Abstract
The latest Studia Philonica Annual is once again richly packed with fine articles, followed by a meaty annotated bibliography for 2008, a provisional bibliography for 2009-2011, and a wide-ranging set of book reviews.
Of the four main articles, three emphasise Philo’s Roman connections. Maren R. Niehoff begins with ‘Philo’s Exposition in a Roman Context’, in which she argues that Philo’s three year stay in Rome (38-41 AD) was ‘a turning point in his career, not only as a leader of the Jewish community, but also as a writer and thinker’. She proposes that the Exposition and the Lives of Moses and Joseph mark a shift from his earlier concern with allegorical interpretation of scripture for Alexandrian Jews to a new interest in apologetic historiography for a small Roman audience of personal acquaintances more familiar with Stoicism than with Scripture. The second piece is contributed by John T. Conway, ‘Philo’s “Death of the Soul”: Is This Only a Metaphor?’ His answer is ‘Not always’, for although it sometimes has metaphorical meaning, Philo also draws on hellenistic ontology to envisage the possibility of metempsychosis of a corrupt human soul into that of a beast, which is a kind of death. The third article by Paul Robertson is modestly entitled, ‘Toward an Understanding of Philo’s and Cicero’s Treatment of Sacrifice’. Robertson analyses first why and how Philo wrote about sacrifice, and what significance the various material elements of the sacrificial cult had for him. He then offers a much shorter discussion of Cicero’s attitude to sacrifice and concludes with a comparison between the two. The last article by Ilaria L. E. Ramelli provides fascinating insight into the longer tradition of a relationship between Alexandria and Rome. Her title is ‘The Birth of the Rome-Alexandria Connection: The Early Sources on Mark and Philo, and the Petrine Tradition’. She argues that there was probably an Alexandrian Petrine tradition that traced the origin of Alexandrian Christianity to the gospel of Mark; it is first attested in Clement’s Hypotyposeis, known from Eusebius. Philo has a significant place in the story, for not only was he thought to have met Peter in Rome, and his Therapeutae were interpreted as Alexandrian Christians converted by Mark, but also his association with the Christian Alexandrian tradition was so strong that Eusebius and Jerome assimilated him to Origen in their presentation of the two figures. This expansive coda to the articles in this year’s Annual deserves to be widely read by those interested in early Christianity, as well as in her Jewish elder sister.