The Chaldean Magi

Philo of Alexandria

One of the most important exponents of Middle Platonism was the Greek-speaking Jewish philosopher of the first century AD, Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BC – c. 50 AD), also called Philo Judaeus, the greatest representative of Hellenistic Judaism. Although a devout Jew, Philo attempted to rationalize Judaism with his version of Platonic philosophy. The Bible, to Philo, was compatible with Platonic philosophy, for according to him, perhaps in reference to the legends reported by Iamblichus or Artapanus, Plato was a follower of Pythagoras, and Pythagoras had been a follower of Moses.

The most important innovation of Middle Platonism, according to John Dillon, was Philo’s placing of a transcendent God, equated with the God of the Old Testament, above the Monad and the Dyad. These notions, though, hold striking similarities with those regarded as the early developments of the Kabbalah, the Monad representing the Primordial Man, the Dyad the Shekhinah. In fact, Philo praised the Essenes, and in The Contemplative Life, he describes the rites and habits of the Therapeutae, and in support of his ideas, he often used the phrase “it is said,” presumably referring to Jewish traditions. For example, “it is said” that Moses was enchanted by the music of the spheres when he was receiving the revelation on Mt. Sinai. Ultimately, in the opinion of Moshe Idel, a leading modern scholar of the Kabbalah, “there seems to be extant evidence for the existence of Hebrew traditions that may mediate between Philo’s views, or other ancient Jewish traditions parallel to Philo, and the emergent Kabbalah.”

Clement of Alexandria (c. 150 – c. 215 AD), the great opponent of Gnosticism, drew heavily on Philo, and followed both Philo and Justin Martyr, in claiming that the Greek philosophers plagiarized their teaching from Moses. The trinity was adopted into Christianity through the philosophy of Philo of Alexandria, whose formulation of the Logos, or the “Word,” as an intermediary between God and creation, equated with Mithras, helped to lay the groundwork for Neoplatonism, Gnosticism as well as the philosophical framework of the early Christian Fathers.

See David Livingstone, Ordo ab Chao, Volume One, Chapter 3: The Hellenistic Age, and Chapter 3: The Book of Revelation.

De Abrahamo

68-71:

The Chaldeans especially cultivated astronomy and ascribed everything to the movements of the stars, assumed that cosmic phenomena are regulated by forces contained in numbers and mathematical proportions.

68-71:

The Chaldeans appear beyond all other men to have devoted themselves to the study of astronomy and of genealogies; adapting things on earth to things sublime, and also adapting things of heaven to things on earth, and like people who, availing themselves of the principles of music, exhibit a most perfect symphony as existing in the universe by the common union and sympathy of the parts for another, which through separated as to place, are not disunited in regard of kindred. These men, then, imagined that this world which we behold was the only world in the existing universe, and was either God himself, or else that it contained within itself God, that is, the soul of the universe. Then, having erected fate and necessity into gods, they filled human life with excessive impiety, teaching men that with the exception of those things which are apparent there is no other cause whatever of anything, but that it is the periodical revolutions of the sun, and moon, and other stars, which distribute good and evil to all existing beings.