A work attributed to Heraclitus on Homeric problems, probably written in the first century A. D., has survived as the most comprehensive treatise we possess from antiquity on allegorical interpretation. Heraclitus' work is one late response to a conflict present in Greek thought from the time of Plato certainly, but even before in the thought of Xenophanes. The latter was the first Greek thinker to criticize religious myth for not being 'fitting' in terms of the true nature of the divine, for not being theoprepes. Although he was not the first to coin this word, the word and concept were thus given a new importance for later theological speculation, whether pagan or Christian. . . . A similar problem arose in the history of Judaism and Christianity when some philosophically trained, hellenized believers were constrained to allegorize the Old Testament along lines very much like those of the Stoic allegorizers of Homer. Philo Judaeus used allegory to harmonize Scripture with Greek philosophical notions of theoprepes: where the text says that God spoke to Moses, the text means to say that God illuminated Moses' mind, a clear shift from the naive anthropomorphism of the text to the philosophically hallowed and respected Greek notion of the illuminated intellect. For Christians, allegorization of the Old Testament saved the text from the extreme moral censure of the God of the Old Testament advanced by gnostics such as Marcion . . . (53).