View source for Israel and Humanity - The testimony of Philo

CHAPTER SEVEN

UNIVERSAL CHARACTER OF THE LAW BY Judaism

I.

The testimony of Philo.

In everything we said earlier about the identity of divine and human laws, the universal character that Judaism assigns to the Act in the organization of humanity is already in a manner so striking that no one would deny the existence of this grand design, it just might be objected that either inconsistent or national prejudice, it shrinks when you move to the principle and because it lies at the point of becoming a purely Jewish .

Such a contradiction is unlikely and if we could give evidence, we would still have every reason to believe is simply the surface and does not reach the very bottom, the intimate nature of the doctrine. But there is no contradiction. The truth is that if the sublime heights to which we were raised in Judaism, the Torah encompasses all of creation, the whole being, God himself, it is inevitably circumscribed by becoming the law of the man, but without losing, even in this lower level, universality, since it extends to the most remote terminals that includes the notion of humanity. For if with respect to the creation, man's law is like the inside of the universe becomes conscious of itself, when it settles on the contrary the relations between species and individuals, who are the problem fundamental human law, it becomes revelation <ref> Page 433 </ref> the type and the specific law <ref> V. the philosophical-religious creed of the author, 1 <super> th </super> Vol. of teologia in fine. </Ref>. Such a definition clearly implies the idea that it is essentially human, it has no other goal than the formation of man and only his faithful observers are truly worthy of being called by that name, so that he who communicates itself bears the title of ideal man and divine.

The testimonies of biblical and rabbinic sources appear in droves, but Philo's words seem to have special importance after the Bible and some of the writings of Rabbis, they paint the attitude that Judaism took, even before the advent of Christianity, turning to the Gentiles, and therefore its purpose and its action on the conversion of the Gentiles. Compared to similar conceptions of Scripture and Doctors, they offer with each other and so that full compliance is impossible to see a clever tactic to attract the sympathy of the Gentiles, so have we selected to serve as an introduction to what we say about this capital issue. This is what Philo says in his Life of Moses, the Mosaic law specifically between those of the Gentiles: "Our law is very different. She urges everyone to behave as it should: the Barbarians and Greeks, inhabitants of the continent and islands of the East and West, those of Europe and of Asia in a word all the inhabited earth to the ends most distant. "

Philo was probably here for, not the law of Moses as a particular code of the Jews, but this universal religion that Judaism possesses and the Mosaic is itself a special appearance. Faithful to the doctrines that we find in Palestine, he believes that religion is the common heritage of mankind and therefore all are called to observe. In this sense he also repeated elsewhere also proclaimed that the Palestinian rabbis, that philosophy, teaching monotheism, taught Judaism. The doctors said in effect that "whoever rejects polytheism deserves the name of Jew" is still that "he who abjure idolatry had confessed the same time all the law" in <ref> Nissim Aboda Zara 357 <super> th </super > </ref> <ref> Page 434 </ref> The Alexandrian philosopher, who was the interpreter and the teaching of Rabbis, would later be echoed itself in the person of Tertullian, when he it says of Socrates and Plato being fair, they were <i>naturally  Christians</i>. 


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