Note 6 — II THE HELLENISTIC IDEA OF A MEDIATOR (PHILO)

As the Apocalyptics show, this view had numerous adherents among the Jews of Palestine also. All those who found no satisfaction in the literalness of the Pharasaic beliefs and the business-like superficiality of the official Jewish religion, found edification in ideas of this sort, which excited the imagination. They dealt with them as “mysteries,” and sought, as may well be from fear of conflicts with traditional religion, to keep them secret from the public.6 Hence it is that we have such an incomplete knowledge of this side of the religious life of the Jews. At any rate they clothed their expected Messiah with the attributes of the Mandaic God of Mediation, and they appear, as is clear from the Apocalypse of Daniel and that of John, to have taken particular pleasure in the description of the scene where God calls (“awakes”) the Redeemer to his mediatory office and installs him as Deliverer, Ruler of the World, and Judge of the living and the dead.