 | | and their inner meanings as resembling the soul. It follows that, exactly as we have to take thought for the body, because it is the abode of the soul, so we must pay heed to the letter of the laws.
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| | (Philo 1932, 185)
15
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For both Paul and Philo, hermeneutics becomes anthropology.
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This congruence of Paul and Philo is one of the features of their thought that suggests they share a common background in the thoughtworld of the eclectic middle-platonism of first-century Greek-speaking Judaism (Chadwick 1966).
16
Their allegorical reading practice and that of their intellectual descendants is founded on a binary opposition in which meaning exists as a disembodied substance prior to its incarnation in language, that is, in a dualistic system in which spirit precedes and is primary over body.
17
Midrash, the hermeneutic system of rabbinic Judaism, seems precisely to refuse that dualism, eschewing the inner-outer, visible-invisible, body-soul dichotomies of allegorical reading. Midrash and platonic allegory are alternate techniques of the body.
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| | 15. For a good, concise description of Philo's hermeneutics, see Fraade (1991, 1114). Philo rather compromises his argument by admitting, "If we keep and observe these, we shall gain a clearer conception of those things of which these are the symbols; and besides that we shall not incur the censure of the many and the charges they are sure to bring against us." Like Paul, it seems, he at least sometimes maintained observance of the literal commandments, in the flesh, to escape the censure of fellow Jews. It is important to note that Philo himself is just the most visible representative of an entire school that understood the Bible and indeed the philosophy of language as he didas is suggested by his very censure of those who pay attention only to the allegorical meaning and ignore the physical observances. See Winston (1988, 211).
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| | 16. The notion that Paul has a background in Hellenistic Judaism has been advanced fairly often. It has generally had a pejorative tinge to it, as if only Palestinian Judaism was "authentic," and such terms as
lax,
and, surprisingly enough,
coldly legal,
are used to describe Paul's alleged Hellenistic environment. Recently, this idea has been rightly discarded on the grounds that there is no sharp dividing line between Hellenistic and Palestinian Judaism. If we abandon the ex post facto judgments of history, moreover, there is no reason to accept the previous notions of
margin
and
center
in the description of late-antique Jewish groups, and no reason why Philo should be considered less authentic than Rabban Gamaliel. The question of cultural differences between Greek- and Hebrew-speaking Jews can be reapproached on different, nonjudgmental territory. In that light, I find the similarities between Paul and Philo, who could have had no contact with each other whatsoever, very exciting evidence for first-century Greek-speaking Jews.
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| | 17. I have limited the scope of this claim to allow for other types of allegory, including such phenomena as Joseph's interpretations of Pharaoh's dreams, as well as for an untheorized allegorical tradition in reading Homer. When I use the term
allegory,
therefore, this is to be understood as shorthand for allegories of the type we know from Philo and onward.
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