Philo
About AD 50, some forty years before John wrote his gospel, Philo began to use a word that lumped all the knowledgeable things about God into a single package. That word was LOGOS. In this word was compressed all that the Jews and Greeks knew of the reasonings and manifestations of God. It was a useful term and people soon began to refer to the Logos rather than go into detail about the way God worked in human affairs. When Philo speaks of "the Divine Logos," his thought is predominately of the divine reason and not of the divine word.
Wisdom is described as "a stream from a river", and Philo, in a passage which comes near to the saying of the Johannine Christ, writes "The man who is capable of running swiftly, it bids not to draw breath but press forward to the most high divine Logos, who is the fountain of wisdom, in order that he may draw from the flowing stream and, instead of death, find eternal life as his prize."
Philo, who was familiar with the Old Testament only in its Greek translation decided to make it even more acceptable to Greek intellectuals by putting Greek clothing on Jewish revelation. But Philo did not know the Lord Jesus, and in Philo the Logos is surrounded with associations derived from the Platonic and Stoic philosophies.
Philo was a Jewish philosopher from Alexandria living from 25 BC - 50 AD and of a noble family of the sect of the Pharisees. While the Old Testament contained the philosophy of the Jews, these Alexandrian Jews had learned in Alexandria to admire greatly the philosophy of the Greeks. So great was their admiration that they soon conceived Plato to be in their Law and their Law in Plato. They argued that since the Old Testament was their revelation, all the best Greek philosophy must be in the Old Testament. At that time these Jews used Greek philosophy in interpreting the Old Testament and employed the allegorical method of interpretation. This eclectic tendency was brought to completion by Philo who was the most notable philosopher of this time.
