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Thinkers

Philo of Alexandria

Jewish · Africa · 20 BCE to 50

Jewish thinker of Alexandria who read scripture through Greek philosophy, and who held that God is beyond all description.

What it is

Philo of Alexandria was a Jewish thinker who lived in the Egyptian city of Alexandria around the turn of the common era. He read the Jewish scriptures with the tools of Greek philosophy, and he is one of the first writers to try to join the two.

The sources give no exact dates, and the ones they offer differ, so his life can only be placed in the decades around the first century. He came from a wealthy and prominent family. His brother Alexander was a high official who dealt with customs and taxes, and a nephew later became prefect of Egypt.

The main ideas

  • Scripture read for hidden meanings. He treated many passages as allegories with a deeper sense, especially when a literal reading made God seem imperfect. Yet he argued that the literal rules should still be kept.
  • A God beyond description. God's existence can be shown, but his nature cannot be grasped. Whatever we say of God falls short, and God can be described only by saying what God is not.
  • Reaching the world. Though God is hidden, he is present in the world through his word, the logos, and through powers that act as go-betweens.
  • Admiration for Plato. He knew Greek literature and philosophy well, and he spoke of Plato with great respect.
  • The contemplative life. He valued study and the contemplation of God over worldly business, and wrote of longing for leisure for thought while being pulled into civic troubles.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine a reader who meets an old story that seems puzzling, perhaps one that speaks of God as though God had a body. Philo would suggest asking what the story is pointing to, treating it as a sign of something about the mind or about God, while still keeping the practices the text prescribes. This is an illustration of his method, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • Commentaries on scripture. Much of his work is a running study of the books of Moses, especially Genesis, in allegorical form and in plain explanation of the laws.
  • The embassy to Caligula. After violence against the Jews of Alexandria in the late 30s CE, he went with a delegation to the Roman emperor to ask that Jewish rights be upheld. He wrote about it in Against Flaccus and On the Embassy to Gaius.
  • A visit to Jerusalem. He tells of making a pilgrimage there.

Questions and criticism

  • Was he a philosopher? Accounts describe him differently. One names him a founder of religious philosophy, and another says he was the first to try to join revealed faith with reason. It is fair to ask whether that makes him a philosopher or an interpreter of scripture.
  • Who preserved him? Later Christian writers kept his works, and many see him as a forerunner of Christian theology, while Jewish tradition did not preserve his thought. Historians weigh how far his work shaped either tradition.
  • How coherent is he? His treatises can seem disordered, and some readers think the looseness is deliberate.

Close neighbours

The page on Plato covers the thinker he admired and quoted with reverence. The page on Plotinus covers a later Platonist whom two of the source pages mention alongside him.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • Plato · He read scripture through Plato's philosophy and used his ideas of forms and the soul.

Other Jewish thinkers

Sources we used

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