:51
physics and cosmology all right but rather than tell you what Plato believed about God and about nature I want to show you this podcast is all about going back to the sources and we have Plato's writings his most famous book arguably is the Republic and in book two of the Republic we read the following

05:15
Do you think God is a wizard and the sort who treacherously makes himself visible sometimes in one form and sometimes in another, and then again becoming himself, changing his appearance into many forms, then deceiving us and making us believe he has done so?

05:32
Or do you think he is straightforward and least of all, one to step out of his own form?

05:38
I can't say I can tell you at the moment, he said.

05:41
So this is a dialogue

05:42
Here we have Plato in conversation with Adamantis, and he is saying to him, look, do you think God can change his form or that he's always in the same form?

05:53
And if you're familiar with the Republic, really what's going on here is that Plato is critiquing the old myths of the gods like you find in Homer, where the god shows up in the form of a bird or a snake or whatever, all these, what we call legends or fairy tales.

06:12
that were very common and very well regarded in the Greek world, Plato is criticizing that, saying, Do you think a god would actually change his form?

06:21
And this is what we read.

06:22
He says, Well, I can't say I can tell you at the moment.

06:26
He said, smart answer, right?

06:28
And then Socrates goes on, What about this then?

06:31
Isn't it essential that if something departs from its own form in some way, the change is made by itself or it is done by some other agent?

06:41
His conversation partner says, that must be so.

06:45
Socrates continues, then are things in the best situation least altered and moved by something else?

06:52
For example, your body is altered as a result of food, drink, and hard work, and every plant by the heat of the sun and the wind and similar influences.

07:02
Isn't the healthiest and strongest least altered?

07:06
Of course.

07:07
And wouldn't some external event disturb and change the bravest and most intelligent soul least?

07:13
Yes.

07:14
And I imagine, furthermore, by the same argument that all manufactured goods, buildings, and clothing that are well made are in good condition, are least altered by time and other effects.

07:26
That is indeed so.

07:28
Socrates continues, then everything that is in a good state, naturally, artificially, or both, undergoes the least change by an external force.

07:37
It seems so.

07:39
There again, God and everything that pertains to God is in excellent condition in every way.

07:46
Of course.

07:47
Then in this respect, God would be least likely to have many forms.

07:52
Indeed, I agree.

07:54
Well then, would He change and turn Himself into something else?

07:58
Clearly He would if He does change.

08:01
Does He then change Himself into something better and finer, or something worse and more demeaning than Himself?

08:06
Obviously, it must be something worse if he does change, he said, because we're not going to claim that God is lacking in beauty or virtue.

08:14
Did you see that right there?

08:16
That is the moment that we get the incredible assumption.

08:20
And the assumption that we get is that change itself is bad.

08:25
I so appreciate Plato for his clear reasoning and his logic, but he doesn't always get it right.

08:33
It's possible for things to change and not change for the worse, but he doesn't see that as a possibility.

08:40
Back to what he wrote.

08:42
Obviously, it must be something worse.

08:45
Let's get to the next slide.

08:47
You're absolutely right, I said.

08:49
And this being the case, do you think, Adamantis, any god or human being would deliberately make himself worse in any way at all?

08:57
That's impossible, he said.

09:00
Then it is impossible even for a god to want to change himself.

09:04
But every one of them, it seems, being the best and finest possible, always remains simply in their own shape.

09:11
I think that must be absolutely right, he said.

09:14
Do you see how Plato is

09:17
putting obviously these words in the mouth of Socrates in this faux dialogue with Adamantes.

09:23
And he's saying, look, there's no way that God changes.

09:27
There's no way that God changes.

09:28
He must always be the same.

09:31
And it seems like a very innocent dialogue exchange.

09:34
And I feel kind of bad to put so much on Plato for corrupting Christianity, which didn't even exist for hundreds of years later.

09:43
But as it turns out, these ideas kind of filter down, and Philo certainly has imbibed them deeply.

09:50
The idea is simple, that God is immutable, impassable, immobile.

