Divine Embodiment in Philo of Alexandria

What is it about?

Because later polemics established Jews and Christians as binary opposites, distinguished largely by their views on God's body, scholars have not sufficiently explored how other Jews in the early Roman period, who stood outside the Jesus movement, conceived of how the divine could become embodied on earth. The first-century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria often operates as the quintessential representative of a Jew who stressed God's absolute incorporeality. Here I demonstrate how Philo also presents a means by which a part of Israel's God could become united with materiality, showing how the patriarchs and Moses function as his paradigms. This evidence suggests that scholars on divine embodiment has been limited by knowledge of later developments in Christian theology. Incarnational formulas, like that found in John 1:14 were not the only way that Jews in the first and second century CE understood that God could become united with human form.

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Why is it important?

My analysis reveals that ancient Jewish conceptions of God's embodiment were not monolithic: there were many means by which Jews in the first few centuries of the Common Era envisioned that God, or a part of God, could become united with bodily, or material, form.