m this contact occurs through the instrumentality
of certain powers,(25) which in part correspond to the Greek Logoi, and
which in his poetic language are also represented as angels.(26) Philo
says in plain terms that the eternal Logoi, that is the Platonic ideas,
are commonly called angels.

We see by this in how misty an atmosphere Philo lived and wrote, and we
may be certain that he was not the only one who in this manner blended the
Jewish religion with Greek philosophy. In the Samaritan theology also, in
Onkelos and Jonathan, traces of the Logos idea are to be found.(27) If we
now observe in the Fourth Gospel, somewhere in the first half of the
second century, this same amalgamation of Christian doctrine with Platonic
philosophy, only in a much clearer manner, we can scarcely doubt from what
source the ideas of the Logos as the only begotten Son of God, and of the
divine wisdom, originally flowed. Christian theologians are more inclined
to find the first germs of these Christian dogmas in the Old Testament,
and it is not to be denied that in the minds of the authors of some of the
books of the Old Testament analogous ideas struggle for expression. But
they are always tinctured with mythology, and among the prophets and
philosophers of the Old Testament there is absolutely no trace of a truly
philosophical conception of the Logos, such as confronts us as a result of
centuries of thought among the Platonists and Neo-Platonists, the Stoics
and Neo-Stoics. We look in vain in Palestine for a word like Logos, for a
conception of the Cosmos as the expression of a rationally thinking mind,
especially for the Logoi as the species of the Logos, as the primeval
thoughts and types of the universe. It is difficult to understand why
theologians should have so strenuously endeavoured to seek the germs of
the Logos doctrine among the Jews rather than the Greeks, as if it was of
any moment on which soil the truth had grown, and as if for purely
speculative truths, the Greek soil had not been ploughed far deeper and
cultivated more thoroughly than the Jewish. That Philo found employment
for Platonic ideas, and especially for the Stoic Logos, nay, even for the
Logoi, in his own house, and that other philosophers went so far as to
declare the fundamental truths of Greek philosophy to have been borrowed
from the Old Testament, is well known; but modern researches have rendered
such ideas impossible. The correspondences to the Greek Logos