Did Philo write the De Aeternitate Mundi?

From time to time the authorship question of Aet. comes up in discussions and articles related to Philo's writings. There seems to be a kind of consensus among Philo scholars who have studied the writing that although ambivalent, the treatise is most probably Philonic. Particularly in the introduction (par. 1-20) and in between the arguments presented does the Philonic voice express itself. The arguments may be compiled by Philo and cannot themselves be taken as viewpoints of Philo since they often contradict our knowledge of him from other writings, particularly of course De opificio Mundi, where Philo follows Plato and his Timaeus (cf. Runia 1986). Most of the treatise would then not be Philonic in any case, only the arrangement and the introduction and even there several expression must be taken as written in quotation marks, for instance the very suspicious expression horatos theos "visible God" (Aet. 10 and 20).

In 1987 the Norwegian scolar Roald Skarsten wrote a dissertation in Norwegian contradicting the consensus at the time. He concludes that Aet. could not have beeen written by Philo. The dissertation was never translated to other languages and has for that reason remained unknown outside Scandinavia.

I have now written a summary of the results of the dissertation in English, a summary that has also been read and approved by Prof. Skarsten.

You can find the summary on our Norwegian Philo Concordance Project Site.