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One important group of aristocrats who lived in the land of Israel-the Sadducees-rejected all notions of life after death, even though they had Hellenized. This would include many of the Hasmonean dynasty, the descendants of the Maccabees. They had no need of Platonic afterlives to justify their social positions because the Torah gave them hereditary control of the Temple. In fact, as we have seen, they seem to have some considerable Greek education too but they were more interested in the Stoic and Epicurean schools because they best fit the attitude of the received books of the Hebrew Bible.

The intellectuals who adopted a Platonic afterlife from Greek culture were those who made a living in Greek society and needed Greek intellectual credibility for their support. They were part of the client class, those who worked for the upper class rulers, or even sometimes themselves part of the Greco-Roman elite. This would include the Alexandrian Philo Judaeus, Josephus, several other Jewish philosophical writers and the Pharisees, or more exactly, the rabbis, as they gave up their sectarian status and became the ruling body in Jewish life. In doing so, they eventually synthesized the notion of an immortal soul with the notion of bodily resurrection. Christianity also provided another meeting point for the two ideas but they did not blend so easily in Christianity, leaving us with centuries of interesting attempts to synthesize them.

Philo Judaeus (ca 20 BCE-ca 50 CE)

IT IS HARD to say that Philo was typical of anyone but himself. His enormous wealth and power would suggest that he represented the cynosure of Jewish Hellenism, rather than a typical example of it. We also have more of his work than any other Hellenistic Jewish philosopher and perhaps more than any other philosopher, with the exception of Plato and Aristotle. His enormous literary corpus was unique in the Hellenistic Jewish world. He was also unique in his attempt to synthesize Greek with Hebrew thought. His apologetic technique is very sophisticated. He repeatedly maintains that the Hebrew Bible not only illustrates Greek philosophical views through allegory (as do the Iliad and Odyssey, according to the Greek commentators) but morally surpasses them. For Philo, Greek philosophers and the Hebrew Bible told the same philosophical truth. The Bible is a better and more direct expression of the truth; the Greeks actually imitated the “oracles” of Moses!

Philo was mostly an exegete, writing commentaries on the Biblical works. He rarely indulged in systematic philosophical exposition. So it is difficult to find an epitome of his ideas on any subject. A synthesis of his work must be gleaned from reading many different treatises in concert rather than reading any one philosophical tractate. We have to be satisfied with a brief characterization of his writing on the afterlife rather than an extensive discussion of it.

Philo was born to a very wealthy Alexandrian family, a couple of decades before Jesus. He was a contemporary of both Jesus and Paul, outliving Jesus but probably predeceasing Paul by a few years. Unlike Jesus and like Paul, Philo was born in a major center of Hellenistic culture. But Alexandria was a far greater and more culturally privileged city than Tarsus and Philo’s family was likely far richer than Paul’s (about whom we know nothing other than Luke’s often debated bibliographical summary), as Philo came from one of the wealthiest families in the city.

Strangely, for all his writing, we know little about Philo’s personal life. We do not know how his family became rich, though they were well diversified by Philo’s birth. As a wealthy boy, Philo presumably received private tutoring, presumably also a gymnasion education, that taught him the arts and sciences as well as physical education. Likely, he participated in Greek athletics, which were played naked. His writings give us a window into the wealthiest level of the Jewish aristocracy and the intellectual elite. He saw nothing in