Origen: An Introduction to His Life and Thought (Cascade Companions) 1498288952, 9781498288958

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ORIGEN

ORIGEN An Introduction to His Life and Thought

RONALD E. HEINE

!!

CASCADE Books • Eugene,

Oregon

ORIGEN An Introduction to His Life and Thought Cascade Companions # Copyright © 2019 Ronald E. Heine. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401. Cascade Books An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3 Eugene, OR 97401 www.wipfandstock.com paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-8895-8 hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-8897-2 ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-8896-5

Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Names: Heine, Ronald E., author Title: Origen : an introduction to his life and thought / Ronald E. Heine. Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books, 2019 | Series: Cascade Companions | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-4982-8895-8 (paperback) | ISBN 978-14982-8897-2 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-4982-8896-5 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Origen. | Origen—Criticism and interpretation. | Bible—Criticism, interpretation, etc.—History—Early church, approximately 30–600. | Christianity—Philosophy. | Fathers of the church. Classification: LCC BR65.068 H456 2019 (print) | BR65.068 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

October 17, 2019

To Katrina

CONTENTS Abbreviations ix A Note on References to the Psalms  xi Introduction 1

PART I: A SKETCH OF ORIGEN’S LIFE 1. Major Influences That Shaped Origen’s Mind  11 Origen’s early education with his father   14 Scripture 15 The faith of his parents and the second-century church 17 Roman persecution of the church  28 2. Origen among Christians and Jews in Alexandria and Caesarea  37 Origen and the church in Alexandria  37 Origen and the Jewish community at Caesarea  44

PART II: ORIGEN’S THOUGHT 3. The Interpretation of Scripture  57 Devote yourself to the reading of Scripture  57 Opening the sealed book  61

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Contents

Reading the sealed book  66 The Pauline imprint on Origen’s interpretation of Scripture 75 Discerning the details in the text  80 4. The Focal Points of Origen’s Theology  93 Creation 95 The Intelligible Creation  101 The Material Creation  107 Incarnation 116 Consummation 126 Entering God’s Rest and Inheriting the Land  132 The City of God, the New Jerusalem  141 The Celebration of Festive Days in Heaven  145 Suggestions for Further Reading  157 Bibliography 159 Index of Scripture  167

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ABBREVIATIONS ACW

Ancient Christian Writers

ANF

Ante-Nicene Fathers

Cels

Contra Celsum

ComCt

Commentary on the Canticle of Canticles

ComJn

Commentary on John

ComMt

Commentary on Matthew

DialHer

Dialogue with Heracleides

Ep Epistle(s) EpistGreg The Letter to Gregory ExpProv Expositions of Proverbs FOTC

Fathers of the Church

FragJn

Fragments on John

GCS

Die grieschischen christlichen Schriftsteller

H.E.

Ecclesiastical History

HomEz

Homilies 1–14 on Ezekiel

HomEx

Homilies on Exodus

ix

Abbreviations

HomLk

Homilies on Luke

HomGn

Homilies on Genesis

HomJer

Homilies on Jeremiah

HomJob

Homilies on Job

HomIs

Homilies on Isaiah

NPNF

Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers

OECT

Oxford Early Christian Texts

PEuch

On Prayer (Peri Euches)

PG

Patrologiae Graecae

Philoc

The Philocalia of Origen

Princ

On First Principles

SC

Sources chrétiennes

SelEz

Selecta on Ezekiel

SelGn

Selecta on Genesis

SelPs

Selecta on the Psalms

SerMt

Series of Commentaries on Matthew

trans. translation

x

A NOTE ON REFERENCES TO THE PSALMS The numbering of the Psalms differs in the Septuagint from that in the Hebrew Bible (on which English versions are based) by one Psalm after Psalm 10. Hence, a reference to Psalm 10 by Origen would be to Psalm 11 in an English Bible, etc. I have used the English numbering of the Psalms as much as possible, but when Origen refers to the number of a psalm I have followed his number with the English Bible reference in brackets as follows: Psalm 36 (37); Psalm 18 (19):8–11.

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INTRODUCTION One can only wish or dream that her or his own intellectual work on understanding Scripture or setting forth its theological meaning will endure so long or reach so far as that of Origen of Alexandria. While he was dead by the middle of the third century, Origen’s work has continued to stir deep admiration and animosity down to the present time, although much of the animosity has abated since the work of some significant scholars in the twentieth century.1 His influence has crossed all boundaries in the church from the ancient Greek and Latin speaking East-West boundaries to the modern ones of Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant. Much of his extensive work was lost or destroyed soon after his lifetime, but a large corpus has continued to exist, either in its original Greek or in later Latin translations. In more recent times additional texts have been recovered through fortuitous discoveries, first that of the Tura papyri in Egypt in the mid-twentieth century, which yielded two previously unknown texts: the Dialogue with Heraclides and the Treatise on the Passover, along with portions of texts already possessed, and more recently, in 2012, the discovery of twenty-nine Greek homilies on the Psalms in a twelfth-century codex in the Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek in Munich. New editions and translations of Origen’s 1.  See Robert J. Daly, S.J., “The Discovery of the True Origen.”

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works continue to be produced in numerous countries and languages. They can be found in series and in individual translations in German, French, Italian, Spanish, and English, and probably in others of which I am unaware. In the last decade of the twentieth century I was director of a small research institute called the Institute for the Study of Christian Origins sponsored by the Disciples of Christ in Tübingen, Germany. I recently revisited Tübingen to participate in a symposium. In a conversation with one of the participants at the symposium I was asked who was teaching theological subjects at the University when I was working in Tübingen. When I began to list a few of the theologians who were at the University at that time—Martin Hengel, Jürgen Moltmann, Hans Küng—my conversation partner interrupted me and said, “O, you were here when the giants were here!” I had not thought of them in that particular way when I was living and working in Tübingen, but that is a good descriptive term for the collection of notable theological scholars who were clustered at the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen at that time. And that is a good descriptive term for Origen. Origen was a giant in the early church. When one thinks beyond the first century and the apostles, there was no one comparable to him until one gets to Augustine in the late fourth century. Origen moved like a colossus over the intellectual life of the early church, whether one thinks of biblical interpretation, theological insight, doctrinal development, or influence on subsequent leaders of the church. He had a lasting influence on how the church read Scripture, especially the Old Testament, and on how it thought about and formulated its doctrines. His pervasive influence spread through his immediate contact with students and the publication of his numerous writings.

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Introduction

Origen was greatly admired and intensely disliked during his lifetime and afterwards. Both of those reactions were often elicited by the fact that his thought was frequently “outside the box,” so to speak. At a time when the majority in the church, including its bishops and presbyters, believed that Scripture must be read and understood in the simple, literal meaning of the words, Origen deftly practiced a non-literal way of understanding Scripture’s words that rankled the feelings of many of his readers or listeners. This can often be detected by remarks he makes in his homilies and commentaries. His teachings about the basic Christian doctrines of the creation of the universe, the incarnation of Christ, and the consummation of history also diverged, significantly in many cases, from views held by multitudes in his time. Aspects of these same views, nevertheless, would later become incorporated into the general faith of the church in the West as well as the East. Many of the most important leaders of the western church in the fourth century were strongly influenced by Origen’s way of interpreting Scripture and by his theological insights, including Augustine of Hippo, Ambrose of Milan, and Jerome of Bethlehem. Origen did not develop his thought in an academic context nor did he envision his many treatises serving such an audience. He developed his thought in the context of the church and he produced his treatises to serve the church— to protect it from straying from what he considered to be the truth of the message of Christ and to enable it to understand this message in its diverse Scriptural expressions. In one of his earlier works, written while he was still living in Alexandria, Origen notes that he has undertaken to write books interpreting the Scriptures because numerous such books were being produced by heterodox Christians 3

ORIGEN

that threatened to confuse or mislead those faithful to the common understanding of the church.2 Origen was always concerned about the faith of the church, both in protecting it and in interpreting it to help others grasp its obvious and less obvious meanings. He was a practicing Christian all his life. He commented in one of his homilies that he wanted to be and be called a Christian in his action as well as his thought.3 In modern jargon one could say that he did not just talk the talk; he walked the walk. He was a man of deep faith and prayer. He often requested the prayers of his listeners to help him in his preaching, and he considered prayer to be the most important element in interpreting Scripture.4 This book begins by sketching the more important influences on the formation of Origen’s thought, including the circumstances of his life, so far as that is knowable. The sources for depicting Origen’s life are scarce. While a large number of his writings have been preserved, he says very little about himself in them.5 His letters, which would be an important source of information, have largely perished. Eusebius refers to more than a hundred letters that he had seen—letters to an emperor and his wife, to bishops, and to various other persons—and arranged in separate “roll-cases” to preserve them, but they seem to have perished in antiquity. Only two have been preserved in the Greek language in which Origen wrote them; one to a former student named Gregory, and another to a scholar named Africanus. There is also a letter to some friends in 2.  Origen, ComJn 5.7. 3.  HomLk 16. 4.  EpistGreg 4. 5.  See Perrone, “Origen’s ‘Confessions,’” for an attempt to cull biographical information from Origen’s writings.

