they derive from others,
good birth; and they should justly be regarded as enemies
not only of the Jewish race, but of all mankind; of the
Jewish race, because they engender indifference in their
brethren, so that they despise the righteous life in their
reliance upon their ancestors' virtue; and of the Gentiles,
because they would not allow them their meed of reward even
though they attain to the highest excellence of conduct,
simply because they have not commendable ancestors. I know
not if there could be a more pernicious doctrine than this:
that there is no punishment for the wicked offspring of good
parents, and no reward for the good offspring of evil
parents. The law judges each man upon his own merit, and
does not assign praise or blame according to the virtues of
the forefathers."

And, again, he writes: "God judges by the fruit of the tree, not by
the root; and in the Divine judgment the proselyte will be raised on
high, and he will have a double distinction, because on earth he
'deserted' to God, and later he receives as his reward a place in
Heaven."[354]

Unfortunately, the development of missionizing activity, which
followed Philo's epoch, threatening, as it did, the fundamental
principles of Judaism, necessitated the reassertion of its national
character and antagonism to an attitude which sought expansion by
compromise. It is the tragedy of Philo's work that his mission to the
nations was of necessity distrusted by his own race, and that his
appeal for tolerance within the community was turned to a mockery by
the hostility which the converts of the next century showed to the
national ideas. Christian apologists early learned to imitate Philo's
allegorical method, and appropriated it to explain away the laws of
Moses. Within a hundred years of Philo's death, his ideal, at least in
the form in which he had conceived it, had been shattered for ages.
While he was preaching a philosophical Judaism for the world at
Alexandria, Peter and Paul were preaching through the Diaspora an
heretical Judaism for the half-converted Gentiles. The disciples of
Jesus spread his teaching far and wide; but they continually widened
the breach which their Master had himself initiated, and so their work
became, not so much a development of Judaism, as an attack upon it. In
some of its principles, indeed, the message of Jesus was the message
of Philo, empha