How Christianity Was Sold to the Masses

A History of Mankind (253)

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There was a key stumbling block for Graeco-Roman acceptance of monotheism, of a new religion of whatever kind that might imbue Classical civilization with enough vigor to overcome internal and external challenges: that cynicism and stoicism made it all but impossible to reconcile the transcendence of God, as many understood it, with a human-like deity who created and ruled the material universe, a blunt, primitive overseer like that portrayed, for example, in the Hebrew Bible.

Plato had portrayed the creation of the world through a Craftsman or Demiurge who shaped the material world, which doesn't quite rise to the level of an all-powerful god¹. So it made perfect sense that it was a Platonist thinker – Philo of Alexandria, a prominent member of the very active Jewish community there – who made the first meaningful stab at reconciling the Semitic God of the Desert with the technocratic master craftsman of the universe.

Philo knew how to handle tricky encounters – in 38, he was a member of an Alexandrian Jewish embassy to Caligula in Rome and survived to tell the tale – and he was ingenious enough to base his own philosophy around the identification of divine knowledge², the Platonic archetype of all things, with angelic appearances.