DOCTRINE OF THE LORD. 9
meaning, as used among the ancient Greeks. Plato spoke of God under the term Logos, meaning by it the divine reason, embracing the patterns or arche- types of things afterwards formed; sometimes also called the intellect of God, which, he says, is the “divinest of all things”; and he admits it into the number of his primary principles. Sometimes he speaks of the Logos in terms which, if literally un- derstood, would lead to the supposition that he considered it a real being distinct from the Supreme God; or, united with, and proceeding from, the fountain of His divinity.
Philo, a learned Jew of Alexandria, sometimes called the Jewish Plato, discussed the doctrine of the Logos in a similar manner, attributing to the Logos the properties of a being, calling him the mediator between God and man, the first-born of God, and applying the term “God” to him. A other times he speaks of him as the image of God, the reason of God, calls God the fountain of the Logos, and the Logos His instrument or minister in creating, preserving, and governing the world. Philo was, perhaps, the first distinctly to attribute to the Logos a personal existence.
Undoubtedly Platonism and Oriental Philosophy exerted considerable influence on the early Chris tian writers, like Justin Martyr, Clement of Alex- andria, Hippolytus and Origen.
The authors of the Septuagint version of the Old Testament used this term Logos in the translation,