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Introduction

Alexandria preserved in a Latin translation of the fourth century by Rufinus of Aquileia. Besides these three letters, we have only occasional sentences from letters quoted in Eusebius’ Church History. The Apology for Origen written by Pamphilus—an early fourth-century priest, martyr, and devotee of Origen—would also have been a good source for information about Origen. Pamphilus wrote the Apology in Caesarea, where Origen spent the latter part of his life. Origen’s library was there, which would have contained his own works as well as others he had gathered for his work. Pamphilus had a passion for collecting books.6 He had copied many of Origen’s works with his own hand. He was later imprisoned and while in prison he wrote the five books of his Apology with the help of Eusebius. After Pamphilus’ martyrdom, Eusebius added a sixth book. These books too, with the exception of the first, have perished. There are only a few sources from which we derive our biographical information about Origen, all from the fourth century. Jerome and Rufinus, Latin authors of the Western church, both translated numerous works of Origen from Greek into Latin and in the process provided some information about his life. The first book of the Apology for Origen by Pamphilus is another source of information. The Apology, however, is primarily a defense of Origen’s thought and says very little about his life in general. This, too, has been preserved only in a Latin translation by Rufinus in the fourth century. The two main sources from antiquity that provide biographical information about Origen’s life are both from the Eastern Greek-speaking church: works of Eusebius of Caesarea and Epiphanius of Salamis. The sixth book of the Church History of Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, is the most important 6.  Grafton and Williams, Transformation of the Book, 179–85.

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source. Origen was a kind of hero of the faith in Eusebius’ eyes. The other source is section sixty-four of the Panarion (Medicine Chest) of Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis in Cyprus, for whom Origen was a heretic. Eusebius, as bishop in Caesarea, had ready access to important resources about Origen’s life. Origen had spent the last portion of his life in Caesarea, and Pamphilus, who had studied Origen’s works thoroughly, was presbyter there before Eusebius. Furthermore, it is generally recognized that a unique feature of Eusebius’ historical works is his wide use and careful quotation of written sources.7 We do not know, on the other hand, where Epiphanius got his biographical information about Origen. For some of the views he presents he seems to be dependent on impressions he has drawn about Origen from a group of monks who claimed to be Origen’s followers. Epiphanius considered these monks to be an heretical sect. He has very little to say about Origen’s life in his account. Most of the rather lengthy section on Origen in the Panarion is devoted to refuting some controversial doctrines Epiphanius attributed to Origen. So, while Eusebius may give a rosy tint to his account of Origen’s life, on the whole it is better to trust a person’s friend for accurate information about him, especially if he has had access to reliable information, than trust an avowed enemy who wants to cast him in the worst possible light. The general approach to Origen’s life in this book is structured by the information given by Eusebius.8 7.  Grafton and Williams, Transformation of the Book, 200–203; Gamble, Books and Readers, 156. 8.  Eusebius’ work has been given critical attention especially by two modern works: Nautin, Origène, and Grant, Eusebius as Church Historian. On the problems involved in writing a life of Origen see the insightful essay by Urbano, “Difficulties,” and the chapter on “Eusebius’ ‘Life of Origen’” in Cox, Biography.

6

Introduction

This book is not an attempt to say everything that can be said about Origen, especially in the chapter on his thought. It is an introduction and as such hopes, beyond simply making him known to those who are unfamiliar with his life and thought, to elicit an interest in reading some of Origen’s texts and wrestling with their complexities. I have also tried to allow Origen to speak for himself as much as possible, and in this way to give the reader access to Origen’s own words (in English translation, of course). As I indicated at the beginning of this introduction, Origen was one of the most important and influential thinkers in the early church. Throughout his life he worked diligently at the interpretation of Scripture in his commentaries that covered most of the books of the Bible and in the application of Scripture to life in these commentaries as well as in his homilies. The extent of his influence on the church’s faith makes an acquaintance with his life and thought essential to anyone who wants to understand the roots of Christian faith.

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PART I

A SKETCH OF ORIGEN’S LIFE

Chapter 1

MAJOR INFLUENCES THAT SHAPED ORIGEN’S MIND John Donne’s poetic line, “No man is an island,” was certainly true of Origen. He was a man whose life and accomplishments depended on several key people, some of whom are unknown to us by name.1 The first two, as with most people, were his parents. His father Leonides was responsible for the beginning of the scholarly habits we know that characterized Origen’s entire life. It was also under the guidance of his father that he began to acquire his intimate knowledge of Scripture, which would be the foundation for his life’s work. The name of Origen’s mother is unknown, but it was her active intervention, both verbally and physically, that preserved his life for posterity. He was on the point of becoming a nameless, zealous, teenage volunteer martyr when his mother stepped in and prevented it. She 1.  The information about Origen in this section is dependent on Eusebius, H.E. 6 unless otherwise noted. Eusebius says he got his information about this phase of Origen’s life from letters and information coming from some of Origen’s students.

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ORIGEN

acted, no doubt, out of a mother’s love, but her action preserved one of the most brilliant thinkers and leaders of Christian antiquity. After Leonides’ death Origen was taken in by a distinguished, wealthy Christian lady in Alexandria. While it is not known for certain, it is most likely that this too was the result of the action of Origen’s mother looking out for him, for when her husband was martyred, his property was confiscated leaving her with seven children to raise, of whom Origen was the oldest. This unnamed Christian lady not only provided Origen with a home after his father’s death, but also financed his further education until he was able to earn a living on his own by teaching. Somewhat later Origen was also befriended and supported by another wealthy Alexandrian named Ambrose. Ambrose was a Valentinian Gnostic whom Origen had converted. They appear to have become close friends. The way Origen refers to Ambrose in some of his writings sounds as if he was present as Origen spoke. It was Ambrose who made the production of Origen’s many treatises possible. He set up, at his own expense, a scriptorium for Origen, which included several stenographers, copyists, and calligraphers to take down Origen’s dictated words and produce manuscript copies of his works. Many of Origen’s writings were also produced at the request, and sometimes prodding, of Ambrose. In the Commentary on John Origen refers to an agreement he had with Ambrose to produce books, and to Ambrose’s insistence that he work on these even in Ambrose’s absence.2 The support of one other rather unknown man was also crucial to what Origen accomplished in his life. Demetrius, Origen’s bishop in Alexandria, seems to have 2.  ComJn 5.1, 2.

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Major influences that shaped Origen’s mind

been ambivalent about Origen. He must have recognized his exceptional intelligence and knowledge of Scripture as a young man, for he appointed him as catechist in the Alexandrian church when Origen was in his late teens. He never ordained Origen, however, which meant that Origen was never allowed to preach in the Alexandrian church. Nevertheless, Origen’s fame as an expounder of Christian teaching spread. He was invited to Palestine where Bishops John of Jerusalem and Theoctistus of Caesarea asked him to preach to their congregations and, at a later date, ordained him, which infuriated Origen’s Alexandrian bishop, Demetrius. The latter unleashed a vicious verbal attack on Origen, much of which he put in letters sent to bishops of other churches. This was a very low point in Origen’s emotional life. He talks about it in the prologue to the sixth book of his Commentary on John and describes how it interrupted his intellectual work as well as threatened his emotional state. He refers to the controversy as the “storm at Alexandria” and borrowing the imagery of the exodus of Israel, says, “We were rescued from the land of Egypt, when the God who led his people from Egypt delivered us.”3 The human deliverer of Origen from Alexandria was Theoctistus, bishop of Caesarea, who welcomed Origen to settle at Caesarea, put him to work preaching in the church, and provided the environment in which Origen could get on with his intellectual work. We know little more about Theoctistus. He had obviously perceived the genius in the teacher from Alexandria and welcomed him as a leader in the Christian community at Caesarea. This perceptive, rather unknown bishop provided Origen with the last platform for his life work. All his homilies, with the exception of one delivered at Jerusalem, were delivered 3.  ComJn 6.8; trans. Origen, Commentary, FOTC 80, 170.

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and taken down by stenographers at Caesarea, and many of his most important treatises were composed there, such as his On Prayer, Exhortation to Martyrdom, Against Celsus, and commentaries on The Epistle to the Romans, and The Gospel of Matthew. Without these five rather obscure people on whom Origen’s life and work depended there would be little to write about him. ORIGEN’S EARLY EDUCATION UNDER HIS FATHER Origen was born in A.D. 185 at Alexandria, Egypt, the son of Christian parents. His father Leonides was an educator by profession. His son followed him in this, as was the common practice in antiquity. Origen would be a teacher all his life, though in many different locales and situations. Leonides was in charge of Origen’s early education. Eusebius indicates that in addition to Origen’s general education, which would have consisted of studies in grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and musical theory,4 his father insisted that he study the Scriptures as well. This study of the Scriptures with his father was a rigorous program including regular memorization and repetition. Origen took to this study with enthusiasm, going beyond even what his father expected from him, perhaps in ways that disturbed his father. Leonides was satisfied with the literal or obvious meaning of the biblical text. Origen, however, even as a boy, raised questions about the intended deeper meaning behind the obvious gist of the text. His father counselled him to stick to the literal meaning of the words in the inspired texts. In private,

4.  Eusebius, H.E. 6.2.7; Marrou, Education in Antiquity, 244–45.

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Major influences that shaped Origen’s mind

however, Eusebius tells us Leonides thanked God for the privilege of being the father of such a son. This early rigorous application to the study and memorization of the Scriptures provided the foundation on which Origen’s later accomplishments were erected. As a mature scholar, teacher, and preacher, his mind moved over the text of Scripture like a computer search program pulling up textual parallels and illustrations and peppering his pages with phrases and sentences culled from passages ranging from Genesis through Revelation, including the books today called the Apocryphal or Deuterocanonical books. After his father’s death,5 when Origen was in his midteens, he was enabled to continue his education by the generous help of a wealthy Christian lady.6 He progressed rapidly in his education and soon was able to become a teacher of secular subjects, following in the footsteps of his father. Although Origen mentions his father only once in his preserved works,7 there can be little doubt that his father had a deep and abiding influence on his life. SCRIPTURE Scripture was a second major influence in the shaping of Origen’s mind. Origen knew Scripture in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures called the Septuagint. This translation had been produced by Jews prior to the Christian era and was used by the church from its earliest days. This is what Origen read and memorized as a child under 5.  The martyrdom of Leonides and its impact on Origen will be discussed below in the section, “Roman Persecution of the Church.” 6.  See the discussion above. 7.  HomEz 4.8, Origen: Homilies 1–14 on Ezekiel, ACW 62.75.