09:56
God does not experience change.

09:59
He exists in a state of perfection, like a ball perched atop a hill.

10:04
If it moved at all, it would move down in every direction.

10:08
That's the way they're thinking about perfection.

10:12
And again, I totally disagree with this.

10:14
I don't think it's biblical at all, but it is the world in which Philo operated.

10:18
And these are just like the background assumptions that he has.

10:21
The only thing God can do, according to a middle Platonist, is cogitate.

10:26
That is just think.

10:29
And that is the logos.

10:32
The logos means, well, the word logos means word, reasoning, understanding, and this is what God can generate without experiencing a change in Himself.

10:45
The logos becomes the intermediary, emanating out from God as God cogitates, He generates this logos, and it becomes kind of an intermediary figure in Middle Platonism.

11:00
And this is common to the period.

11:02
It drove Philo, the Gnostics, Justin Martyr, who was also a Platonist.

11:09
And so the Logos is absolutely huge to understand Platonism.

11:14
And it's really important in Philo because Philo talks about the Logos all the time.

11:19
Now, the idea is this, that God could not possibly

11:24
have created the universe or acted, he could not possibly have wrestled with Jacob like it says in Genesis.

11:31
The logos created the universe.

11:33
The logos wrestled with Jacob.

11:37
God could not dirty his hands to split the Red Sea.

11:40
No, no, no, no.

11:41
That's the intermediary, the logos who split the Red Sea on God's behalf because the logos is kind of a lower level than the high God.

11:52
How did Philo conceive of the Logos?

11:54
That's really the question.

11:55
Did he think of it as a second power?

11:57
Did he think of it as a second member of the Godhead?

12:00
Was Philo A Jewish binitarian?

12:03
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the question for our subject today.

12:08
So let's read Philo's actual words to see.

12:11
Now I've got five different texts to consider with you, each of them from a different book that Philo wrote.

12:17
We're not going to read all 46 of his surviving books.

12:21
But we are going to read five texts just so you see exactly what's going on.

12:25
First up is on the change of names.

12:29
Philo writes, Therefore, did Abraham, in token of the even tenor of his future life, receive his new name from God, the unchangeable, that the stability of his future might be set on a firm foundation by him who stands and is ever the same in nature and condition.

12:48
But Jacob was renamed by an angel.

12:50
God's minister, the Word, in acknowledgment that what is below the existent cannot produce permanence unswerving and unwavering, but only such harmony as is found in a musical instrument wherein the tones now stretched to a high pitch, now relaxed to a low, are blended into melody by the artist's skill.

13:12
Abraham received a new name from God.

13:15
Did you catch that there?

13:16
We're talking about

13:17
Abraham, his former name was Abram, and then it became Abraham, and then you had Jacob who became Israel, right?

13:24
So we're talking about the two change of names.

13:27
It's literally the name of this book.

13:29
Philo calls God the unchangeable, just like Plato had taught that it's impossible to think that God could ever change.

13:39
And so Philo just like assumes that.

13:41
He doesn't prove it.

13:42
He's just like, yeah, God's the unchangeable.

13:44
He calls God him who stands and is ever the same in nature and condition.

13:51
That's what he says about God.

13:53
Now Abraham got the higher honor here, whereas Jacob was renamed by an angel who he calls God's minister or the logos.

14:02
Abraham was renamed by God.

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So the logos is clearly inferior to God here.

14:07
He literally says he is below, the logos is below the existent.

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He's God's messenger.

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The word messenger is the same as the word angel in Greek, and he's God's minister.

14:16
The word minister means servant.

14:18
So the logos cannot produce permanence, whereas the high God can.

14:23
On to our second quote.

14:25
On dreams, chapter 1, verses 227 to 230.

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For he says, I have seen all that Laban doeth unto thee, Jacob,

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The reverse, that is, of all that I bestowed upon thee, even sore foulness and spuriousness.

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Don't you just love those old English translations?

14:42
And darkness in every part.

