A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

indulge in arguments with earthly men like Lot or Jonah. Many Jews came to feel that such apparent embarrassments in their stories must conceal deeper layers of truth and so must be allegories. Greeks had after all already applied this idea of allegorical meaning to their own myths and to the writings of Homer (see pp. 24–5), and the allegorical approach became naturalized among Alexandrian Jews in the biblical commentaries of Jesus Christ’s Jewish contemporary the scholar and historian Philo.47 When a Christian community eventually became established alongside the Alexandrian Jewish community, it was much influenced by Philo’s allegorical method. Powerful currents of opinion within Judaism also continued to suggest modifications of aspects of Jewish belief if there seemed to be valuable material in the religions of others. Following Greek thought, Jews embraced the concept of nothingness, and that gave them a new perspective on creation. II Maccabees, a work of the Apocrypha probably written in the second century BCE, is the first in Jewish literature to insist that God did not make creation ‘out of things that existed’, unformed, chaotic material, but