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the tutelage of his father. He later learned the Hebrew language as well, so that he could read the Old Testament Scriptures in their original language, but the Septuagint was the default version of Scripture that he used. In his writings he cites all thirty-nine books of the Hebrew canon plus ten books from those known as deuterocanonical or apocryphal books.8 One of the early works that Origen began in Alexandria was a massive compilation in parallel columns of four translations of the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek along with the Hebrew Old Testament itself plus a sixth column containing the Hebrew text of the entire Old Testament transliterated into Greek characters, perhaps so that the words could be pronounced by Greek speakers who could not read Hebrew. These six texts were copied by hand in parallel columns for comparative purposes. It was referred to as the Hexapla because of the six columns. In the Psalms there were two additional columns of different Greek translations that Origen had discovered. The very undertaking of such a huge project indicates how important Scripture was to Origen. This careful work of copying would also have increased his knowledge of the contents of Scripture. There was also a canon of New Testament books by Origen’s time, though there would be no official conciliar decree about the limits of the New Testament canon for several centuries. It consisted of the apostolic books recognized and used by the churches in general. Origen states that there were only four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—recognized by the church, though many more had been written, some of which he names and claims 8.  For Origen’s use of and attitude toward this latter group of books see Heine, “Boundaries.”

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Major influences that shaped Origen’s mind

to have read.9 He cites from all twenty-seven writings of the New Testament and wrote commentaries or delivered homilies on the majority of them.10 He also uses the terms “Old Testament” and “New Testament” when referring to the two parts of Christian Scripture. Origen had a wide knowledge of secular Greek literature as well. He had read the philosophers and knew the epic poems of Homer well enough to be able to argue with the philosopher Celsus about their proper and improper use.11 But it was Scripture that he loved and interiorized. Writing to a former student named Gregory, he urged him to take from philosophy, geometry, and astronomy the things that would “be useful for the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures.” But above these secular studies, Origen urges Gregory, “Devote yourself, primarily to the reading of the divine Scriptures.”12 It was Scripture, not philosophy or any other aspect of ancient learning, that formed the basis of Origen’s thought and life. THE FAITH OF HIS PARENTS AND OF THE SECOND-CENTURY CHURCH Hal Koch made an important but often overlooked observation in his 1932 study of Origen when he pointed out that Origen did not come to Christianity out of a pagan background, as the majority of the leaders of the secondand third-century church had done, but was born to Christian parents.13 From his childhood Origen was instructed 9.  HomLk 1.1–2. 10.  See Jerome, Ep 33.4. 11.  See Heine, “Origen and Celsus.” 12.  EpistGreg, 1, 4. 13.  Koch, Pronoia, 311–14.

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in Scripture and the Christian faith. He did not arrive at his knowledge of divine truth after searching for it first in various philosophical schools, as Justin relates that he had done, or from seeking it in the mystery religions. Origen was a devoted Christian from his childhood, studying the Scriptures under the guidance of his father,14 and doubtless also worshipping with his parents and the Christians in Alexandria. Koch’s observation carries some very important implications for how we should approach the study of Origen if we are to understand him correctly. We must look at his life and work in the context of the thought of the secondcentury church. Koch suggested that the thought of the second-century church could be known from the writings of the second-century apologists, and perhaps even better from writings such as The Shepherd of Hermas¸ II Clement, and The Letter to Diognetus. Curiously, he omits the works of Irenaeus written near the end of the second century and offering a very thoughtful presentation of the church’s faith in the context of his arguments against those he considered to threaten it. In what follows, as well as summarizing Koch’s conclusions I will also introduce a few additional points concerning the second-century church drawn from the works of Irenaeus and other Christian authors of the second century.15 Koch capsulized the faith of the second-century church in three points: (1) There is one true God, creator of heaven and earth; (2) Christ overpowered the demons and the devil and thereby provides eternal life to humanity;

14.  See the previous section. 15.  On the reading of Irenaeus’ works in Egypt by the time of Origen, see Heine, “Boundaries,” 406–8, esp. n. 46.

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Major influences that shaped Origen’s mind

and (3) Christianity is a new life that should be apparent in the way those in the church actually live.16 Second-century Christians were strict monotheists. There was no wavering on the basic belief that there was only one God and that this God created heaven and earth. This fundamental belief set the Christians, along with the Jews, apart from every other person in the Roman world and also made them suspect to their pagan neighbors. It was not a risk-free belief; it stigmatized them in the eyes of those who worshipped many gods and was at the head of the list of charges against them when they were put on trial by the Roman authorities.17 In the late second century, Irenaeus spoke of the common faith of the church everywhere and said that the church in many nations believes “in one God, the Creator of heaven and earth, and all things therein.”18 Somewhat earlier, in the middle of the second century, Hermas, writing probably in Rome, sets out the same view in the creed-like statement, “First of all believe that God is one who created all things, and fashioned them and made all things to exist out of what did not exist.”19 This must have been a confessional statement Origen regularly heard and repeated in worship as a child and throughout his life, for he has the same statement word for word in the last book of his Commentary on John, which was written in the final years of his life.20 Origen’s faith in the one God, creator of heaven and earth, had deep roots in the faith of the second-century church, which he embraced as a child and defended throughout his adult life. 16.  Koch, Pronoia, 312–13. 17.  See, for example, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 43. 18.  Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3.4.2, p. 417. 19.  The Shepherd of Hermas, Mandate 1. 20.  ComJn 32.187.

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Koch’s second point in regard to the faith of the second-century church concerns Christ’s victory over death and the demonic world of Satan thereby providing humanity with the promise of eternal life. Such a view is nascent in the story Jesus told about the necessity of binding the strong man before plundering his house.21 This way of understanding the redemptive work of Christ has its earliest clear expression in the work of Irenaeus in the late second century. Christ is understood to have waged war against the enemy and crushed him who had made humanity captive to sin and death by his deceit of Adam.22 Origen has an extended reflection on Christ’s struggle against the demonic world in his discussion of the betrayal of Jesus and Jesus’ prayers in Gethsemane. When Jesus tells his disciples that “the Son of Man is about to be handed over into the hands of men,” Origen ponders what this means and who it is who hands him over. He notes that it is not as simple as saying that Judas handed Jesus over to the priestly aristocracy. The whole process involves God, who, Origen says on the basis of Romans 8:32 and Galatians 1:4, hands the Son over for the salvation of humanity. This is not, however, Judas’ betrayal recorded in the Gospels. Origen is thinking of a cosmic struggle between Christ and Satan, which is only hinted at in the story in the Gospels. It is what we might call a behind-the-scenes struggle that is being played out in the trial, execution, and resurrection of Jesus. In this struggle Origen says that Christ, by his death, destroyed the devil, who held the power of death and, in the words of Hebrews 2:15, set free “all those who, by fear of death, were subject to lifelong slavery.”23 Origen depicts 21. Matt 12:29. 22.  See Matt 12:29; Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.21.1. 23.  ComMt 13.8.

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Christ’s struggle with the demonic world in the imagery of Psalm 2. He sees the eminent struggle foreshadowed in the description of Christ in Gethsemane when Matthew refers to Christ beginning “to be sad and distressed,” or, Origen adds, as Mark put it, “He began to be afraid and distressed.” The reason for this distress, Origen suggests, was that Jesus may have perceived “‘the kings and princes of the earth’ standing gathered ‘together against the Lord and against’ himself, ‘his Christ’. And because those multitudes were drawn up, as it were, and were mighty in evil, ‘he began to be sad and distressed’ or even ‘afraid’.”24 The conclusion of the cosmic struggle between Christ and Satan is also described in the language of the second psalm. Satan and the demons were “laughed at by the dwellers ‘in heaven’ and mocked by the Lord for the destruction of their own kingdom and rule contrary to their expectation when they received the Son from the Father. For the Son,” Origen continues, “was raised on the third day” because his enemy, death, had been rendered ineffective and we have been made conformed, not only “to his death” but also “to his resurrection” and, therefore, we walk “in newness of life,” no longer sitting “in the region and shadow of death” but also of the “resurrection,” because the “light” of God has risen on us.25

This is a more extended and sophisticated discussion than that found in Irenaeus in the second century, but the theme is the same: Christ’s work was to engage the power of Satan, 24.  SerMt 90; Ps 2:2. Origen proceeds to emphasize that Matthew says Jesus “began” to be sad and distressed and did not experience the fullness of these emotions. 25  ComMt 13.9, trans. Commentary on Matthew, 1, 137–38.

