y
exterminated the rebels was none other than Tiberius Alexander, the
nephew of Philo, who was in turn procurator of Judaea and Egypt. By
another irony of history he had in the previous year been largely
instrumental in securing for Vespasian, who was besieging Jerusalem,
the imperial throne of Rome.[82] With him ends our knowledge of
Philo's family, and it ends significantly with one who has ceased to
be a Jew. The ruin of the Jewish-Alexandrian community was completed
by a desperate revolt in the reign of Trajan, 114-117 C.E., after
which they were deprived of their chief political privileges; and
finally, after incessant conflicts with the Christians, they were
expelled from the city by the all-powerful Bishop Cyril (415 C.E.).

Philo himself passed out of Jewish tradition within a short time, to
become a Christian worthy. The destruction of the nation and the
gradual severance of the Christian heresy from the main community
compelled the abandonment of missionary activity and distrust of the
work of its exponents. The dangerous aspect of the Alexandrian
development was revealed. Its philosophical allegorizing might attract
the Gentile to the Jewish Scriptures, but it also led the Jew away
from his special conduct of life. The Alexandrian Church, which
claimed to continue the tradition of Philo, departed further and
further from the Jewish standpoint, and formulated a dogmatic creed
that was utterly opposed to Jewish monotheism. A philosophical Judaism
for the whole world was a splendid ideal, but unfortunately in Philo's
time it was incapable of accomplishment. The result of the attempt to
found it was the establishment of a religion in which, together with
the adoption of Hebraic teachings about God, certain ideas of
Alexandrian mysticism became stereotyped as dogmas, and Jewish law was
abrogated. When Babylon replaced Palestine as the centre of Jewish
intellect, the works of Philo, like the rest of the Hellenistic-Jewish
literature, written as they were in a strange tongue, fell into
disuse, and before long were entirely forgotten. The Christians, on
the other hand, found in Philo a notable evidence for many of their
beliefs and a philosophical testimony for the dogmas of their creed.
They claimed him as their own, and the Church Fathers, to bind him
more closely to their tradition, invented fables of his meeting with
Peter at Rome and Mark at Alexandria, They traced, in the treatise "On
the Contemplative Life,"