La Rivelazione in Filone di Alessandria

Last September there was a conference in Bologne, Italy, on La Rivelazione in Filone di Alessandria: Natura, Legge, Storia ('The Revelation in Philo of Alexandria; Nature, Law, History'), and Francesca Calabi has been so kind as to inform me about the program. She also tells me that the lectures most probably will be published this year by an Italian publisher. The editors are Angela Mazzanti and F. Calabi.

Though I am not strong in reading Italian, I look forward to the publication, hoping that it also will contain summaries in English of each contribution. I know there are several Italian scholars working on Philo too, hence this will surely be a worthy contribution from Italy.

I provide a list of the topics at this conference below, You will probably understand the Italian. I tried to use the BabelFish but it didn't work out too well.) Nevertheless, I presume most of you can get an impression of what to look for when the publication is out.

Lunedì 29 settembre
Lucio Troiani , Università di Pavia; Natura e storia politica in Filone.

Clara Kraus Reggiani, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”; La presenza di Dio nella storia secondo Filone di Alessandria.

Mauro Pesce, Università di Bologna; Filone e il sacrificio.

Roberto Radice, Università Cattolica di Milano; Considerazioni sulle origini greche dell’allegoria filoniana.

Giulia Sfameni Gasparro, Università di Messina; Mosé e Balaam, propheteia e mantiké. Modalità e segni della rivelazione nel De vita Mosis.

Angela Maria Mazzanti, Università di Bologna; Creazione dell’uomo e rivelazione in Filone di Alessandria

Francesca Alesse, C.N.R. Istituto per il Lessico Intellettuale Europeo e Storia delle Idee, Roma; Il luogo del nous. Alcuni aspetti dell’antropologia di Filone Alessandrino.

Pierluigi Pavone, Pavia; Tò pathetón, materia preesistente o intero creato?

Martedì 30 settembre
Francesca Calabi, Università di Pavia, Ordine della città e ordine del mondo nel De decalogo.

Cristina Termini, Pontificia Università Urbaniana, Roma; Dal Sinai alla creazione: il rapporto tra legge naturale e legge rivelata in Filone di Alessandria.

Paola Graffigna, Università di Genova; Modelli di vita felice. Felicità e stabilità in Filone.

Antonio Cacciari, Università di Bologna; Presenze filoniane nelle Omelie su Numeri di Origene

Sara Mancini Lombardi, Università di Bologna; La versione armena di Legum allegoriae: osservazioni su alcune particolarità lessicali

Paola Pontani, Università Cattolica di Milano; La traduzione armena del De Abrahamo e i suoi rapporti con il testo greco (The Armenian translation of De Abrahamo and its relationships with the Greek text).

Biblical Hermeneutics,- and some Philo articles

Those of you who read Mark Goodacre's NTGateway Weblog(who doesn't?), will have observed his reference to a new new website focusing on Biblical Hermeneutics. Biblical hermeneutics is important also for philonic studies. What I miss on this site, however, is a somewhat greater focus on Jewish hermeneutics related to the Hebrew Scriptures. As it is now, if focuses mainly on hermeneutics from a Christian or more general perspective.

The owner of the site, Holger Szesnat, has also published some articles on Philo of Alexandria, and made them available on the Internett:
Philo and Female Homoeroticism: Philo's Use of GYNANDROS and Recent Work on Tribades. Journal for the Study of Judaism 30 (1999) 140-147.

'Pretty Boys' in Philo's De Vita Contemplativa. Studia Philonica Annual 10 (1998) 87-107. (a zip file containing scanned pictures of the article).

Philo and the Presence of the Therapeutrides at Lake Mareotis. Neotestamentica 32 (1998) 191-201 (This page contains links to scanned images of the article. You may download these files for your personal use only. The images are saved in the form of six GIF files, compressed into a ZIP file).

Philo and Arithmology

Philo's use and understanding of the role of numbers are one of the more strange features in Philo's works. It is especially evident in De Opificio that he was interested in the symbolic value and role of various numbers, not at least the number 7.

Robert Kraft, University of Pennsylvania, has most recently mad available a paper on Philo's Treatment of the Number Seven in On Creation, a paper originally delivered for the SBL Philo Group, November 1996 (New Orleans). Here he has a confession that many others may subscribe to: It is tempting to say that the author of On Creation was inebrieated with thoughts of numbers in various connections and relationships. Whether and to what extent he might have been unusual for his time and training is one aspect of the problem. That he is usually perceived as unusual in this regard from our modern perspectives is obvious in the literature. My own interest in these matters is closely related to the fact that when I was first learning about the ancient Pythagoreans and their interpretations of reality in terms of number, I never could force myself, in scholarly empathy, into their world. Plato was difficult enough in his otherness. Now that I have been studying these issues for several decades, I find myself still largely an outsider. And this is itself seductive Philo's use of arithmology is interesting also because he refers to an other work in which he porbably dealt more extencively with arithmology, but this is lost to us.