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destroy it and the demonic world that held human beings captive, and set humanity free from death. That this discussion found in Origen’s Commentary on Matthew, which was one of the last things he wrote, indicates that this view of the work of Christ held by the second-century church remained with Origen throughout his life. The third aspect of the faith of the second-century church noted by Koch is that Christianity is the expression of a new way of life and the lives of the individuals who constitute the church are expected to reflect this new life. The lives of Christians should be noticeable different from those in their worldly environment. The Didache, written in the first part of the second century, begins with a description of two ways, one leading to life and one to death. This was probably intended to present the form of teaching to be addressed to candidates for baptism. The first command concerning the way of life expands on the commands to love God and neighbor, joined with the golden rule. The second presents a detailed list of negative commands to regulate the life of the Christian.26 In the middle of the second century, the Epistle to Diognetus refers to the Christian faith as a “new way of life” and the author sets this way of life forth in a well-known passage in which he contrasts the way Christians live with the life of the world around them. Christians, he says, are not distinguished from the rest of humanity by country, language, or custom. For nowhere do they live in cities of their own, nor do they speak some unusual dialect, nor do they practice an eccentric way of life. . . . But while they live in both Greek and barbarian cities . . . and follow the local customs in dress and food and other aspects of life, at the same time they demonstrate 26.  Didache 1.1—4.14.

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the remarkable and admittedly unusual character of their own citizenship. They live in their own countries, but only as nonresidents; they participate in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign country is their fatherland, and every fatherland is foreign. They marry . . . and have children, but they do not expose their offspring. They share their food but not their wives. They are in the flesh, but they do not live according to the flesh. They live on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven. They obey the established laws; indeed, in their private lives they transcend the laws. They love everyone, and by everyone they are persecuted. . . . They are cursed, yet they bless; they are insulted, yet they offer respect.27

Origen took the Sermon on the Mount of Matthew 5–7 to be the new law for Christians and expected them to live by it.28 In a homily on Psalm 81, which comes from very late in Origen’s life, he censures his audience for the shoddy way they are living out the Christian moral ideal in the following words: No one compels you to commit fornication so that you will die, but you die because of committing fornication. No one compels you to commit fraud so that you will die but because you do this and take away what belongs to another and do not pay what you owe, you cause your own death. No one makes you die but because of anger you destroy even your sensible self. [God]

27.  The Epistle to Diognetus 5.1–15. 28.  Origenes Werke Dreizehnter Band, 356–59 (First homily on Ps 77. 3–4); see also Origen, Commentary on Matthew, I. 20–24.

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rebukes us, therefore, because we cause our own death through our sin . . . .29

Second-century Christianity had a strong focus on the kind of moral life that was expected of a follower of Christ. Origen’s understanding of the life expected of the members of the church reflects this strict approach to Christian morality. Another aspect of the second-century church that was present especially, but not exclusively, in Alexandria was the attempt to correlate Christian faith and Greek philosophy. I say not exclusively because Greek apologists of the second century such as Justin in Rome, Athenagoras perhaps of Athens, and Theophilus in Antioch had used Greek philosophy to set forth the Christian faith to their pagan addressees. In Alexandria the Jewish philosopher Philo had wedded Platonic philosophy with the writings of Moses in the first century. Clement of Alexandria, who may have been born in Athens, travelled widely before finally settling in Alexandria in the early third century. Clement was deeply influenced by Greek philosophy and by its expression in the works of Philo. Philo clearly influenced Origen’s thinking as well; he is one of the few authors whom Origen sometimes cites by name. Philo’s influence on Origen, however, did not begin to approach that of Moses, David, the Hebrew prophets, and Paul and John. Eusebius quotes from a letter of Origen in which he defends his study of philosophy. He states that as his renown as a student of Scripture was increasing, he began to be approached by heretics and others who were proficient in philosophy. Prompted by their questions, he says, he decided to look into the views of the heretics and 29.  Origenes Werke Dreizehnter Band, 521–22 (HomPs 81.7).

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philosophers.30 This indicates that his study of philosophy occurred sometime after his education in Scripture, and that he undertook it to be able to defend the Christian faith intelligently. This is in harmony with his later advice to his student Gregory when he advises him to “take from Greek philosophy what can serve for general education and, as it were, preparatory teaching for Christianity.”31 There was a strong presence of gnostic Christians among the Christians in Alexandria. The famous gnostic teacher Basilides had taught there during the reign of Hadrian, and his son succeeded him as leader of his school. Valentinus may also have taught there at approximately the same time. One characteristic of these early gnostic teachers was their use of philosophy in expounding Scripture. Origen definitely had contact with gnostics in the church in Alexandria. When he was living at the home of the Christian lady who provided for his education after the death of his father, she was also hosting another man from Antioch named Paul at the same time. Eusebius labels Paul a heretic. Origen’s hostess appears to have had a church that met in her home. Eusebius refers to numerous people, both heretics and some “of our own,” as he puts it, who would gather to hear the man preach because he was a very skilled speaker. Origen, he hastens to add, would never associate with the man, even in prayer, “keeping the rule of the Church, even from boyhood.”32 In his early Commentary on John, begun in Alexandria, Origen says he has undertaken the commentary because of the many heterodox who are presenting interpretations of the Gospels in writing and whose influence, he fears, will lead believers 30.  Eusebius, H.E. 6.19.11–12. 31.  EpistGreg, 1. 32.  Eusebius, H.E. 6.2.13–14.

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astray if not countered by people such as himself who can present the teaching of the church against heretical falsehoods.33 Throughout much of this commentary he argues with interpretations that had been put forward in a writing on the Gospel of John by Heracleon, who, Origen says, was an acquaintance of Valentinus.34 One further aspect of the faith of the second-century church that must be mentioned in relation to its influence on the thinking of Origen is the belief that the Old Testament was understood correctly only when read in relation to Christ and the cross. This way of reading Old Testament Scripture had its roots in the apostolic writings themselves. The letters of Paul show that it was the way the church learned to read Old Testament Scripture from its earliest days. The Lukan tradition indicates that the apostles had learned this from Jesus himself.35 Oscar Skarsaune has argued that Justin, the mid-second-century Christian apologist, understood his Christological reading of the writings of the Hebrew prophets to stand in the direct line of interpretation that the apostles had learned from Christ himself.36 The second-century church believed that the books of the Old and New Testament formed a unity,37 and that those of the Old Testament were to be understood and interpreted in light of the saving work of God accomplished through the death and resurrection of Christ. “If anyone . . . reads the Scriptures with attention,” Irenaeus says, and 33.  ComJn 5.8, trans. Origen, Commentary, FOTC 80, 106. 34.  ComJn 2.100. On Heracleon’s identity see Berglund, “Origen’s Vacillating Stances.” 35.  See Luke 24. 36.  Skarsaune, The Proof from Prophecy, 11–13. 37.  See Theophilus, 3.12.

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by Scriptures he means the Old Testament, “he will find in them an account of Christ. . . . For . . . the treasure hid in the Scriptures is Christ.” Christ is not present in obvious ways in Old Testament Scripture, however; he is hidden, to use Irenaeus’ word, in “types and parables.” His presence was imperceptible prior to the incarnation of Jesus. Irenaeus uses Daniel’s description of the sealed book to describe the hidden presence of Christ in the Old Testament. The concealed message becomes understandable only after its fulfillment.38 John Behr points out that “in the Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching . . . Irenaeus does not explicitly make any great use of the apostolic writings. .  .  . Apart from” a “few references, Irenaeus simply expounds the apostolic preaching within the framework of the Christocentric reading of the Old Testament that characterized second-century Christianity.”39 When we later discuss Origen’s interpretation of Scripture, we will see how deeply this Christological approach to Old Testament Scripture influenced his interpretation.40 These are some of the more important aspects of the faith of the second-century church. This was the nature of the Christianity in which Origen grew up; it was the Christianity in his home, where his father instructed him in the Bible, and it was the Christianity believed, preached, and taught in the Christian community where he worshipped. He would modify and develop parts of this faith as he matured, but he would never abandon it.

38.  Irenaeus, 4.26.1; cf. 4.20.2 (ANF I. 496, 488); Dan 12:4; and Behr, Irenaeus, 95–96, 134. 39.  On the Apostolic Preaching, 16. 40.  See chapter 3 below.

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ROMAN PERSECUTION OF THE CHURCH When Origen was born, c.  A.D. 185, Commodus (A.D. 180–92) ruled the Roman Empire, and empire and church were at peace.41 Walzer suggested that Commodus’ mistress was either a Christian or was favorable to them.42 The church was blossoming at this time. Among its literary works were those considered to be the writings of the apostles, along with the writings of the earliest post-apostolic leaders, usually referred to as the apostolic fathers, and the legacy of the Greek apologists. Irenaeus was either writing or had recently completed his major theological work called The Defence of the Faith against All Heresies. The larger body of Christians had been successful in defining and defending itself against Christian groups considered to deviate from the original teachings of the apostles. The four Gospels had been recognized as authoritative and most of the apostolic epistles had been accepted as authoritative in the church as well, though perhaps not yet on the same level as the four Gospels. Both Irenaeus and Tertullian attest to the existence of a widely accepted Rule of Faith that summed up what were considered the most basic Christian teachings.43 Many of the greatest cities in the empire had churches with prominent leaders. Frend has noted that sometime around A.D. 190 powerful bishops emerged in the church: Demetrius in Alexandria, Serapion in Antioch, and Victor followed by Zephyrinus in Rome.44 The church was also expanding in the decade 41.  See Eusebius, H.E. 5.21.1. 42.  Walzer, Galen, 10. See Hippolytus, Refutation of all Heresies 9.12.10–11, on Marcia, Commodus’ mistress, obtaining pardon for some Christians imprisoned in Sardinia. 43.  See Ferguson, The Rule of Faith. 44.  Frend, Martyrdom, 303–4.

