d in dealing with
ancient authorities. It is the Christian teachers who preserved Philo,
and they preserved him not as scholars but as missioners. The best
editors have recognized that our text has been interfered with by
evidenced-making scribes, as where a passage about the new Jerusalem
appears, agreeing almost word for word with the picture of
Revelations. Similarly, not a few passages about the Logos are
probably spurious.[220]

Yet, even when we have expurgated our text of Philo, there remain, it
will be said, numerous passages where the Logos is spoken of and
apostrophized as a person. This is so, but the conclusion which is
drawn, that the Logos is regarded as a second deity, is unjustifiable.
The Jewish mind from the time of the prophets unto this day has
thought in images and metaphors, and the personification of the Logos
is only the most striking instance of Philo's regular habit of
personifying all abstract ideas. The allegorical habit particularly
conduces to this, for as persons are constantly resolved into ideas,
so ideas come to be naturally represented as persons. There are thus
two steps in Philo's theology, which seem to some extent to counteract
each other; in the first place, he resolves the concrete physical
expressions of the Bible into spiritual ideas, in the second he
portrays those ideas in pictorial language and clothes them in
personifications. The allegorizer requires an allegorist to interpret
him aright.

Nor must it be forgotten that Philo was preaching spiritual monotheism
not only to Jews, but also to the Hellenic world, for whom it was a
vast bound from their naturalistic polytheism. Zealous as he was for
the pure faith, he realized that mankind could not attain it directly,
but must approach it by conceptions of the One God gradually
increasing in profundity and truth. The Greek thinkers had
approximated closest to the Hebraic God-idea when they conceived one
supreme, immanent reason in the universe; and Philo, in carrying his
audiences beyond this to the transcendent-immanent Being, transformed
the Greek cosmical concept into a Divine power of the One Being. For
the true believer this is the stepping-stone to the perfect idea. "The
Logos," he says, "is the God of us imperfect people, but the true
sages worship the One Being."[221] And, again, "The imperfect have as
their law the holy Logos."[222] And in this sense, it is "intermediate
([Greek: methorios]) between God and man."[22