The autorship of De Aeternitate Mundi

My co-blogger Kåre Fuglseth was a participant at a conference in Denmark a couple of years ago, and the papers from this conference have now been published in a nice volume:
David Brakke, Anders-Christian Jacobsen & Jörg Ulrich (eds.), Beyond Reception. Mutual Influences between Antique Religion, Judaism, and Early Christianity (Peter Lang, 2006),

Two of the papers, now articles, dealt explicitly with Philo, and are to be found in this volume as

Maren Niehoff, ‘Philo’s Contribution to Contemporary Alexandrian Metaphysics,’ pp. 35-56,

and

Kåre S. Fuglseth, ‘The Reception of Aristotelian Features in Philo and the Authorship Problem of Philo’s De Aeternitate Mundi,’ pp. 57-67.
The first of these two papers, the one by Maren Niehoff, is a critical examination of what appears to be an Aristotelian, non-Jewish feature in De Aeternitate Mundi, namely the indestructibility of the world. Niehoff here tries to locate Philo’s presentation in the philosophical traditions at the time, and thus deals with the influence of the Romans on Philo. The study of Niehoff lends support to the idea that Philo is a Platonist standing midway between Platonism and Neo-Platonism, perhaps a kind of Middle-Platonist.

Fuglseth’s paper is in fact a response to Niehoff’s contribution. Arguing that in the Philonic treatise here dealt with there are many statements that are clearly non-Philonic, Fuglseth wants to review the question of authorship. According to Fuglseth, “substantial divergences between De Aeternitate Mundi and other Philonic writings argue in favour of either a non-Philonic origin or that he is paraphrasing and/or quoting other authors.” In the rest of his article, he to a large extent presents some of the main problems of a Philonic authorship as set forth in a Norwegian phd dissertation, written in Norwegian, by Roald Skarsten.

This dissertation has been presented earlier on this blog both by me and Fuglseth, and Fuglseth has also a brief presentation of the main arguments on his own webpage; hence interested readers may read more on the links provided here.

Fuglseths own conclusion runs thus in this article : “If we accept the stylistic and substantial arguments of Skarsten, and I believe that we should; and conclude that the author of De Aeternitate Mundi and De Opificio Mundi cann be the same person, it is then necessary for us to find another way of reading the De Aeternitate Mundi. We must concede that it is not a Philonic compilation, but a work of an unknown editor who gathered the ancient arguments of antique metaphysics in order to support his own agenda. Then we can study the writing along the lines that Niehoff presents, as a very interesting theological blend, typical for the Hellenistic period and Middle Platonism, but not as a Philonic one.”