Therapists as a Jewish Monastic Philosophical Community in Current Historiography.

Abstract

Abstract: After a long historical period in which De vita contemplativa was considered a work dedicated to Christian asceticism, embodied in the community of the Therapeutae of Alexandria, historical research managed to dismantle this stubbornly maintained fiction, and to situate this congregation in the Jewish sphere to which it belongs. Even the doubts about the authorship of the work have gradually turned into certainties, and scholars no longer doubt that Philo is the creator of this remarkable treatise, which describes for the first and only time the daily life of a philosophical group in antiquity. In recent decades, De vita contemplativa has continued to be the object of interest and analysis for numerous researchers who have been able to provide different approaches to its purpose and significance, as we shall see in this article, for despite its brevity, the work has the quality of being very rich in meanings and consequently in interpretations.