Kraft has also made available another work on Philo's arithmology, namely Horst Moehring, "Arithmology as an Exegetical Tool in the Writings of Philo of Alexandria," pp. 191-227 in SBL Seminar Papers 1978/1.
In Kraft's own article he discusses the article of Moehring and the older work of Karl Staehle, Die Zahlenmystik bei Philon von Alexandreia (a 1929 Tuebingen dissertation published by Teubner in 1931).

I will include both this work of Kraft and the article of Moehring in my next update of my Philonic Resource Pages. But just to wet your appetite a little more, I'll quote the following from Kraft's conclusion: If I am forced to draw some tentative conclusions from all this, my feeling is that Op is a product of confident informed and enthusiastic youth, from an author who has not yet felt the sting of criticisms from his associates and others from whom he expected support. His discourse on seven is a draft of what he also included in On Numbers around the same time, but never introduced in such a full sampling in subsequent writings. If LA is based directly on that material, it is a faint and extensively reworked echo. It is easier for me to believe that Op is an improved version of what appears in LA, or perhaps simply an alternate version. I can also understand LA as a faint and toned down echo of the more inclusive and sophisticated tradition by an author who had lost or laid aside some of the boldness or brashness he once exhibited. Alternatively, but with less enthusiasm, I might resort to a theory of early and later editions of Op to explain how LA might reflect such a weak form of the "seven" tradition, being based on the early edition that was considerably strengthened later, after On Numbers had been completed. There are many paths; but they are all conjecture.

Porn attack?

I apologize to all who were attacked by some aggressive porn-related pop-up window while accessing my Resource Pages for Biblical Studies. I have no idea of how this function was linked to my page, but it has now been removed, and I do hope it will never appear anymore on any of my pages. Arrrrrgh....

Philo and the New Testament

I would like to write a few words about a recent publication of mine, a kind of spin-off result from the Norwegian Philo Concordance Project.

It is a comparison of all Greek words in Philo and the New Testament. I have written a report on the comparison in the Festschrift to Peder Borgen last year Neotestamentica et Philonica. I followed up on this study by publishing a list of common words in Philo and the New Testament on Mellen Press A Comparison of Greek Words in Philo and the New Testament.
Other scholars have earlier studied hapax legomena in the two corpora, but today, with advanced personal computers, more thorough studies are made possible and affordable.

The statistical comparison shows great similarities particularly between John and Philo and Hebrews and Philo. This is not a big surprise, of course, but nevertheless - now it is also statistically demonstrated. Further comparisons in these tracks are naturally possible; the next step would perhaps be to include LXX.

Philo and the Law

Philo's view on the Law is important as a topic within the Philonic symbolic universe per se, but it is also interesting to see how his views on the Law are considered in the running debate on Paul and the Law in light of "the new perspective".
The announcement today of a review in the Review of Biblical Literature of the book of A. Andrew Das, Paul, the Law and the Covenant (Peabody, Mass.,Hendrickson, 2001), reminds me of these issues again. Das has a section on Philo in his book; unfortunately I don't have the book in my office, but as far as I remember, he does not find Philo to quite support the view of the Law in "the new perspective on Paul".
However, this is a complex matter. As the reviewer above also points out, we have a much more comprehensive account on the Law in various sectors of Judaism in the book edited by D. A. Carson , Peter T. O'Brien , Mark Seifrid , Peter T. OBrien, Justification and Variegated Nomism: I. The Complexities of Second Temple Judaism ([Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, 2. Reihe, 140. Herausgegeben von Jorg Frey, Martin Hengel, Otfried Hosius] Edited by D. A. Carson, Peter T. O'Brien, & Mark A. Seifrid. Tubingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck; Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001. Pp. 619. Paper, $44.99.) . This anthology has a more comprehensive chapter on Philo written by David M. Hay. Readers interested in this topic should consult this contribution too. There are several reviews of this book out on the Internett; you may read one here or here.

Addenda half an hour later...
I just found, to my surprise, that Hendrickson has a sample chapter out of Das' book on Paul, the Law and the Covenant, and this is the chapter that contains the section on Philo! You can access that chapter here. You will find the section on Philo on pp. 23-27. Great! Tolle lege! :-)

PACS

Finally, at last,--... but today I received from Brill the two volumes published in the Philo of Alexandria Commentary series. That will make up my reading for some days.... No blogging tomorrow; it's your turn, Kåre! :)

I ordered these volumes at the Brill booth at the SBL Annual Meeting last november in Atlanta; they had a good offer, but now I had almost come to the conclusion that my order had disappeared or been forgotten. Good! For those of you who don't know these volumes; the first commentary published was written by David T. Runia, On the Creation of the Cosmos according to Moses (De Opificio) (2001), and the second by Pieter van der Horst, Philo's Flaccus The First Pogrom (2003). Have a look at them, and consider your money...

Article on the Thereapeutae (cont.)

It seems to me that Harvard Theological Review has limited the availability of the articles through LookSmart to comprise only the articles of 2001. Hence the article referred to below, written by Joan E. Taylor, Philip R. Davies is no longer available on the web.