Philo of Alexandria was a Jewish commentator on the Torah. …
Philo of Alexandria was a Jewish commentator on the Torah. He was the first philosopher to combine his ideas with traditional religion and the first to use the word logos in the Biblical sense, as an attribute of God rather than the reason of a philosopher. He is the first true Platonist after Plato, by my way of understanding him because he reproduces the Platonic double talk. His commentaries on the Torah superficially show an absolute reverence to the sacred text, yet at the same time his method of interpretation enables him to read whatever he desires into the sacred texts. He notes that the text is sometimes mythical, contradictory, or banal, and interprets these as clues to a higher, esoteric, allegorical "4D chess". I read him as an antecedent to post-modernism. The purport of his philosophy can easily be compared with Plotinus or Spinoza, but his method is to read it into the Torah without appearing to create a new system. A merging of Platonism and Judaism is natural, as the law is central to both. Jewish Platonism is bigger than Plato ever envisioned because Jewish law is for a whole people, not just a city state.
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Philo's method is a precursor to Kabbalism, which in turn is a precursor to Strauss's method, who read the philosophers the same way that Kabbalists read the Torah. These methods function as justifications of covert power. Deception cannot be expressed without contradiction. Thus, contradictions in a text are evidence of deception (of course, they can also be evidence of mistakes or carelessness). The Straussian method is instead to treat contradictions as clues to a higher esoteric level of meaning, which can be the opposite of a straightforward reading of the book. Thus, Thomas Aquinas was really an atheist, Plato was really a libertarian, etc. Thus, nothing is every truly contradictory or imperfect. There is simply a higher level of meaning. This method can be understood as an intellectualization of the narcissist's habit of reframing and recontextualization to evade guilt.
Marx and Freud are often linked together even though they are really quite different. However, they are similar in the way that they are both influenced by Judaism without talking about it and in the way that they see everything as a covert expression of impersonal forces. It is if they read Kabbalistic mysticism, correctly read it as a kind of trick to ensure that God is always right, and then read everything else along the same lines. For Marx everything is a covert expression of class and for Freud it is our hidden drives. Their own writings are elaborate deceptions to conceal their own covert power. Their attempts to downplay the individual serve to conceal their own individualism, which leaves no room for anybody else. Together they are two of the most important sources for existentialism, which generalizes the method of promoting covert power (both of the individual existentialist and the state) by denying that anybody else really means what they say by reading it all as an expression of impersonal forces.
The development of Christianity shows a gradual takeover by Platonists in a manner similar to that envisioned by Plato, in which the original idea is gradually replaced. In Plato's vision, the philosophers do not believe what they are saying. With Christianity, we do not have any direct admissions from the gospel writers or the church fathers of making stuff up, but can see a progression from an ascetic esoteric sect to a mass political movement with esoteric elements eliminated and with a greater influence from Greek philosophy.
Christianity shows a resemblance to Essanism, an underdog apocalyptic sect of Judaism that opposed temple worship and the Pharisees. They were influenced by Greek and Zoroastrian ideas. They believed in the immortal soul and the universe as a cosmic battle of good and evil, and esoteric, like a Greek mystery religion. Thus their beliefs were only available to initiates. They were the writers of the dead sea scrolls and the practice of baptism derives from practice of ritual cleanliness. They also seem to be proto-gnostic in their asceticism and their focus on the spiritual world over the physical world, though they did not hate the physical world to the degree that gnostics did later.