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Chapters The Jewish Life ofthe Logos: Logos Theology in Pre- and Pararabbinic Judaism Erwin Goodenough has clearly articulated the problematic that gave rise to Logos theology in the first centuries ofthe Christian era: "The Logos then in all circles but the Stoic ... was a link of some kind which connected a transcendent Absolute with the world and humanity. The Logos came into general popularity because ofthe wide-spread desire to conceive of God as transcendent and yet immanent at the same time. The term Logos in philosophy was not usually used as the title of a unique attribute of God, but rather as the most important single name among many applicable to the effulgent Power of God which reasonably had shaped and now governs the world." 1 Goodenough does not sufficiently emphasize, however, how thoroughly first-century Judaism had absorbed (and even co-produced) these central "Middle Platonic" theological notions. We have seen in the last chapter how bound up with the Bible and old traditions of its interpretation the Christian Jewish Logos is. The idea that the Logos or Sophia (Wisdom, and other variants as well) is the site of God's presence in the world-indeed, the notion of God's Word or Wisdom as a mediator figure-was a very widespread one in the world of first- and even secondcentury Judaic thought." Rather than treating Logos theology as the specific product of"Christianity:' with Philo a sort of Christian avant la lettre,:' I wish to explore the evidence for Logos theology as a common element in Jewish, including Christian Jewish, religious imagination. As Dunn has recently written of Wisdom Christology, the close congener of Logos theology: "the usage is Jewish through and through."4A comparative study of Philo's Logos and the Memra of the Targum will make the life of the Logos in the Judaic religious world much more vivid. Jewish Life of the Logos 113 Philo's Logos, Targum's Memra: The Word in Non-Rabbinic Judaism Historian of dogma Basil Studer has claimed that "first it has to be fully acknowledged that the beginning of trinitarian reflection was made because ofthe Easter experience, understood in apocalyptic terms." I would suggest, in contrast , that the beginning of trinitarian reflection was in pre-Christian Jewish accounts of the second and visible God, variously, the Logos (Memra), Wisdom, or even perhaps the Son of God." These linkages have been discussed before but, it seems, have been out of fashion for several decades. "Memra is a blind alley in the study of the biblical background of John's logos doctrines;' writes C. K. Barrett ? echoing the views of many scholars," who similarly resist the idea that the Memra is indeed a hypostasis (independent divine entity, or even person), and not "but a means of speaking about God without using his name, and thus a means of avoiding the numerous anthropomorphisms of the Old Testament,"? It is hardly beside the point, then, to rehearse the evidence for precisely that claim that contemporary scholars have found so easy to dismiss out of hand. David Winston has argued that, although we can know very little of the philosophical context of Philo's writing, we can determine from the writings themselves that "Logos theology is the linchpin of Philo's religious thought" and "something his readers will immediately recognize without any further explanation ."l0 The consequences of this point are formidable. Philo was clearly writing for an audience of Jews devoted to the Bible. If for these Logos theology was a commonplace (which is not to say that there were not enormous variations in detail), the implication is that this way of thinking about God was a vital inheritance of at least Alexandrian Jewish thought. It becomes apparent, therefore, that for one branch of pre-Christian Judaism there was nothing strange about a doctrine of a deuteros theos, a "second" God (although, to be sure, Philo uses this "shocking" term only once), and nothing in that doctrine that precluded monotheism.!' Moreover, Darrell Hannah has emphasized that "neither in Platonism , Stoicism nor Aristotelian thought do we find the kind of significance that the concept has for Philo, nor the range of meanings that he gives to the term A6yo~;' and, therefore, that "he appears to be dependent upon a tradition in Alexandrian Judaism which was attributing a certain independence to God's word."12 He sees the sources of that tradition as in part growing out of the Israelite Prophets themselves, at least...

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