This leads us to the great question of Original Sin. Here the views of Philo are those of the Eastern Rabbis. But both are entirely different from those on which the argument in the Epistle to the Romans turns. It was neither at the feet of Gamaliel, nor yet from Jewish Hellenism, that Saul of Tarsus learned the doctrine of original sin. The statement that as in Adam all spiritually died, so in Messiah all should be made alive, finds absolutely no parallel in Jewish writings.3 What may be called the starting point of Christian theology, the doctrine of hereditary guilt and sin, through the fall of Adam, and of the consequent entire and helpless corruption of our nature, is entirely unknown to Rabbinical Judaism. The reign of physical death was indeed traced to the sin of our first parents. But the Talmud expressly teaches,a that God originally created man with two propensities, one to good and one to evil (Yetser tobh, and Yetser hara). The evil impulse began immediately after birth. 7 But it was within the power of man to vanquish sin, and to attain perfect righteousness; in fact, this stage had actually been attained.
Similarly, Philo regarded the soul of the child as ‘naked’ (Adam and Eve), a sort of tabula rasa, as wax which God would fain form and mould. But this state ceased when ‘affection’ presented itself to reason, and thus sensuous lust arose, which was the spring of all sin. The grand task, then, was to get rid of the sensuous, and to rise to the spiritual. In this, the ethical part of his system, Philo was most under the influence of Stoic philosophy. We might almost say, it is no longer the Hebrew who Hellenises, but the Hellene who Hebraises. And yet it is here also that the most ingenious and wide-reaching allegorisms of Scripture are introduced. It is scarcely possible to convey an idea of how brilliant this method becomes in the hands of Philo, how universal its application, or how captivating it must have proved. Philo describes man’s state as, first one of sensuousness, but also of unrest, misery, and unsatisfied longing. If persisted in, it would end in complete spiritual insensibility. But from this state the soul must pass to one of devotion to reason.3 This change might be accomplished in one of three ways: first, by study—of which physical was the lowest; next, that which embraced the ordinary circle of knowledge; and lastly, the highest, that of Divine philosophy. The second method was Askesis: discipline, or practice, when the soul turned from the lower to the higher. But the best of all was the third way: the free unfolding of that spiritual life which cometh neither from study nor discipline, but from a natural good disposition. And in that state the soul had true rest and joy..5
Here we must for the present pause. Brief as this sketch of Hellenism has been, it must have brought the question vividly before the mind, whether and how far certain parts of the New Testament, especially the fourth Gospel,7 are connected with the direction of thought described in the preceding pages. Without yielding to that school of critics, whose perverse ingenuity discerns everywhere a sinister motive or tendency in the Evangelic writers, it is evident that each of them had a special object in view in constructing his narrative of the One Life; and primarily addressed himself to a special audience. If, without entering into elaborate discussion, we might, according to St. Luke 1:2, regard the narrative of St. Mark as the grand representative of that authentic ‘narration’ (διήγησις), though not by Apostles, which was in circulation, and the Gospel by St. Matthew as representing the ‘tradition’ handed down (the παράδοσις), by the Apostolic eye-witnesses and ministers of the Word, we should reach the following results. Our oldest Gospel-narrative is that by St. Mark, which, addressing itself to no class in particular, sketches in rapid outlines the picture of Jesus as the Messiah, alike for all men. Next in order of time comes our present Gospel by St. Matthew. It goes a step further back than that by St. Mark, and gives not only the genealogy, but the history of the miraculous birth of Jesus. Even if we had not the consensus of tradition, every one must feel that this Gospel is Hebrew in its cast, in its citations from the Old Testament, and in its whole bearing. Taking its key-note from the Book of Daniel, that grand Messianic text-book of Eastern Judaism at the time, and as re-echoed in the Book of Enoch—which expresses the popular apprehension of Daniel’s Messianic idea—it presents the Messiah chiefly as ‘the Son of Man,’ ‘the Son of David, ‘the Son of God.’ We have here the fulfilment of Old Testament law and prophecy; the realisation of Old Testament life, faith, and hope. Third in point of time is the Gospel by St. Luke, which, passing back another step, gives us not only the history of the birth of Jesus, but also that of John, ‘the preparer of the way.’ It is Pauline, and addresses itself, or rather, we should say, presents the Person of the Messiah, it may be ‘to the Jew first,’ but certainly ‘also to the Greek. The term which St. Luke, alone of all Gospel writers, applies to Jesus, is that of the παῖς or ‘servant’ of God, in the sense in which Isaiah had spoken of the Messiah as the ‘Ebhed Jehovah,’ ‘servant of the Lord.’ St. Luke’s is, so to speak, the Isaiah-Gospel, presenting the Christ in His bearing on the history of God’s Kingdom and of the world—as God’s Elect Servant in Whom He delighted. In the Old Testament, to adopt a beautiful figure, the idea of the Servant of the Lord is set before us like a pyramid: at its base it is all Israel, at its central section Israel after the Spirit (the circumcised in heart), represented by David, the man after God’s own heart; while at its apex it is the ‘Elect’ Servant, the Messiah.2 And these three ideas, with their sequences, are presented in the third Gospel as centring in Jesus the Messiah. By the side of this pyramid is the other: the Son of Man, the Son of David, the Son of God. The Servant of the Lord of Isaiah and of Luke is the Enlightener, the Consoler, the victorious Deliverer; the Messiah or Anointed: the Prophet, the Priest, the King.
Yet another tendency—shall we say, want?—remained, so to speak, unmet and unsatisfied. That large world of latest and most promising Jewish thought, whose task it seemed to bridge over the chasm between heathenism and Judaism—the Western Jewish world, must have the Christ presented to them. For in every direction is He the Christ. And not only they, but that larger Greek world, so far as Jewish Hellenism could bring it to the threshold of the Church. This Hellenistic and Hellenic world now stood in waiting to enter it, though as it were by its northern porch, and to be baptized at its font. All this must have forced itself on the mind of St. John, residing in the midst of them at Ephesus, even as St. Paul’s Epistles contain almost as many allusions to Hellenism as to Rabbinism. And so the fourth Gospel became, not the supplement, but the complement, of the other three. There is no other Gospel more Palestinian than this in its modes of expression, allusions, and references. Yet we must all feel how thoroughly Hellenistic it also is in its cast, in what it reports and what it omits—in short, in its whole aim; how adapted to Hellenist wants its presentation of deep central truths; how suitably, in the report of His Discourses—even so far as their form is concerned—the promise was here fulfilled, of bringing all things to remembrance whatsoever He had said.a It is the true Light which shineth, of which the full meridian-blaze lies on the Hellenist and Hellenic world. There is Alexandrian form of thought not only in the whole conception, but in the Logos, and in His presentation as the Light, the Life, the Wellspring of the world.4 But these forms are filled in the fourth Gospel with quite other substance. God is not afar off, uncognisable by man, without properties, without name. He is the Father. Instead of a nebulous reflection of the Deity we have the Person of the Logos; not a Logos with the two potencies of goodness and power, but full of grace and truth. The Gospel of St. John also begins with a ‘Bereshith’—but it is the theological, not the cosmic Bereshith, when the Logos was with God and was God. Matter is not pre-existent; far less is it evil. St. John strikes the pen through Alexandrianism when he lays it down as the fundamental fact of New Testament history that ‘the Logos was made flesh,’ just as St. Paul does when he proclaims the great mystery of ‘God manifest in the flesh.’ Best of all, it is not by a long course of study, nor by wearing discipline, least of all by an inborn good disposition, that the soul attains the new life, but by a birth from above, by the Holy Ghost, and by simple faith which is brought within reach of the fallen and the lost.
Philo had no successor. In him Hellenism had completed its cycle. Its message and its mission were ended. Henceforth it needed, like Apollos, its great representative in the Christian Church, two things: the baptism of John to the knowledge of sin and need, and to have the way of God more perfectly expounded. On the other hand, Eastern Judaism had entered with Hillel on a new stage. This direction led farther and farther away from that which the New Testament had taken in following up and unfolding the spiritual elements of the Old. That development was incapable of transformation or renovation. It must go on to its final completion—and be either true, or else be swept away and destroyed.
Edersheim, A. (1896). Vol. 1: The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (52–57). Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software.
