Paul and Philo (within Judaism) within paganism

It looks like the next phase in the study of Paul, after the New Perspective on Paul and Paul within Judaism, will be Paul (within Judaism) within paganism. See, for example, Paul Within Paganism: Restoring the Mediterranean Context to the Apostle, edited by Chantziantoniou, Fredriksen, and Young (2025), which presents “a florilegium of essays tracing the various ways in which Paul’s Jewish religious program is native to the ancient Mediterranean” (xi).1 The British New Testament Society conference this year will have a session on the book and related themes, to which I will be contributing.

I doubt the embrace of Paul’s pagan context will be as productive or transformative a methodology as its predecessors, but it makes sense. My study of the Christ encomium in Philippians 2:6-11 fits the paradigm, and I don’t think we can understand Romans properly without situating the Jewish Paul firmly in an idolatrous Greek world.

The literature of Hellenistic Judaism already exposes the complexities of the interface between Judaism and paganism. I came across a passage in Philo recently that I think reinforces my view that in Romans 1:18-25 Paul differentiates between common Greek polytheistic religious practice and the more “enlightened” outlook of the philosophers.

It also lends support to my argument that the mission of the church is not so much to save people as to be a priestly-prophetic presence that has needed to be saved—and perhaps needs to be saved again in our own era.

Israel and the Greeks

In On the Special Laws 2, Philo explains what happens on the second day of the Passover festival. A sheaf—a bundle of grain stalks—is brought to the altar as first fruits both of the land allotted to Israel and of the whole earth. It is, therefore, a particular offering for the nation but also a common (koinēn) offering for all humanity (162). The rationale is that the nation of the Jews has the same relation to the whole administered world (oikoumenēn) as the priest has to the city (163).

An excellent thought.

Elsewhere Philo says that the marriage of Abraham and Sarah produced “not a small number of sons or daughters but an entire nation…, which to me seems to have been allotted priesthood and prophecy on behalf of the whole race of humans” (Abr. 98*). I’ll come back to the practical distinction between priesthood and prophecy in a moment.

Philo, as was his wont, rationalises the matter. The Law of Moses imposes order on the Jews in the same way that reason governs the “irrational senses,” though “weighty and forcible rebukes” and the threat of punishment may be required. Holiness must sometimes be coerced.

The Jews, then, insofar as they are guided and disciplined by the Law, may be considered a priesthood for the nations—even a high priesthood “in the judgment of truth” (164).

In what respect are they judges of truth? In respect of belief in the one God who made all things.

So there we have Philo (within Judaism) within paganism.

In the cities of the oikoumenē, the Alexandrian philosopher notes, a multitude of gods is honoured by ordinary, uneducated people, “for whom the search for truth is impractical and beyond their capability of investigation.”

There are those among Greeks and barbarians who are devoted to mathematics and philosophy, who desire to learn about the “highest Father of both gods and humans and the Maker of the entire cosmos,” whose nature is “invisible and unfathomable not only to sight but also to perception.”

But on the whole, the Greeks “slipped in the most essential matter,” and so it falls to the Jews to correct the errors of their neighbours by looking beyond created things, which are “generate and corruptible in nature,” and choosing to serve only what is “ungenerate and eternal” (166).

A key reason why this is the better course is that Jewish worship of the creator is older than Greek worship of created things.

Philo, therefore, is amazed that the Jews are sometimes accused of “misanthropy” (apanthrōpian) or anti-social behaviour when they offer prayers and first fruits for all humanity and “serve the God who really exists, both on behalf of themselves and of others who have run from the acts of worship which they should have rendered” (167*).

So there are two lessons that I want to draw from this—first, concerning the purpose of the church; secondly, concerning Greek knowledge of God.

The church as priesthood and prophetic community

The idea that Israel was a priesthood for the inhabited or administered world comes from Exodus 19:6:

Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

After the conversion of the nations of the empire in the fourth century, the churches functioned in principle as embedded priestly communities, displacing the old pagan priesthoods. But the distinction Philo makes in the passage from On the Life of Abraham, between priesthood and prophecy is important, even if he does not develop it in this way.

The task or mission of the people of God in settled times is to be an effective priesthood. In unsettled times, however, the priesthood assumes a prophetic function. Its existence, its life and speech, embody both judgment on the current disorder and the prospect of a new future.

So the church as it appears in the New Testament, in the unsettled, transitional, and at times deeply traumatic period between the collapse of second temple Judaism and the conversion of the Greek-Roman world, is more a prophetic than a priestly community. Its purpose is eschatological—to bear faithful witness to the future rule of Christ over the nations.

That’s the first point. Now those knowledgeable Greeks….

Greek knowledge of God

Greek polytheism is a Greek error. Philo does not attempt to trace it back to an original sin in the garden of Eden. Indeed, he appears to regard it as a “fall” or “slippage” or deviation from the truth more recent than the formation of Israel as a covenant people.

Paul’s critique of Greek idolatry in Romans 1:18-32 follows similar lines. When he says “Greek,” he means Greek.

The error is not the original sin of the first couple; it is quite specifically the exchange of the “glory of the imperishable God for the likeness of an image of a perishable person and of birds and four-footed animals and reptiles” (Rom. 1:3). The key words are “imperishable” and “perishable”: Paul is troubled by the materiality of Greek religious practice, just as Philo took issue with the Greeks’ short-sighted preoccupation with created things that are “generate and corruptible in nature.”

But at the same time, Philo lends support to my argument that in Romans 1:19-25 Paul differentiates between a Greek philosophical knowledge of God and the dominant religious culture.

The mathematicians and philosophers recognise that there is a supreme, transcendent deity, who is “invisible and unfathomable,” beyond both visual and mental perception.

Paul, likewise, acknowledges a strand of thought or wisdom among the ancient Greeks which, in the past at least, discerned in the created order the “everlasting power and deity” of the living God. There was knowledge of the true nature of God. But the Greeks, as a culture, chose not to pursue this insight but “slipped,” as Philo would say, and served the created thing rather than the creator (1:25).

Paul did not share Philo’s confidence, however, in the capacity of the Jews to fulfil the priestly function and correct the Greek error. In fact, it was worse than that. He believed that the God of Israel was no longer willing to put up with the impiety, lawlessness, and hypocrisy of his people.

Things were coming to a head. Yes, there would be wrath against the Greek—God had fixed a day when he would judge the oikoumenē by a man whom he had appointed (Acts 17:31). But for God to act righteously and impartially in this regard, he had first to hold his own people to account. Therefore, wrath against the Jew would precede wrath against the Greek (Rom. 2:5-11).

So Paul sees the need for a new “priesthood” to emerge from the wreckage of second temple Judaism, one which would be instructed and disciplined not by the Law but by the Spirit.

But the new historical era of Christ-honouring monotheism would be born out of tribulation and distress.

By identifying quite realistically and intimately with the crucified and risen Christ, the churches would be the agents of eschatological change: their consistent, embodied witness would lead the peoples of the Greek-Roman world to abandon their idols and serve instead the living God:

For not only has the word of the Lord sounded forth from you in Macedonia and Achaia, but your faith in God has gone forth everywhere, so that we need not say anything. For they themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come. (1 Thess. 1:8-10)

In this regard, the renewed people of God must endure as a prophetic and eschatological community before it may function as a messianic priesthood for the nations.

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  A “florilegium” is literally a “collection of flowers”—so an anthology (also meaning a “collection of flowers”) of literary extracts usually rather than of whole works such as essays.