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in which Origen was born. There were churches stretching from the region of modern Iran to Spain and along the entire Mediterranean coast of North Africa. While church and empire were, in general, at peace in the decade of Origen’s birth, it was a tenuous peace. There had been no official recognition of the church by the empire, so Christianity was still an illegal religion. Some of the earlier pagan suspicions and hatreds against Christians recorded by the mid-second-century apologists had faded somewhat but had by no means died completely. Origen comments in his Contra Celsum, written when he was over sixty years old, that some of the old rumors that had been spread about the immoralities that occurred in Christian worship were still believed by some people.45 The more pressing issues, however, in Origen’s later life at least, were the refusal of Christians to comply with Roman expectations of what they should do and how they should serve the empire. Christians were considered to be disloyal and possibly dangerous. Their most blatant deviation from Roman customs was their refusal to swear by the genius of the emperor. They also refused to fight as soldiers in the army and were reluctant to accept the duties of public office.46 In mid-180, when Origen was still a small boy, approximately 1,200 miles west of Alexandria in a town called Scillium, near Carthage, North Africa, a small group of Christians was put on trial, condemned, and executed precisely for their refusal to conform to Roman customs. The spokesman for the group insisted that they had committed no crime, that they honored the emperor, and that they paid the tax. They refused, however, to swear by the genius of the emperor. Their sentence was that they confessed to 45.  Cels. 6.27. 46.  Cels. 8.65, 73, 75.

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living by Christian rites and refused the opportunity to return to the Roman customs. For this they were executed.47 A Christian named Apollonius was also tried and executed in the later years of Commodus’ reign.48 A change in the semi-peaceful relationship between church and state occurred, however, when Commodus was murdered and succeeded by Septimius Severus (A.D. 193–211) as emperor. While the statement of Spartianus (Severus’ biographer in The Scriptores Historiae Augustae) that Severus issued an edict that no one was to convert to Judaism or Christianity49 may not be correct,50 there was a notable increase in the persecution of Christians in various places during his reign, and most notably in Alexandria. There was no previous law governing the treatment of Christians except for the rescript of Trajan in the early second century instructing Pliny, the governor of Bithynia, that Christians were not to be sought out, but were to be punished by death if they refused to recant their faith when they were discovered.51 This gave the provincial governor the right to exercise his discretion and be as lenient or as severe as he chose in his dealings with Christians.52 The persecutions at this time may have resulted from the actions of local governors, with which Septimius simply 47.  Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Vol. 2, 86–89. 48.  Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Vol. 2, xxiii–xxv, 90–105; Eusebius H.E. 5.21. The two sources disagree on the place this occurred, whether in Rome or the province of Asia, and on several other details. 49.  The Scriptores Historiae Augustae, ch. 17, 409. 50.  See Birley, The African Emperor, 135 and the secondary literature cited there. Tertullian certainly gives a favorable impression of Septimius’ attitude toward Christians in To Scapula 4.5–6 and On the Pallium 2.7. 51.  Pliny, Epistles 10.96 and 97. 52.  See Platnauer, The Life and Reign, 153.

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did not interfere. He may not have been in Alexandria, however, when the persecutions described by Eusebius were occurring, for which Eusebius blames Severus.53 Eusebius intimates that the persecutions were going on in the tenth year of Severus’ reign, which would have been 202. Solid historical evidence, including coins from Alexandria, shows that Severus was in Egypt in 200.54 There is no evidence that he ever returned. There is, nevertheless, ample evidence that persecution of Christians increased significantly in the opening years of the third century. Hippolytus of Rome composed his Commentary on Daniel sometime between 202 and 204. A recent interpretation of the sixty-six weeks in Daniel had pointed to the year 202 as the time when the antichrist would appear. Hippolytus compared what he anticipated would happen when this occurred with what he had heard, and perhaps observed, currently taking place. We must, therefore, contemplate the tribulation and distress of the saints that will occur at that time—for we must think on the things that will come based on what is already happening in part—such a storm and commotion as this which is occurring in the entire world. All the faithful everywhere are being destroyed, slaughtered in every city and country. The blood of just people is being shed; people are being burned alive, and others thrown to wild beasts. Infants are killed in the squares, and all are cast aside unburied to be eaten by dogs. Both virgins and wives are brazenly defiled and shamelessly mocked. . . .”55 53.  H.E. 6.1–2. 54.  Birley, The African Emperor, 138–39. 55.  Hippolyte (IV.51), 368 (my italics). See also 10, 12.

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In 203 at Carthage, North Africa, the twenty-twoyear-old Perpetua and her pregnant slave girl, Felicitas, along with several young catechumens, were arrested, condemned, and gored to death by a young heifer in the arena.56 Clement of Alexandria, Origen’s older contemporary, speaking of what he must have been observing in Alexandria refers to the daily sight of “martyrs being roasted, impaled, and decapitated.”57 This persecution in Alexandria impinged directly on the young Origen. His father, Leonides, who had been a chief source of his education up to this point, was arrested, held in prison, and then decapitated. Origen was about seventeen years old. He was so moved that he wanted to rush out to martyrdom himself. His mother, so Eusebius says, was able to prevent this only by hiding his clothes so that he remained in the house. As an old man Origen alludes to his father’s martyrdom in one of his homilies on Ezekiel and says, “Having a father who was a martyr does me no good, if I do not live well myself and adorn the nobility of my descent. That is, I must adorn his testimony and confession by which he was illustrious in Christ.”58 These words suggest the deep and lasting influence Origen’s father’s martyrdom had on him—he thought of his own life and work as a way to adorn this ultimate confession his father had made. Since all the church’s catechetical instructors had fled Alexandria because of the persecution, two brothers, Plutarch and Heraclas, approached Origen asking him to be their catechist. Origen seems to have done this for a while 56.  Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Vol. 2, 106–31. See also xxv–xxvii. 57.  Clemens Alexandrinus, Vol. 2 (Book 2.20.125.1–3), 180–81. 75.

58.  HomEz 4.8, trans. Origen: Homilies 1–14 on Ezekiel, ACW 62,

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without any official appointment from the church. Somewhat later, Eusebius says when Origen was eighteen years old, he was officially appointed as catechist for the Alexandrian church, a position he seems to have held throughout his remaining time in Alexandria. Christians were still being arrested and martyred. Eusebius mentions Aquila as governor at this time; Laetus, Aquila’s predecessor, was governor when Eusebius first introduced the subject of persecution in Alexandria. This persecution may have stretched over a few years. Origen became well-known for his ministries to all those who were arrested for the faith. Eusebius names seven of Origen’s students who were receiving catechetical instruction who were martyred, including a woman who had not yet been baptized. Origen said she received “the baptism by fire,” which was an early Christian designation of martyrdom.59 Origen later refers back nostalgically to this period as a time that produced people of intense faithfulness. “But people were faithful then,” he says, when intense martyrdoms were occurring. We used to come back to our gatherings from the burial places after we had followed the martyrs to their graves. The whole church would be gathered without depression. The catechumens, neither frightened nor troubled, were instructed by the martyrdoms and by the deaths of those confessing the truth unto death before the living God. The faithful were few at that time, but they were genuinely faithful.60

59.  The information in this paragraph has been drawn from Eusebius, H.E. 6.1–5. 60.  HomJer 4.3.

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He testifies that he witnessed the faithful being martyred in this period when he says in a homily on Ezekiel, “I have known just men who persevered in the faith who were handed over to wild beasts and were torn to pieces by them.”61 These close encounters with martyrs at such an early age made a deep impression on Origen’s mind and faith. This was the first persecution that Origen experienced. There would be two more that directly affected him. Not long after Origen had moved his place of residence from Alexandria to Caesarea, in 235 Alexander Severus, the last of the Severan dynasty that had come to power when Origen was a boy in Alexandria, was killed in a mutiny led by Maximinus the Thracian. Origen was approximately fifty years old. Maximinus soon initiated a reign of tyranny and began eliminating people who had been associates of Alexander Severus. He also targeted people of wealth and some leaders of the church.62 In Caesarea, Origen’s friend and patron Ambrose, a wealthy man and perhaps also a public official under Alexander Severus,63 was arrested along with Protoctetus, a presbyter. Origen addressed his treatise Exhortation to Martyrdom to these two men. He urges that they remain true to the confession of the one God and that they make this confession with their mouths, and not only in their hearts. These were two of the important elements in the faith of the secondcentury church that were discussed above: (1) there is only one God, and (2) Christian faith must be demonstrated visibly in the way the Christian lives.64 Belief assumedly

75.

61.  HomEz 4.7, trans. Origen: Homilies 1–14 on Ezekiel, ACW 62, 62. See Origen, Commentary, FOTC 89, 5–6. 63. See ExhMart 36. 64. See ExhMart 5–7.

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held in the heart was cancelled by contradictory overt actions. Origen’s views on martyrdom had matured from that of the young teenager who wanted to volunteer for martyrdom when his father was arrested in Alexandria. Throughout the Exhortation to Martyrdom Origen encourages his friends to faithfulness to their confession and praises martyrdom as an ultimate confession of faith. But nowhere in the treatise does he speak of himself or anyone else seeking martyrdom. In the later Book 28 of his Commentary on John, when he discusses the statement that Jesus withdrew from Jewish territory to Ephrem when the Jews were seeking to kill him, he says that these words counsel against hastily rushing to death by martyrdom and encourage withdrawal from danger when that is possible. Nevertheless, if caught in a situation where this is not possible one should faithfully accept martyrdom.65 The final persecution that affected Origen directly was that instigated by the emperor Decius in 251. A number of bishops—Eusebius mentions those of Rome, Jerusalem, and Antioch—were arrested and either executed or died in prison. Origen was arrested and severely tortured but survived the imprisonment.66 Decius’ reign lasted less than two full years. Eusebius puts Origen’s death very vaguely early in the reign of Decius’ successor Gallus and says he was sixty-nine years old when he died. While Origen was not executed nor did he die in prison, he nevertheless, seems to have died when he did as the result of his treatment during the persecution of Decius. Persecution and martyrdom were never far removed from Origen in the whole course of his life. 65.  John 11:54; ComJn 28.192–201. 66.  Eusebius, H.E.6.39.

