school. Philo, a contemporary of Jesus and the apostles, seems to have been largely without influence in his own Jewish community as the articulator of allegorical hermeneutics in Alexandria and forerunner of the hermeneutics of Clement and Origen. It will be helpful to observe the beginnings of allegorical interpretation and its influence on Philonic exegesis. We know the first allegorists, like the earliest Greek philosophers, only through the fragments of their work preserved by later authors.