Jews], and one not unskilful in philosophy” (Josephus’ “Antiquities of the Jews,” bk. xviii., ch. 8, sec. 1).  This “Alexander was a principal person among all his contemporaries both for his family and wealth” (Ibid, bk. xx, ch. 5, sec. 2).  He was the principal man in the Jewish embassage to Caius (Caligula) A.D. 39-40, and was then a grey-headed old man.  Keim speaks of him as about sixty or seventy years old at that time, and puts his birth at about B.C. 20.  He writes:  “The Theology of Philo is in great measure founded on his peculiar combination of the Jewish, the Platonic, and the Neo-Platonic conception of God.  The God of the Old Testament, the exalted God, as he is called by the modern Hegelian philosophy, stood in close relations to the Greek Philosophers’ conception of God, which believed that the Supreme Being could be accurately defined by the negative of all that was finite.  In accordance with this, Philo also described God as the simple Entity; he disclaimed for him every name, every quality, even that of the Good, the Beautiful, the Blessed, the One.  Since he is still better than the good, higher than the Unity, he can never be known as, but only that, he is:  his perfect name is only the four mysterious letters (Jhvh)—­that is, pure Being.  By such means, indeed, neither a fuller theology nor God’s influence on the world was to be obtained.  And yet it was the problem of philosophy, as well as of religion, to shed the light of God upon the world, and to lead it again to God.  But how could this Being which was veiled from the world be brought to bear upon it?  By Philo, as well as by all the philosophy of the time, the problem could only be solved illogically.  Yet, by modifying his exalted nature, it might be done.  If not by his being, yet by his work he influences the world; his powers, his angels, all in it that is best and mightiest, the instrument, the interpreter, the mediator and messenger of God; his pattern and his first-born, the Son of God, the Second God, even himself God, the divine Word or Logos communicate with the world; he is the ideal and actual type of the world and of humanity, the architect and upholder of the world, the manna and the rock in the wilderness” ("Jesus of Nazara,” vol. i., pp. 281, 282).

“Man is fallen....  There is no man who is without sin, and even the perfect man, if he should be born, does not escape from it....  Yet there is a redemption, willed by God himself, and brought to pass by the act of a wise man.  Adam’s successors still preserve the types of their relationship to the Father, although in an obscure form, each man possesses the knowledge of good and evil and an incorruptible judgment, subject to reason; his spiritual strength is even now aided by the Divine Logos, the image, copy, and reflection of the blessed nature.  Hence it follows that man can discern and see all the stains with which he has wilfully or involuntarily defiled his life, that man by means of his self-knowledge