The church fathers made a significant contribution to the almost complete preservation of the Placita of Aëtius. In this chapter I investigate what motivated them to use it so extensively. I first introduce the Placita, outlining six features that give this work a distinctive mode of ordering knowledge. Philo of Alexandria, the first of eight authors to be discussed, is not a Christian. Nevertheless his approach to the variety of philosophical doctrines recorded in the antecdent tradition of the Placita will be crucial for his Christian successors. These commence with Athenagoras and Hermias, followed by three fourth-century authors, Eusebius, Pseudo-Justin and Nemesius, and conclude with two fifth-century writers, Cyril of Alexandrian and Theodoret. Although the Placita bring order into the vast body of contradictory doctrines put forward by the philosophers, this ‘structured disorder’ is in sharp contrast to the ordering of Christian knowledge, which is presented as being founded on a unified body of revealed truth.

As seen from the two previous chapters, Eusebius of Caesarea is the one author who had produced the master narrative of the beginnings of Christainity. In his 10 books of the history of the church, he chronologically developed a world history, in which Christianity is and always has been the ultimate goal of God’s creation. Already before time, God had conceived the Logos and through the Logos created this world which, despite the fall, was to come to its restauration and final perfection through the guidance of the Logos, his incarnation, presence on earth and him being alive in his community, called the Church, finally recognized by the first Christian Emperor Constantine.

The Jewish exegete Philo of Alexandria speaks of death and immortality in several different ways. He may refer to the higher or lower part of the soul or the body, and mean either moral or ontological death. Not all combinations are possible; e.g., Philo never says the soul’s leading part could cease to exist, and the body can neither undergo moral death nor avoid the physical one. Three types of Philonic discourse are discussed: human mortality caused by the body, the soul’s moral corruption that Philo calls its death, and the ontological immortality of the mind. Despite the last one, Philo speaks of attaining immortality. This is not an inconsistency but refers to the mind’s liberation from its mortal companions (the body and the mortal portion of the soul) so that only its congenital immortality remains. Attaining immortality also means the end of the repeated deaths in the cycle of reincarnation, and the mind’s restoration to its original state of blessedness.

Chapter 1 discusses how the categories of analysis traditionally used by scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity can be refined, with critical attention paid to terminology, vocabulary, and anachronism. Invoking the work of J. Z. Smith, Stanley Stowers, Eric Hobsbawm, and others, this chapter challenges how Christianity was rhetorically “invented” after the first century and how a figure like Paul the Apostle was transformed into one of the founders of Christianity, despite questions about how effective his so-called ministry was at creating cohesion about presumed Christian “communities.”

Philo’s interest in music is as known as it is overlooked in its philosophical implications. This chapter focuses on the importance of the musical paradigm in Philo’s thought and its relation to the other complementary model adopted by the philosopher: the pattern of the scala naturae, inherited from Stoicism. More specifically, Philo’s appeal to the notion of harmony introduces the idea of some orderly discontinuity in nature, implying both the transcendence of God and the limited condition of human rationality: the world is indeed governed by harmony, but only in the very qualified sense that it implies harmonically defined relationships between very distant entities. This ‘vertical’ harmony, however, is combined with a ‘horizontal’ one, for God also exerts his providence through harmony, while, in turn, music is the intellectual means by which man can contemplate the heavens and draw closer to God. These are not mere metaphors, for music represents a proper philosophical model for Philo that he applies to aspects which will prove fundamental in the post-Hellenistic age.

This chapter looks at the manner in which Calcidius presents allusions to Christian views (in comparison with known Christian authors of the era), his use of the "Hebrews," and his minimal reliance on Origen.

This chapter examines how Calcidius sees his role as commentator in relation to his own translation, and his posiiton vis-à-vis the Platonist tradition.

This chapter traces a genealogy of pneumatic cosmology, covering the Pythagoreans of the fifth century BCE, the Stoics of the third and second centuries BCE, the Jews writing in Alexandria in the first century BCE and the Christians of the first century CE. Starting from the early Pythagoreans, ‘breath’ and ‘breathing’ function to draw analogies between cosmogony and anthropogony – a notion ultimately rejected by Plato in the Timaeus and Aristotle in his cosmological works, but taken up by the Posidonius and expanded into a rich and challenging corporeal metaphysics. Similarly, the Post-Hellenistic philosopher and biblical exegete Philo of Alexandria approaches the cosmogony and anthropogony described in Genesis (1:1-3 and 1:7) through Platonist-Stoic philosophy, in his attempt to provide a philosophically rigorous explanation for why Moses employed certain terms or phrases when writing his book of creation. Finally, the chapter sees a determined shift in the direction of rejecting pneumatic cosmology for a revised pneumatic anthropogony in the writings of the New Testament: by appeal to the ‘Holy Spirit’ (πνεῦμα ἅγιον), early Christians effectively adapted the Stoic metaphysics of ‘breath’, with its notions of divine intelligence and bonding, to the ecclesiastical project of building a Christian community conceived of as the ‘body of Christ’.