While scholarship has always underlined Philo’s debt to the preceding philosophical tradition, this chapter instead intends to shed light on his critical attitude towards some key traditional aspects of prophecy and divination endorsed by Graeco-Roman thinkers. This contribution thus explores which kinds of prophecy, inside and outside the Scriptures, are dangerous and impious according to Philo, and why. Special focus is laid on: the conceptual categories of ‘truth’, ‘authority’, and ‘appropriate time’ – crucial and widespread notions in the debates on prophecy at the turn of the millennium – and on the complex relation between contingency and transcendence in Philo’s thought.

Festal sermons exhibit a distinct mode of creating and communicating knowledge and, hence, constitute one specific element of the late-antique Christian intellectual world. Through their dynamic character and the flexibility of the genre, sermons offered the preacher endless possibilities to spread the word of God and to inspire his audience by drawing them into the liturgical and spiritual world that he created for them. Three elements contributed to this: rhetoric and style; the use of the scriptures; and a theological and liturgical epistemology, in which the sermon transcends the concrete here and now to encompass the past, present, and future of God’s plan of salvation for humanity. The final section shows that the preacher’s liberty was substantial but not unlimited: in the end he remained a servant of the Word and of his congregation.

In the Christian literature of the first centuries, notions such as those of harmonia, symphōnia and epōidē – just to mention a few – as well as many musical instruments and musical myths borrowed from pagan culture, appear, in an adequately reinterpreted form, in the description and explanation of fundamental aspects of Christian doctrine. The chapter examines some musical concepts and images in Clement of Alexandria’s and Origen’s works, with a specific focus on the Greek musical culture that lies in the background of this rich musical imagery. By analysing Clement’s and Origen’s strategy of reinterpretation and appropriation of fundamental figures and notions drawn from the Greek musical world – such as the figure of Orpheus and the notion of symphōnia – the chapter shows that the use of music stands out as a momentous feature in the apologetic and exegetical activities of these Christian writers, touching upon some crucial issues, such as the Christian attitude to pagan culture and the relationship between Christianity and philosophy.