Q.—John 1 Is it true that the language of some scriptures is drawn from contemporaneous philosophy as (a) in the opening of the fourth Gospel from Philo the Alexandrian Jew, especially as to the Logos? (b) that moral terms of the Stoics reappear in Paul's Epistles? (c) that early Gnostic expressions were derived from the apostle's Epistle to the Colossians? W. T.
A.—(a) The truth is that God in His grace, who knew the bewilderment of man's mind, not dissipated but deepened by philosophy and the vile half-breed of the Gnostics, either anticipated or answered these unbelieving reveries by the revelation of the truth. Philo was born somewhat before the apostle John, and died long before him, certainly in part a contemporary, yet speaking of his advanced age about A.D. 40. He had no thought of Christ save as a conqueror of the nations and a restorer of Israel to the highest power, honor and enjoyment on earth, and even to the great relief of the brute creation. He believed in the inspiration of the O.T., which he allegorized everywhere excessively to suit or teach Platonism, without denying the law or the history. Indeed he held that the law of Moses would rule forever. But he did not believe that the Lord Jesus was the Son of God or even the Christ. Hence the Gospel of John reveals the Logos in the strongest contrast with all Philo's vaporings which deny the truth of both God and man.
(b) It is not otherwise with the use of moral terms, in great vogue among the Stoics, the proudest and sternest of all heathen philosophers. To live according to nature was their first principle, and a direct ethical lie; because it is evil through sin since the fall, which they wholly disdained. None more radically opposed to man's ruin or to God's grace. The terms if the same have a totally different source and sense in Paul's usage.
(c) The same principle applies to the Gnostical expressions. The Pleroma, the Ӕons, and the Demiurgus, &c. of scripture uproot and destroy this pretentious school of fantastical error, a different Christianity which was not another. Christ true God and perfect man is the revelation of God, which sets aside the corrupt Gnostic, the self-complacent Stoic, and the dreaming Platonist. If inspiration employed their language, it was in pitiful condescension to impart the truth of God in Christ, which brings to naught their vain, self-righteous, and false ideas.
The Fathers of the second and third centuries were deeply infected with the Alexandrian philosophy which denied that the true God comes down to the earth, or that man's body ever goes to heaven: an error derived from the East. Christ refutes both absolutely in His own person. Justin Martyr, the Hermas of the second century, Clemens Alex., and Origen were all heterodox more or less.