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Yet there can be no cowering fear for the man who relies on the hope of the divine comradeship to whom are addressed the words, I am the God who appeared to thee in the place of God.

14:57
Huh?

14:58
Surely a right noble

15:00
cause of vaunting it is for a soul that God deigns to show himself to and converse with it.

15:07
And do not fail to mark the language used, but carefully inquire whether there are two gods.

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You see, he said before, I am God.

15:15
Let me show you again.

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I am the God who appeared to thee in the place of God is what it says in Genesis 31, 13, at least in the Greek version.

15:24
not in the Hebrew version, but in the Greek version.

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So he says, carefully acquire whether there are two guys.

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This is what Father was asking.

15:29
Are there two guys?

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This is the moment, ladies and gentlemen, for we read, I am the God that appeared to thee, not in my place, but in the place of God, as though it were another's.

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Verse 229.

15:41
What then are we to say?

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He that is truly God is one, but those that are improperly so-called are more than one.

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Accordingly, the holy word

15:52
And that word there is logos.

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The holy logos in the present instance has indicated him who is truly God by means of the articles saying, I am the God.

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While it omits the article when mentioning him who is improperly so-called saying, who appeared to thee in the place not of the God, but simply of God.

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You see the difference of the God versus of God.

16:17
Here it gives the title of God, in quotes, to his chief logos, his chief word, not from any superstitious nicety in applying names, but with one aim before him, to use words to express facts.

16:33
Philo is puzzling over Genesis 31.13, and that verse says, I am the God who appeared to you in the place of God.

16:41
This is a totally weird verse.

16:43
This is actually a really bad translation.

16:46
of the Greek version of Hebrew, right?

16:49
So the Hebrew reads, I am the God of Bethel.

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And in the Greek version, it just misunderstood the word Bethel.

16:57
It's actually kind of a compound word in Hebrew with like a little, they call it, but it's like a hyphen between the bet and the L there.

17:05
And so maybe they're thinking the word bet is the word for place.

17:09
It's very similar to the word for house, right?

17:12
The house of God is the literal translation.

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So instead of recognizing that Bet-el is a location, they're translating a place of God.

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Anyhow, this created a confusing text.

17:26
It's a confusing text that is not in your Bible.

17:28
It's not in my Bible unless you're reading the Septuagint.

17:31
And Philo is taking the opportunity to clearly affirm monotheism.

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He says, He that is truly God is one.

17:38
There's no question here.

17:39
This is an echo of the classic Shema.

17:42
Philo might be a Greek thinker, he might be a Platonist, but he still affirms the Shema because God bless him, he's a Jew and all Jews from Jesus and even before Jesus loved to affirm the Shema.

17:55
When the scribe came to Jesus and said to him, hey, what's the greatest commandment of all?

17:59
What did Jesus say?

18:00
He said, well, let me think about it.

18:01
That's a great question.

18:02
No, he just instinctively answered like any Jew would back then or now and said, here Israel,

18:08
The Lord our God, the Lord is one.

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And so Philo also holds to that as do all Jews today.

18:14
And that causes Philo to ask the question, well, are there two gods?

18:21
And look, this is the moment, you know, if Philo's gonna tell us something about the two powers idea, this is where it would be.

18:29
And so he sets up this intriguing delineation between proper and improper uses of the word God.

18:35
which is kind of a sophisticated grammatical argument, and Philo thinks the second instance of the word God, theos, refers to the logos, and the first instance refers to the Father or the God of Israel.

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So God gives the title God to his chief logos, and Philo, as a monotheist, is completely comfortable recognizing

18:59
that the logos is also God, but not the God, but just God in a lower sense, or what he calls an improper sense.

19:07
When used of the God of Israel in Greek, we find the word the God, but used in this secondary sense of someone that's a lower level but still divine, we read God without the definite article.

19:19
All right, let's go on to our third text.

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on husbandry 51 and 52.

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It well befits every lover of God to rehearse this psalm, but for the universe it is a still more fitting theme.

