Philo on Wikipedia

The free Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia is constantly growing. While one should always be critical when reading its articles, there are several very good and informative.

Philo has also been included: here are some references to wikipedia articles on Philo:

English Wikipedia:
Philo
Philo's works
Philo's view of God

German Wikipedia
Philo

French Wikipedia
Philon de Alexandrie

Swedish Wikipedia
Philo Judeus (very brief)

Italian Wikipedia
Filone de Alexandrie (very, very brief)

Wikipedia in Portugal
Philon Italian Wikipedia (very, very brief)

Polish Wikipedia
Filon z. Aleksandrii

I have found no article on Philo in the following version of Wikipedia;
the Dutch version, in the Spanish version, and in the Norwegian Wikipedia.

Correction June 1:
There is, in fact, a brief article on Philo in the Spanish version: Filon de Alexandria.

News on Aristobolus

Snipped from the Online Critical Pseudepigrapha News Blog:Ian Scott has just completed an updated version of Aristobulus. This update includes an expanded introductory page with full bibliographic information for the published sources of the Aristobulus fragments. The Grammateus reader interface has also been upgraded to allow the poetic quotations in the Artapanus fragments to be displayed in proper versified form. You can find this info on the Online Critical Pseudepigrapha webpage here.

Pisidian Antioch

A great website on a site known to students of both early Christianity and Judaism has been launced; Building a new Rome:The Imperial Colony of Pisidian Antioch.

The background of the website is this: From January 13 to February 24, 2006 at the Duderstadt center on the University of Michigan north campus, the Kelsey Museum mounted an exhibition on the Roman site of Antioch of Pisidia in Asia Minor (Turkey)—a Hellenistic city refounded by Augustus in 25 BC as a Roman colony. Located along a strategic overland artery between Syria and the western coast of Asia Minor, Pisidian Antioch served Rome’s military needs but also presented a striking symbol, from the Roman perspective, of the benefits that Roman civilization provided to local populations. The city is best known to the modern world as a destination on the first missionary journey of St. Paul and Barnabas in the 1st century AD, recounted in the Book of Acts....
Held at the Duderstadt Center Gallery on North Campus, the exhibition featured a physical model created with a 3-D printer. Digital reconstructions of the buildings and topography projected on three screens will take the viewer on a journey through the virtual city. The large scale of the three-screen projection conveyed a sense of the original monumentality of the site and the character of its setting. Kiosks, located throughout the exhibition, allowed visitors to explore each virtual building on a smaller scale. At scheduled times the “CAVE,” located in the Duderstadt Center, offered a walk-in, fully three-dimensional experience of Antioch.
With the close of the Duderstadt phase of the exhibition, all of the text, images, and movies, as well as considerable additional content is to be arranged into the permanent, online version of "Building a New Rome: The Imerial Colony of Pisidian Antioch, 25 BC to 700 AD."
Have a look; again; Internet at its best...

Cambridge Companion to Philo

This morning I reread Ellen Birnbaum's review article on Philo ("Two Millennia Later: General Resources and Particular Perspectives on Philo the Jew," Currents in Biblical Research 4 (2006): 241-276), and noticed in the bibliography that she had listed a not yet published volume edited by A. Kamesar, The Cambridge Companion to Philo of Alexandria.

This was news to me, and I was looking for further information, but I found no information on the webpage of Cambridge University Press; neither on their page on Religion Religon nor on Philosophy, or any other sites on the Internet.

If anyone has any information about this forthcoming volume, please use the comments field below and tell us.

Texts of Josephus

In updating my Resource Pages for Biblical Studies, I discovered that the link on page One to the translation of the works of Josephus was outdated. Interested readersd should find the texts, (the old translation of Whiston), on this link; The Works of Flavius Josephus

Antike Schulwesen

A collegue of mine, Associate professor Tor Vegge, at the University College of Agder, Kristiansand - Norway, received his doctor degree on a huge dissertation on Die Schule des Paulus. Eine Untersuchung zur Art und zum Stellewert schulischer Bildung im Leben des Paulus. (Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo, 2004) 595 pages! This volume is interesting also for students of Philo and his social world, as it both draws on Philo, and presents the 'school system' of Philo's time. It is a very learned study, and I am happy to see that it is now in process of being published. The publisher is Walter de Gruyter in Berlin: Vegge, Tor, Paulus und das antike Schulwesen Band 1: Schule und Bildung des Paulus (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren Kirche 134; Ca. Euro [D] 148,- / ca. sFr 237,- / for USA, Canada, Mexico ca. US$ 207,20. 23 x 15,5 cm. Ca. 600 Seiten. Leinen. ISBN 3-11-018345-5. I hope to come back to this study here when I get hold of the published volume. In the meantime, here is the publisher's presentation: "The author describes educational methods, educational ideals and literary education in the Hellenistic period based on an analysis of ancient ideas and concepts of teachers, pupils and students. Paul’s education is discussed against this wide background and in view of his ancestry. Analyses of his letters (especially 1 Cor. 7 and 2 Cor. 10–13) prove Paul had great compositional skills, so it must be assumed that he had literary and rhetorical training."

Philo on Sarah

An article from 2004 I noticed recently is this dealing with Philo's exposition of Sarah:Maren R. Niehoff,
'Mother and Maiden, Sister and Spouse: Sarah in Philonic Midrash,'
Harvard Theological Review 97 (2004): 413-444

Ancient Texts for New Testament Studies

Professor Craig A. Evans has updated , and changed the title, of his former book Noncanonical Writings and New Testament Interpretation (1992), now issued asAncient Texts for New Testament Studies: A Guide to the Background Literature (Hendrickson Press, Peabody, Ma, 2005). 528 pp. The book deals with the great amount of relevant literature as the Old Testament apocrypha, the Old Testament pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, assorted ancient translations of the Old Testament and the Targum paraphrases, Philo and Josephus, Rabbinic texts, the New Testament pseudepigrapha, the early church fathers, various gnostic writings, and more.

Philo is dealt with as Philo (p. 168f); Philo and the New Testament (p. 170f); and General bibliography for Philo (p. 172).