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QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. Which of the influences on Origen’s early life do you think probably had the greater impact on his later thought? Why do you think this? 2. How would you have reacted to the various encounters with persecution that Origen experienced in his lifetime? 3. What do Origen’s writings contribute to our knowledge of the books of Scripture recognized by the church at that time?

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Chapter 2

ORIGEN AMONG CHRISTIANS AND JEWS IN ALEXANDRIA AND CAESAREA ORIGEN AND THE CHURCH IN ALEXANDRIA1 The church in Alexandria in Origen’s time was a very mixed group of people comprising Jews and gentiles, heterodox gnostic Christians and legalistic Christians, Christians who held Marcion’s view that the Hebrew Scriptures should not be used by Christians and Christians who were circumcised and wanted to observe the Mosaic law. Various gnostic Christians, such as Basilides, led schools in Alexandria as did the Hebrew Christian Pantaenus and his pupil Clement of Alexandria. We do not know how Christianity first reached Alexandria. The Pauline mission described in the Acts of the Apostles moved northwest from Antioch toward 1.  For a more detailed discussion of this subject see Heine, Origen: Scholarship, 26–64.

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Rome. Nothing is said of the evangelization of Egypt and the north African coast in this earliest description of the expansion of Christianity. Luke refers to African nations only three times in the Acts of the Apostles; Egypt and Libya are mentioned in the list of countries from which Jews present at Pentecost had come; Philip is said to have evangelized a court official from Ethiopia who was on his way home from Jerusalem;2 and later Apollos, described as a Jew from Alexandria, eloquent and well-educated in Scripture, is introduced as coming to Ephesus and preaching Jesus there.3 The majority of ancient manuscripts of Acts 18:25 say nothing about where Apollos had learned about Jesus, but the fifth-century manuscript codex D records that he had been “instructed in the word of the Lord in his fatherland.” This reading, if correct, would indicate that there were Christians in Egypt very early. Carl Holladay, in his recent critical commentary on Acts, suggests that the tense of the verb used in the reading of the majority of manuscripts, which say that Apollos “had been instructed in the way of the Lord,” “invites us to imagine a previous period of instruction in Alexandria.”4 Neither the verb tense nor the reading in Codex D provides conclusive evidence, of course, but if Apollos did learn about Jesus in Alexandria, the most likely first evangelists to preach Jesus there were those Jews from Egypt who Luke says were present at Pentecost.5 Whoever the first preachers of Jesus in Alexandria were, the earliest Christians in Alexandria most likely came from the Jewish community. Alexandria

2.  See Acts 2:5–10; 8:26–39. 3.  See Acts 18:24–25. 4.  Holladay, Acts, 362–63. 5.  See Pearson, “Earliest Christianity,” 134–36.

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was home to the largest diaspora community of Jews in the first century A.D. There was a contingent of Christians from the Jewish community in the Alexandrian church when Origen was there. These Jewish Christians are not to be identified with those referred to as Ebionites by the larger church and labeled heretical. The Jewish Christians in Alexandria may, however, have met as a church separately from the gentile churches, probably meeting in the areas where they lived. The first Christians met in homes, and probably in homes of Christians located nearest to themselves. Alexandria was the second largest city in the empire at that time, with approximately a half-million residents, and it was separated into five districts that were populated primarily by different ethnic groups. The Jews lived in two of these districts. The Jewish Christians in Alexandria most likely met in homes in the Jewish sections of the city. There was a gospel called the Gospel of the Hebrews that seems to have been in use among these Jewish Christians in Alexandria. Origen knew of this gospel for he cites from it twice in works that we still possess. In the second book of his Commentary on John, which was written in Alexandria, he says, “if someone accepts the Gospel according to the Hebrews,” and then quotes a statement from it.6 His introduction of the statement is curious in that he does not speak against the gospel though he does not accept it himself as equal to the four Gospels recognized by the church. It may have been his respect for his fellow Jewish Christians who did recognize this gospel that led him to introduce it in such a neutral fashion. Origen makes several references in his Alexandrian works to a person he designates simply as 6.  ComJn 2.87, trans. Origen, Commentary, FOTC 80, 116; see also HomJer 15.4, trans. Origen: Homilies on Jeremiah, FOTC 97, 161, and Jerome, Lives of Illustrious Men 2 (NPNF 2, 362).

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“the Hebrew.” It is clear from some of the teachings he attributes to this person that “the Hebrew” was a Christian. Origen clearly respected this man deeply. He seems to have been a figure in Origen’s early life, for it appears that he was dead before Origen began writing his treatises. Alexandria had long been a center for heterodox Christianity, hosting at different times such well-known gnostic Christians as Basilides, Valentinus, Heracleon, and Carpocrates. Marcion may have spent some time there; his disciple Apelles certainly later spent time in Alexandria. Beyond these well-known leaders of heterodoxy there were others, such as the man named Paul that Eusebius says shared the home of the lady in Alexandria with Origen when Origen’s father had been martyred. Origen often groups Marcion, Basilides, and Valentinus together when he refers to views he considered heretical. At the other far end of the theological scale from the gnostic-type Christians were those of a legalistic bent who insisted on reading Scripture literally and, to some extent at least, keeping the law of Moses. In a comment on John 1:13, where the narrator speaks of those born, “Not from blood, or the will of flesh or the will of man but from God,” Origen says, clearly with such legalists in mind, And consider . . . if it is possible that the person who thinks he is pious and a son of God by offering perceptible sacrifices that are in accordance with the law is [in fact] a son of blood. For these people think they are pleasing to God through slaughters and the shedding of blood. . . . They prefer to please the will of the flesh when they are circumcised in the flesh and wish to embrace Judaism openly with no concern for the heart and the Judaism which is in secret.7 7.  FragJn 8; see Rom 2:28–29.

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These words would have been in one of the lost books of the Commentary on John, which were written in Alexandria.8 In another Alexandrian writing, Origen attacks Christians who misunderstand what Scripture says about the future resurrection and the life that is promised thereafter. He does not group such people among the heterodox. He says they are “some of our own people” who either because they lack intellect or education hold unworthy views of the resurrection of the body and the nature of the life that is to follow this life. He describes such people as those who read the law literally in lieu of the labor of thinking, and consequently derive a false understanding of what Scripture teaches.9 Clement of Alexandria, whose time in Alexandria overlapped with the very early life of Origen, was born in the mid-second century in Athens. His parents were not Christians, and we know nothing about his conversion. What we know about his early life is what he tells us himself. He travelled widely to study with various teachers, whom he refers to as being in Greece, Magna Graecia, Syria, the East, and finally a Hebrew from Palestine whom he found in Egypt. The latter was Pantaenus, who had a school in Alexandria. These all appear to have been Christian teachers, for Clement refers to their preserving the teaching derived from the apostles.10 A number of Clement’s writings have been preserved, which is unique among Alexandrian Christians who wrote 8.  Books 1–2 are extant and reach only John 1:7. Book 6, which was the beginning point for Origen’s resumed work in Caesarea, begins with commentary on John 1:19. The excerpts preserved of Books 4 and 5 do not contain any commentary on John. 9.  Princ 2.10.3; 2.11.2 (Origen On First Principles, trans. Butterworth, 140–41; 147–48). 10.  Clement, Stromata 1.1.

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in the late second and early third century. The writings are addressed to a cultured, educated audience. They are quietly apologetic as Clement attempts to present the Christian faith winsomely and convincingly to the Alexandrian intelligentsia. The title “Apostle to the Intellectual,” once suggested for the twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich, would be appropriate for Clement.11 Clement took a positive approach to philosophy, considering it to be God’s gift to the Greeks in the same way that the law was to the Hebrews. He did not, however, sell out, so to speak, to Greek philosophy, at least in his own understanding. He insisted that even if his teaching was expressed differently than what one might find in Scripture, its source and meaning was to be found in Scripture. The role of philosophy in relation to Scripture was that of a preparatory discipline preparing the soul for the true faith.12 This view of philosophy’s usefulness is very similar to what Origen later wrote to his former student Gregory about philosophy being preparatory instruction for the study of Scripture.13 Henry Chadwick once labeled Clement “The liberal Puritan” and said, “Clement is Hellenized to the core of his being, yet unreserved in his adhesion to the Church in the sense of being wholly opposed to Gnosticism and bound to the authority of scripture as inspired revelation by which alone he has certitude concerning God’s will and purpose.”14 Origen’s relationship with Clement is a mystery. Neither ever mentions the other in their preserved works. This makes it unlikely, though not impossible, that Eusebius is 11.  Brown, Ultimate Concern, 193. 12.  Clement, Stromata 1.5.28.3; 7.3.20.2. 13.  Origen, EpistGreg, 1. 14.  Chadwick, Early Christian Thought, 64.