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For land and water and air and fire and all plants and animals which are in these, whether mortal or divine, yea, and the sky and the circuits of sun and moon and the revolutions and rhythmic movements of the other heavenly bodies are like some flock under the hand of God, its king and shepherd.

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This hallowed flock he leads in accordance with right and law, setting over it his true word and firstborn son,

20:03
who shall take upon him its government like the viceroy of a great king.

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For it is said in a certain place, Behold, I am.

20:12
I send my angel before thy face to guard thee in the way.

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Let therefore even the whole universe, that greatest and most perfect flock of the God who is, say, The Lord shepherds me and nothing shall fail me.

20:29
So what's going on here?

20:32
Philo is meditating on Psalm 23.

20:35
the Psalm, right?

20:36
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want and so forth.

20:40
And Philo's interpretation has nothing to do with what the Psalm appears to say on its surface.

20:47
Philo starts marveling about the rhythmic motions of heavenly bodies, which is God's flock.

20:55
that he governs with a law and God doesn't manage it personally.

20:59
No, He would not do that.

21:01
Instead, he set over his true logos to coordinate the motions of the heavenly bodies.

21:08
And that is what he calls his firstborn son, his viceroy and my angel.

21:13
Now look, Philo's not a Christian.

21:16
He doesn't, presumably he doesn't know anything about Jesus at all.

21:19
He's living very far away at the same time as Jesus and they overlap quite a bit.

21:23
but he's way over in Egypt and Jesus is in the land of Israel.

21:29
He's in Judah and Galilee primarily, right?

21:31
So he's not thinking of the firstborn in the sense of Jesus Christ here.

21:37
He's thinking of the firstborn in the sense of Logos.

21:40
You could see why later Christians would look at Philo and they'd be like, oh, there it is.

21:44
And especially if they're coming from a middle Platonist perspective, but Philo is not talking about Jesus at all, he's not doing Christology.

21:52
He's talking about the creative being or intermediary.

21:58
I don't know exactly what word is right to use here to describe the logos in Philo.

22:03
Let's look at another quote and see what he says.

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Who is the heir of divine things versus 205 and 206 to his word, his chief messenger, and that's the word archangel.

22:15
in Greek there 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 he glories in this prerogative and proudly describes it in these words

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And I stood between the Lord and you, that is, neither uncreated as God nor created as you, but midway between the two extremes.

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A surety to both sides, to the parent pledging the creature that it should never altogether rebel against the rain and choose disorder rather than order, to the child warranting his hopes that the merciful God

23:07
will never forget his own work, for I am the harbinger of peace to creation from that God whose will is to bring wars to an end, who is ever the guardian of peace.

23:20
The logos is, according to Philo, God's

23:24
chief messenger.

23:26
He's the highest in age and honor, and the Logos stands on the border between creature and creator.

23:32
This is why I was struggling to find a clear word to describe what the Logos is, because it's neither the creator nor a creature.

23:42
It's this intermediate individual or personification or

23:48
person, hard to say exactly what Philo is talking about here, but it plays a mediating role.

23:56
With the immortal, it pleads to God, but it also acts as God's ambassador to people.

24:04
It's neither uncreated as God nor created as people, but actually midway between the two.

24:10
Let's look at number five.

24:12
On the confusion of tongues, 62 to 63 and 146.

24:17
I have heard also an oracle from the lips of one of the disciples of Moses, which runs thus.

24:25
Behold a man whose name is the rising.

24:28
Strangest of titles, surely, if you suppose that a being composed of soul and body is here described, but if you suppose that it is that incorporeal one, which literally translates to the one without a body, it's a somaton.

24:44
is the Greek word there.

24:46
The incorporeal one who differs not a wit from the divine image.

24:50
That's an incredible statement too.

24:52
So he's in the divine image, very, very much in the divine image there.

24:57
You will agree that the name of rising assigned to him quite truly describes him.

25:03
For that man is the eldest son whom the father of all raised up and elsewhere calls him his firstborn.

