Philo

Who blindly and for years reposed his whole trust in one whose sole aim was to rob him, not only of his little competence, but of his character as a man, who suffered one near and dear to him to starve, literally starve to death, and then be buried at the very moment that himself and his were luxuriating on the very money for which that man had bartered health and almost life itself.

Was it not very singular? I have wondered time and again how such things could be, and intensely so when he has been revealing to me some of the loftier mysteries of the order, when talking of Apollonius of Tyana, the Platonists, the elder Pythagoreans, of the Sylphs, Salamanders, and Glendoveres, of Cardan, of Jung Se-so, and the Kabbalistic light, of Hermes Trismegistus, and the Smaragdine Tables, of sorcery and magic, white and black, of the labyrinth and divine policy, of the god and the republic of gods, of the truths and absurdities of the gold-seeking Hermeticists and pseudo-Rosicrucians, of Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Caprian, Lactantius, and the Alexandrian Clement, of Origen and Macrobius, Josephus and Philo, of Enoch and the pre-Adamite races, of Nambuc and Cecus, Celus, Jamblichus, Plotinus and Porphyrius, Paracelsus, and over seven hundred other mystical authors.

Said he to me one day, Do you remember laughing at me when I first began to talk about the Rosicrucians, and you asserted that, if such a fraternity existed, it must be composed either of knaves or fools, laughing heartily when informed that the order ramified extensively on both sides of the grave? And on the other shore of time was known in its lower degrees as the Royal Order of the Foley, and powering infinitely beyond and above that was the Great Order of the Neridi, and that whoever, actuated by proper motives, joined the fraternity on this side of the grave, was not only assured of protection and a vast amount of essential knowledge imparted to him here, but also of sharing a lot on the farther side of life, compared to which all other destinies were insignificant and crude.

I repeat this assertion now.

The latter created a sensation, and then disappeared, only occasionally jingling their bells to let the world know that the fools were not all defunct, while the true brotherhood went on, and still goes on, quietly performing its mission.

Every student of history is, or ought to be, aware that the pretended adepts in past times laid claim to enormous amounts of the most wonderful knowledge, but when put to the proof, invariably failed to substantiate their claims.

Such were the men who sought, and in some instances pretended to have succeeded, in accomplishing the composition of the Philosopher's Stone and the Great Elixir.

Vaughan, in his Hours with the Mystics, laughs at the idea that there ever was really such a society as that of the Brethren of the Rosy Cross, and alleges that they were but the Mrs. Harris of certain romancers of the past two centuries.

Because the number four is solid and square, therefore it denotes the solidity and perfection of the gospel.

Whence Philo says, the number four first shows the nature of a solid, for a point is reckoned in unity, a line by duality.

When breadth is added, superfluities pertain to the number three.

For a surface to become a solid body, it lacks one thing.

So we actually didn't really know about someone who may have been one of Rambam's inspirational writers, because it got taken out of the Jewish tradition by the Christians.

The other person, of course, was Philo, whose writings were adopted by Christianity, lost to Judaism completely.

And then they only started to come back Much, much, much later.

This idea is quite common in Jewish history.

The concept has a history, we can trace it back at least to the pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus, who was possibly the first one to use logos to denote this underlying cosmic principle, which we're kind of interested in.

It'll appear in Plato and in Aristotle, have an important role in thinkers like Philo, that middle Platonist philosopher who's roughly contemporary with the apostle Paul.

However, for our purposes, we're gonna focus on the Stoics.

who by most accounts had become one of the central schools of thought in the first century, and in whose philosophical system the concept of logos played a central role.

But either way, the basic story existed before Josephus.

Now Philo of Alexandria, who also wrote before Josephus, says that Moses received an exceptional education in subjects such as mathematics, geometry, music, philosophy, hieroglyphics, and astronomy.

Now, this broadly agrees with what Acts chapter 7, verse 22 says.

And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was mighty in word and deed.

Now, a word about Pilate, Pontius Pilate, before we go further.

The historical record we have of him from sources outside the New Testament, so Tacitus, Josephus, Philo of Alexandria, all of that, it paints a not very flattering picture.

He had brought military standards bearing the image of the emperor into Jerusalem and had only backed down when his Jewish subjects threatened to die in protest.

He had taken money from the temple treasury to build an aqueduct and had crushed the resulting demonstration with violence.