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correct when he says that Origen had been a student of Clement.15 If Clement was among the teachers who fled from Alexandria during the persecution in the reign of Septimius Severus,16 when Origen’s father was martyred, this might explain why Origen never mentions him in his writings. In a portion of a letter from Alexander of Jerusalem to Origen quoted by Eusebius, Alexander refers to Pantaenus and Clement as honored men of blessed memory and then remarks that it was through them that he had come to know Origen.17 That shows that Alexander saw some kind of connection between the three men. There are some similarities between Clement’s approach to the Christian faith and that of Origen. Stroumsa has pointed out that Clement understood Christians to be divided into two classes, the simple, who were believers, and the perfect, who were knowers, which is the meaning of the word “gnostic.” Clement used the term “gnostics” of those Christians who looked deeper into the meaning of scriptural texts in search of esoteric meanings. (He did not mean it in the technical sense that it usually has in Christian usage when those such as Basilides are labeled “gnostics.”) Corresponding to these two classes of Christians, Clement also believed that there are two levels of understanding Scripture: a literal or surface meaning and a deeper or hidden, secret meaning.18 Origen used these same two categories of both people and Scripture.19 Did Origen learn these distinctions from Clement? Or, did both Clement and Origen learn them from Pantaenus? Unfortunately, we 15.  See Eusebius, H.E. 6.6.1. 16.  Eusebius, H.E. 6.3.1. 17.  Eusebius, H.E. 6.14.9. 18.  Stroumsa, “Clement, Origen,” 55–56. 19. See Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 1, 7–14.

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cannot answer these questions. Eusebius tells us that already as a child under the instruction of his father Origen was looking for deeper meaning in Scriptural texts.20 That suggests that such ideas may have been in the air, so to speak, in the Alexandrian context. Clement was definitely a factor in the Christian culture in Alexandria that Origen shared even though direct links between the two cannot be established with certainty. It was in this diverse Christian community that Origen did his work in Alexandria. ORIGEN AND THE JEWISH COMMUNITY AT CAESAREA Origen undoubtedly had contact with the Jewish community in Alexandria. The majority of Jews he knew in Alexandria, however, seem to have been those who had become Christians, such as the man Origen occasionally refers to as “the Hebrew.” Philo was one Jewish author whose writings Origen certainly knew when he was in Alexandria. Origen’s contact with him, however, was purely literary. Philo had been dead more than a century when Origen lived in Alexandria. Philo had, however, written extensively and most of his writings were on sections of the Old Testament books of the Law. Philo understood the Jewish religion from the perspective of Plato’s philosophy and read the Mosaic books allegorically. We know that Origen had access to and had read many, if not all, of Philo’s works. Some modern scholars of Philo have suggested that Origen may have copied all of Philo’s works and had them in his personal library. It has also been suggested by some that Origen’s copies of Philo’s works may be the chief source of the works of Philo that we possess today. 20.  Eusebius, H.E. 6.2.9.

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Origen, as most ancient writers, rarely mentions the sources he draws on in his writings. Philo is one of the few authors Origen sometimes names in his writings in reference to something he is saying. He mentions Philo’s name in three separate places, once recommending what Philo has written as an important source for understanding a particular passage in Genesis.21 There are also at least twenty-three additional passages where it is rather certain that Origen is referring to Philo, but his name is not mentioned. In these anonymous references Origen usually introduces the reference with a vague phrase such as “one of my predecessors says,” or “someone says.” The statement that follows such a phrase often resembles a viewpoint expressed by Philo. Origen was aware, of course, that Philo was a Jew. He saw himself, nevertheless, standing in the same exegetical tradition as Philo. He never criticizes Philo’s exegesis; he rarely even disagrees with it. On the one occasion that he clearly does disagree, he still introduces Philo’s position very respectfully: “And Philo,” he says “who is also wellrespected among intelligent people for many of his treatises on the Mosaic Law, says . . . .”22 Origen saw himself and Philo as being on the same side, so to speak, in their interpretation of Scripture. He clearly had a very positive attitude toward the writings of this Jewish philosopher and exegete. When Origen moved from Alexandria to Caesarea he encountered a much smaller city, but a city with a strong and active Jewish presence. In addition to the synagogue there was a thriving rabbinical academy. Approximately two years before Origen took up residence in Caesarea 21.  Cels 4.51; 6.21; ComMt 15.3. 22.  ComMt 15.3.

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Rabbi Hoshaya established a school there (A.D. 230). Hoshaya died about 250 and Origen about 254. Their time in Caesarea, therefore, was largely coextensive. Hoshaya was considered the preeminent rabbinic authority of his time. Students flocked to his academy and some of them became outstanding rabbis in the following generation. Origen too, by this time, was a widely known and respected Christian teacher and interpreter of Scripture. He also started a school in Caesarea that attracted many students who later became significant leaders in the church. It is highly probable that Origen had contact and conversations with a number of these rabbis, possibly even Hoshaya himself, but no proof exists. Many unsuccessful attempts have been made to show conversations between Hoshaya and Origen. Neither of the two men, however, is ever named as a dialogue partner. In the Contra Celsum, written late in his life in Caesarea, Origen refers to earlier conversations that he has had with Jews considered to be “wise,” but he never mentions any names.23 His remark that these conversation partners were considered “wise” by the Jews suggests that they were rabbis who were wellknown for their teachings. Maren Niehoff has argued that “Origen and the rabbis” were “lively discussion partners, highly aware of each other’s interpretations.” Origen, she says, takes explicit note of Jewish exegesis; the rabbis, on the other hand, do not mention an alternative interpretation, but seem to have taken Origen’s view into account in formulating their own in some passages.24 In another essay she compares Origen’s comments in the fragmentary remains of his commentary on Genesis with views expressed in the rabbinic Genesis 23.  Cels 1.45, 55; 2.31. 24.  Niehoff, “Origen’s Commentaries on the Old Testament.”

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Rabbah and concludes that Origen “clearly formulated his own thoughts on the book of Genesis in light of the views of his rabbinic colleagues in the Land of Israel. . . . Moreover, the rabbis contributing to Genesis Rabbah seem to have been aware of certain interpretations offered by Origen.”25 There are several passages scattered through Origen’s writings produced at Caesarea that speak of interaction with Jewish leaders. These leaders are not named, unfortunately, but the passages are significant, nevertheless, in showing the varied nature of Origen’s contacts with the Jewish community there. Some of the interactions were friendly and others confrontational. In some Origen presents himself as the learner, in others as the teacher, and in yet others, defender against what he considered hostile attacks on the church. When Origen discusses Matthew 15:1–2 in his Caesarean Commentary on Matthew—where Matthew describes the Pharisees accusing Jesus’ disciples of not keeping the tradition of the elders, and Jesus’ subsequent shifting of the discussion to the issue of how the Pharisees violated the law of God about honoring father and mother by their crafty application of one of the traditions of the elders—Origen says he would not have understood the issue “had not one of the Hebrews called our attention to what is in the passage.”26 This discussion between Origen and an unnamed Jew seems to have been collegial. There is no debate or argument between them. A Jew points out to Origen how one of their traditions worked and how this applied to the passage of Scripture in the Gospel of Matthew that Origen must have been working on at the time. 25.  Niehoff, “Origen’s Commentary on Genesis,” 152. 26.  ComMt 11.9.

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We do not know whether Origen had raised the question to his Jewish conversation partner or whether he had been present when the tradition about Corban was being discussed by some Jewish scholars and had perceived how this applied to the passage in Matthew’s Gospel. However, it happened, it shows Origen’s willingness to learn from the rabbis in Caesarea, and it shows that not all of his encounters with them were argumentative. There is another clear example of Origen learning from a Jewish scholar in Caesarea that lacks any indication of a polemical relation between them. This occurs in a Greek fragment from Origen’s lost commentary on the Psalms that he wrote in Caesarea. The discussion concerns how one ascertains the authorship of psalms where no author is indicated in the psalm text. This conversation was with Ioullus, who Origen says was the patriarch, and another Jewish man considered wise. Unfortunately, Ioullus has never been successfully identified. What Origen learned was that among the Jews, psalms lacking the name of an author in their inscriptions were considered to have been written by the person named as author in the preceding psalm. Origen’s account indicates that there was a disagreement between himself and Ioullus on the number of psalms to be attributed to Moses. It was, however, the kind of disagreement that is common among scholars arguing over the interpretation of a text.27 More of an argumentative tone is evident in Origen’s treatment of Matthew’s passage about divorce in Matthew 19. The discussion is cast as an imaginary argument, but it must represent actual conversations Origen had been involved in with Jewish scholars. “But perhaps some Jewish man,” he says, “will dare to oppose our Savior’s teaching 27.  PG 12.1056B-1057C.

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and say that Jesus . . . permitted divorcing a wife like Moses did.” He goes on to say that the Jewish man will claim that Moses’ words about the discovery of “a shameful deed in her” are the same as Jesus’ words about “sexual immorality.” Origen counters with the argument that the law demanded that a wife involved in adultery be stoned, which eliminated the point of writing a bill of divorce and cancelled out the identification of Moses’ reference to a “shameful deed” with Jesus’ words about “sexual immorality.”28 In a reference to Matthew 11:12–13 about clean and unclean foods, he alludes to accusations from Jews that the Christians do not obey the food laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, which prompts his response that Jesus is teaching through the words in Matthew 11 that “we are not to think that the goal in Scripture lies in the common understanding of these words.”29 On the other hand, he also knows that there are Christians who follow Jewish customs. He applies Jesus’ warning about the “leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees” in Matthew 16:6 “to those who choose to live physically as the Jews do along with living as Christians.”30 Not everything, however, was congenial between Origen and the synagogue. He can also lash out angrily at Jewish attitudes toward Christians as he does in the following passage from his Commentary on Matthew when he comments on Jesus’ last days in Jerusalem when he is handed over by the Jewish priesthood to the Romans for torture and death. But if, according to a certain way of signifying things, humans are the city [he means 28.  ComMt 14.24. 29.  ComMt 11.12. 30.  ComMt 12.5.