25:11
and indeed the son thus begotten followed the ways of his father and shaped the different kinds looking to the archetypal patterns which that father supplied 146 but if there be any as yet unfit to be called a son of God let him press to take his place under God's firstborn the word or logos who holds the eldership among the angels

25:36
their ruler as it were and many names are his for he is called the beginning and the name of God and his word that's logos and the man after his image and he that sees that is Israel the logos is the incorporeal one we see that the logos does not differ from the divine image the logos is God's firstborn begotten son

26:06
and that the logos shaped different kinds.

26:09
Likely, this is referring to Genesis chapter 1.

26:12
11 and 12 says, Then God said, Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.

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And it was so.

26:25
The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it.

26:33
And God saw that it was good.

26:36
So what do we have here?

26:37
The logos shaped the kinds, looking to the archetypal patterns which the Father supplied.

26:44
Now this is just clearly talking about Plato's realm of the Forms.

26:48
And if you're not familiar with Plato's Republic and what he says about the Forms, it goes something like this, that he likens our existence, our current access to reality, the physical world as

27:02
to living in a cave.

27:03
But outside the cave, there's another reality.

27:06
I don't think he would have used the word dimension, but that's probably what we would call it, another layer of reality in which are all the perfected versions of everything that exists on earth.

27:17
And that is the realm of the forms.

27:19
And so the Logos is looking to that realm of the forms, the perfected version, and then creating the universe, the physical universe that we have.

27:29
the standard model of understanding how creation took place within Middle Platonism.

27:35
And it is all based on Plato's book called the Timaeus.

27:39
And this is what the Timaeus says in 28a through 29a.

27:45
But when the artificer of any object, informing its shape and quality, keeps his gaze fixed on that which is uniform, using a model of this kind, that object, executed in this way, must of necessity be beautiful.

27:59
But whenever he gazes at that which has come into existence and uses a created model, the object thus executed is not beautiful.

28:08
Now the whole heaven, or cosmos, after which of the models did its architect construct it?

28:14
Was it after that which is self-identical and uniform, or after that which has come into existence?

28:20
Now if so be that this cosmos is beautiful and its constructor good, it is plain that he fixed his gaze on the eternal, but if otherwise, which is an impious supposition, his gaze was on that which has come into existence.

28:35
But it is clear to everyone that his gaze was on the eternal, for the cosmos is the fairest of all that has come into existence, and he the best of all the causes.

28:45
So having in this wise come into existence, it has been constructed after the pattern of that which is apprehensible by reason and thought and is self-identical.

28:55
So just like everyone today has heard of the Big Bang based on the red shifted measurements of most stars and galaxies moving away from us.

29:04
So educated people in Philo's time, especially in Alexandria, Egypt, recognize Plato's account of the craftsman or the artificer, as it was translated here, creating our universe as a copy of the higher realm of perfect forms.

29:20
But here's the thing, the craftsman is never identified in the Timaeus.

29:24
It's not God, but who is it?

29:29
He calls it the Demiurge, Demiurgos in the Greek.

29:34
the artificer, the craftsman.

29:37
Who is the creator of the physical realm?

29:40
Philo saw in the Logos a ready answer for this.

29:44
And this is not Philo's innovation.

29:45
This is widespread in the first and second centuries that among Platonists, they saw the Logos as this intermediary.

29:55
It's very popular among Stoics as well.

29:58
So let's summarize a bit of what we've seen so far.

30:03
The logos is not equal to God, but what is the logos?

30:08
Let's see what Philo says.

30:10
Let me just summarize little snippets of everything we've looked at so far.

30:15
The logos is an angel.

30:18
He's below the existent who cannot produce permanence, unswerving and unwavering.

30:25
Philo recognized that truly God is 1.

30:28
who can transfer the title of theos to his chief logos, although without the definite article.

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He said that God alone receives the definite article while the logos is only called theos without the article.

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The logos is God's firstborn son who is like some viceroy of a great king.

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He is an archangel and eldest who is neither uncreated as God nor created as you, but midway between the two extremes.

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He is the divine image who is begotten and firstborn.

