impotent rage on an ury phantom, who seemed to
expire on the cross, and, after three days, to rise from the dead. [28]

[Footnote 20: The Platonists admired the beginning of the Gospel of St.
John as containing an exact transcript of their own principles. Augustin
de Civitat. Dei, x. 29. Amelius apud Cyril. advers. Julian. l. viii. p.
283. But in the third and fourth centuries, the Platonists of Alexandria
might improve their Trinity by the secret study of the Christian
theology. Note: A short discussion on the sense in which St. John has
used the word Logos, will prove that he has not borrowed it from the
philosophy of Plato. The evangelist adopts this word without previous
explanation, as a term with which his contemporaries were already
familiar, and which they could at once comprehend. To know the sense
which he gave to it, we must inquire that which it generally bore in his
time. We find two: the one attached to the word logos by the Jews of
Palestine, the other by the school of Alexandria, particularly by Philo.
The Jews had feared at all times to pronounce the name of Jehovah; they
had formed a habit of designating God by one of his attributes; they
called him sometimes Wisdom, sometimes the Word. By the word of the Lord
were the heavens made. (Psalm xxxiii. 6.) Accustomed to allegories, they
often addressed themselves to this attribute of the Deity as a real
being. Solomon makes Wisdom say "The Lord possessed me in the beginning
of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from
the beginning, or ever the earth was." (Prov. viii. 22, 23.) Their
residence in Persia only increased this inclination to sustained
allegories. In the Ecclesiasticus of the son of Sirach, and the Book of
Wisdom, we find allegorical descriptions of Wisdom like the following:
"I came out of the mouth of the Most High; I covered the earth as a
cloud;... I alone compassed the circuit of heaven, and walked in the
bottom of the deep... The Creator created me from the beginning, before
the world, and I shall never fail." (Eccles. xxiv. 35- 39.) See also the
Wisdom of Solomon, c. vii. v. 9. [The latter book is clearly
Alexandrian.--M.] We see from this that the Jews understood from the
Hebrew and Chaldaic words which signify Wisdom, the Word, and which were
translated into Greek, a simple attribute of the Deity, allegorically
personified, but of which they did not make a real particular being
separate from the Deity. The sch