He believed that the Bible contained different levels of meaning in order to make the Scriptures relevant to different kinds of people, cultures, and periods of time. One of its first leaders was Clement of Alexandria (a.d. The basics of Philo’s approach to interpretation were continued in the Christian School of Interpretation, which developed in this same city. the text could be adapted (allegorized) to his philosophical world view (Grant and Tracy 1984, 53) B. the text contained any perceived historical problemsĤ. the text contained any perceived inconsistenciesģ. the text spoke of that which seemed to be unworthy of God (physicalness of God)Ģ. His basic approach was to allegorize the text if:ġ. God reveals Himself to the chosen people of Israel but He revealed Himself in no radically different way from the way in which He reveals Himself to the Greek” (Grant and Tracy 1984, 53-54). “In his mind many of the insights of Judaism, properly understood, do not differ from the highest insights of Greek philosophy. To do this he had to totally remove the Old Testament from its historical context. The rabbis were interested in applying the Mosaic Law to daily life, while Philo wanted to reinterrpet the history of Israel in light of his Platonic world view. Philo, although using some of the same idiosyncrasies of grammar and spelling, found hidden meanings in the text as it related to Platonism. The rabbis’ interpretation is characterized by a focus on “how to,” especially in relation to the Law of Moses. Therefore, every aspect of the text had meaning-every sentence, clause, word, letter, and even the smallest embellishment or idiosyncrasy of the text. He believed God uniquely spoke through the Hebrew Scripture and the Greek philosophers, especially Plato. Philo agreed with the rabbis that the Old Testament was given by God. He, being a Jew of the Diaspora, was not very influential among the rabbis, but had a great impact among the Hellenistic intellectuals of Alexandria, which was the seat of learning in that day.
The Alexandrian Method was an adaptation of the method of Philo, a Jewish interpreter who lived from 20 b.c. in reaction to the Allegorical Method, which had developed several hundred years earlier in Alexandria, Egypt. The most consistent use of the method of Bible study known as the Historical-Grammatical-Lexical Method (in this Textbook called the Contextual/Textual method) began in Antioch, Syria, in the third century a.d.
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