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He is responsible for creating our world, though He was looking to the archetypal patterns which the Father supplied.

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Once again, we find clear subordination with the Logos.

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The Logos is an intermediate between God and creation.

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Someone could know the Logos, but no one could truly know God.

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God is just beyond.

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He's just supreme.

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And in this sense, God is just utterly beyond us.

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The logos is not the only intermediary in Philo, though.

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Philo also gives Sophia, or wisdom, an independent existence.

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And he also speaks of powers that function as God's guardians.

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Once again, Christina Termini writes,

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Philo also safeguards monotheism by continually interchanging the entities of logos, sophia, and powers, as well as their functions and titles.

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In this way, he avoids coming to a binitarian scheme, which would result from the concentration of attributes on only one mediating figure.

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Did you catch that?

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Did you see what Christina Termidy said?

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A Philo scholar, she said,

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Philo avoids binitarianism.

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He's not a binitarian.

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He does have this concept of logos, but he also has this concept of Sophia and the powers.

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And so it's not just one.

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There's a whole bunch of intermediaries in Philo's Platonist system, and that is pre-standard for Platonist as well, at least until we get to Neoplatonism when things get a little cleaned up, but that wouldn't be for a couple of centuries after Philo when, well, I guess 150 years after Philo, when Ammonius of Alexandria really develops Neoplatonism in the, I think, 180s, 190s, early 200s AD.

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So Philo is unaware of the concept of two powers in heaven.

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He has no clue about it.

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For him, the logos is a necessary intermediary doing God's bidding.

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The logos is not some sort of independent, coequal person of God.

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Now, it's not clear that the logos is more than a literary metaphor.

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But maybe he really believed the Logos existed and had its own thoughts and its own will.

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I couldn't say based on what we've seen here.

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All I can say is that it's clear that it's not the concept of Vinitarianism.

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It's not the two powers idea.

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It's not like the Logos is co-equal with God, whether antagonistic or cooperative.

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Either way, it's just not part of the two powers ideology.

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Now, I know what you're thinking.

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You're thinking,

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Man, Pastor Sean, you called this series Two Powers.

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And we've looked at First Enoch and Philo and we haven't made any progress in understanding Two Powers.

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You got a point there.

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I get it.

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I get it.

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I can see why that might be frustrating.

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But here's why I did this.

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Because multiple scholars point to First Enoch and Philo as evidence of two powers in the 1st century.

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Over and over again, that's what they do.

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They point to these two collections of literature as evidence of the two powers doctrine.

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So I wanted to start by showing you where it's not, I guess, in the earliest and most important evidence before moving to later periods of Jewish literature.

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And I hope I've shown you that such claims are utterly wrong.

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There is no two powers ideology in 1st Enoch.

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There is no two powers ideology in Philo, but don't despair.

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You're here for two powers.

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I'm gonna give you two powers, okay?

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As I promised before, we are going to get to Jewish texts that talk about two powers.

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You just need to be patient with me.

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There's a lot to cover, and I don't want to be sloppy.

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I want to be careful, and I want to cite the actual source material.

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So it's not Tom Finnegan's opinion, it's what the text says.

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And that will empower you to have what you need to make your own conclusions, even if you happen to disagree with me.

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Now next time we're going to examine the Mishnah and the Tosefta.

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These are important Jewish books from the 3rd century.

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And there are a couple of references that two powers advocates commonly point to that we'll look at carefully.

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And I hope you'll stick with me as we continue on this journey together.

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And if you found this episode helpful, please like and subscribe and also share this episode with others.

35:42
If you are in dialogue with somebody who is saying, Bilo was a binitarian, send him this episode.

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Please.

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If you'd like to support,

35:53
this ministry, Restitudio, financially, you can also do that by coming to our website, restitudio.org, and setting up a monthly recurring donation.

36:02
Thanks so much to those of you who are already doing that.

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It makes such a difference.

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Well, that's going to be it for today.

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I'll catch you next time.

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And remember, the truth has nothing to fear.