3 - One God (and God’s Word) in the Greek Period

Summary

In this chapter, I argue that the expression “God is one” in Greek emerges later than some of the current scholarship supposes. I suggest that the expression is first attested, not among the Presocratic philosophers, but in Hellenistic Jewish pseudepigrapha. But the idea finds its first clear theological explication in the works of Philo of Alexandria. Yet speculations about divine unity and transcendence immediately led Philo into a philosophical quandary that has not been resolved two thousand years later. How can a God who is one and transcendent interact with a material world that is immanent and diverse? Philo endeavors to solve this problem by means of divine agents that he refers to as “Words” and “Powers.” But in so doing, he creates the potentially more serious problem of the relationship of the highest of these divinities with God, a problem that continued to trouble Jewish thinkers throughout history.