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Jerusalem], even now Jesus is delivered in Jerusalem . . . to the Jews who claim to be serving God. And those who are high priests, as it were, and the scholars, who boast that they interpret the divine scriptures, condemn Jesus to death by their evil speech against him. They are always handing Jesus over to the Gentiles, mocking him and his teaching among themselves, and tongue-lashing the worship of God through Jesus Christ. They themselves crucify him by their anathemas and their desire to destroy his teaching.31

That, and similar passages, show that not everything in Caesarea was congenial between Origen and the synagogue. Origen reflects a very definite tension between the church and the synagogue in his exegesis of the Song of Songs. “I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem” the biblical text says, “Do no gaze on me because I am dark.”32 Origen identifies the black bride as the church of the gentiles and the daughters of Jerusalem as the synagogue. He understands the daughters of Jerusalem to vilify the bride as ugly because she is black.33 The “daughters of Jerusalem” are the Jews, whom Paul identified as “most dear because of the election of the fathers, but enemies because of the gospel.”34 Origen’s choice of this Pauline statement to identify the “daughters of Jerusalem” suggests the tension he felt in his dealings with the synagogue. He was vividly aware—primarily because of the Pauline arguments in Romans 9–11—of the importance of the 31.  ComMt 16.3. 32.  Song of Songs 1:5–6 (NRSV). 33.  ComCant 2.1.1. 34. Rom 11:28.

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ancestry of the Jews in the divine plan of salvation. But on the other hand, he was also intensely aware of the current hostility of the synagogue to the church. The “daughters of Jerusalem,” he says, disdain the bride because she is not descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, nor was she a recipient of the teachings of the Mosaic law.35 The verbs Origen chooses to express this attitude of the synagogue to the church are much stronger than anything that appears in the text of Song of Songs 1:5–6. In the biblical text, the bride says to the daughters of Jerusalem, “Do not look at me because I am blackened” (my italics). Origen, however, says the daughters of Jerusalem “despise” the church from the gentiles and “vilify” it “because of its lowly origins.” He further identifies the church of the gentiles with the Ethiopian woman that Moses married.36 Just as Miriam and Aaron had opposed Moses’ marriage to the Ethiopian so the synagogue, identified with Miriam, and the Jewish priesthood, identified with Aaron, opposed the church of the gentiles.37 The Caesarean Rabbi Isaac related a parable in relation to Song of Songs 1:6 that Reuven Kimelman considers to have been a response to Origen’s interpretation of the verse. The parable goes as follows: It happened once that a provincial lady had a black maidservant who went down with a companion to draw water from the spring, and she said to the companion: Tomorrow my master is going to divorce his wife and marry me. Why? Asked the other. She replied: Because he saw 92.

35.  ComCant 2.1.3–4, trans. Origen: The Song of Songs, ACW 26, 36. Num 12:1.

37.  ComCant 2.1.22–23, trans. Origen: The Song of Songs, ACW 26, 96–97. See Heine, Origen: Scholarship, 211–14.

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her hands stained. Retorted the other: Foolish woman, listen to what you are saying. Here is his wife whom he loves exceedingly, and you say he is going to divorce her because once he saw her hands stained. How then will he tolerate you who are stained all over and black from the day of your birth? . . . If the sun of idolatry has tanned us, you are darkened from birth. While you were still in your mother’s womb you served idols.38

Rabbi Isaac’s story suggests bitterness on the side of the synagogue in the debate with the church about who constituted the people of God. It cannot be missed that the servant girl in the story is considered to hold not just a false, but a stupid opinion about herself and her relationship with her master. Origen’s remarks in a homily on Exodus delivered in this same general time in Caesarea show a similar rancorous attitude on the part of the church to the synagogue as he identifies the gentile church as the true Israel instead of that Israel “according to the flesh.” He says to his gentile congregation as he interprets Exodus 20:3, “These words are addressed much more to you who were made Israel spiritually by living for God. . . . For although we are Gentiles in the flesh, in spirit we are Israel . . . .”39 Origen’s relationship with the Jewish community at Caesarea was mixed. He had some congenial, collegial relationships with some of the community, at least, but he also had some serious confrontational issues with others. Matthew 13:53–54 speaks of Jesus completing his teaching in a certain area and then returning to his fatherland where he began to teach in the synagogue. The people in 38.  Kimelman, “Rabbi Yohanan,” 593. 39.  HomEx 8.2, trans. Origen, Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, FOTC 71, 320.

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the synagogue were amazed at his teaching but also dismissive of it, questioning where he got his knowledge, since he was “the carpenter’s son.” Origen says on this passage: And if anyone carefully observes Jesus Christ, “a stumbling-block to the Jews” by whom he is persecuted even now, but who is preached and has been accepted in faith among the Gentiles . . . , he will see that Jesus has no honor in his own fatherland, but he is honored by the Gentiles, the strangers “to the covenant.” The evangelists have not recorded what he said when he was teaching in their synagogue, but described it as so great and of such a kind that everyone was amazed. It is likely that what was said went beyond their scripture. But “he was teaching in their synagogue,” neither separating from it nor rejecting it.40

The final statement is important for understanding Origen’s attitude toward the Jews in Caesarea. Jesus, even though disputed and attacked in the synagogue, did not abandon it, nor did Origen abandon his interaction with the synagogue, even if sometimes it was tense. Origen is often referred to in connection with Alexandria, sometimes being called Origen of Alexandria and at others simply the Alexandrian. This Alexandrian connection may rest on the fact that he was born and educated there, or that he has traditionally been labeled with a method of exegesis associated with Alexandria.41 He also began his career as a writer there, though what remains of that, except for brief fragments and references in other works, is only the first two books of the Commentary on 40.  ComMt 10.16, trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 1, 49, my emphasis. 41.  Origen’s exegesis will be discussed below in chapter 3.

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John and the On First Principles. The majority of his most important works were produced at Caesarea, and certainly the majority of his works that are extant today. It was at Caesarea that Origen matured as a scholar and exegete of Scripture; it was also at Caesarea that he had the experience of regularly addressing the assembly of the church in homilies on Scripture, many of which have been preserved. Origen’s Caesarean experience was not a small footnote in the volume of his life. The synagogue, academy, and church at Caesarea are at least as important in understanding Origen, if not more so, than his contacts with the scholarly secular and heterodox culture of Alexandria. He should be remembered as Origen of Alexandria and Caesarea. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. How did the church in Alexandria in Origen’s time differ from the church with which you are acquainted? 2. Do you think the evidence points to Origen having been a student of Clement of Alexandria? Provide some reasons for your answer. 3. Would you describe Origen’s relationship with the Jewish community at Caesarea as positive or negative? 4. Do you think the milieu of the city of Alexandria or of Caesarea was more important in terms of influencing Origen? Why?

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PART II

ORIGEN’S THOUGHT

Chapter 3

THE INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE DEVOTE YOURSELF TO THE READING OF SCRIPTURE Sometime in the latter portion of Origen’s life, after he had moved to Caesarea and established a school there, he had a student named Gregory from Cappadocian Pontus. Gregory had already spent time studying rhetoric and Roman law in other places before he encountered Origen’s school at Caesarea. He was captivated by Origen and remained under his instruction in Caesarea for several years. When he left, he composed and delivered a long speech in honor of Origen. In this speech, after briefly sketching his own life prior to his encounter with Origen, he describes Origen’s teaching in his school at Caesarea in glowing terms. He was deeply impressed both by the subjects treated and by Origen as a teacher. It is generally recognized that the second portion of Gregory’s speech describes the syllabus followed in Origen’s school. It began with the study of dialectic, went on to physics, geometry, astronomy, and ethics,

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and climaxed in the study of theology. The latter meant primarily the study of Scripture and especially the search for the deeper meaning in Scripture.1 Gregory’s speech makes clear that the study of philosophy was pursued rigorously in Origen’s school. He began by using a Socratic approach to teach his students how to question their own thoughts, and think clearly about a subject before speaking.2 He also put a strong emphasis on ethical instruction, but not, as Gregory says, of the knowledge alone of ethics, but of ethical living. This, Gregory goes on to say, Origen accomplished most effectively by the example of his own life.3 Origen also insisted on a wide and careful reading of the philosophers; he did not emphasize any particular philosophy over another.4 The students were counseled, moreover, not to become the devotees of any particular school of philosophy, but to devote themselves only to God and his prophets.5 The school curriculum reached its pinnacle in the study of theology. Over and above his mastery of the other disciplines for which Gregory praises Origen, he says he excelled as an expositor of Scripture, and especially of Scripture’s “dark and enigmatic” sayings. This exceptional insight into the deeper meaning of Scripture causes Gregory to conclude that Origen must participate in the same divine Spirit who inspired the prophets who composed the Scriptures.6 1.  Heine, “Three Allusions to Book 20,” 264. 2.  Grégoire le Thaumaturge, Remercient, ch. 7 (English in ANF 6, 28–30). 3.  Grégoire le Thaumaturge, Remercient, chs. 9–11 (ANF 6, 30–33). 4.  Grégoire le Thaumaturge, Remercient, ch. 13 (ANF 6, 33–35). 5.  Grégoire le Thaumaturge, Remercient, chs. 14–15 (ANF 6, 35–36). 6.  Grégoire le Thaumaturge, Remercient, ch. 15 (ANF 6, 36).

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Sometime after Gregory’s departure from Origen’s school Origen wrote a letter to Gregory. The opening of that letter gives the impression that Gregory had not yet decided what profession he was going to follow when he left Origen. Origen begins by praising Gregory’s intelligence and natural abilities. “Your natural facility can make you an accomplished Roman lawyer and a Greek philosopher of the highly regarded schools of thought. But my wish,” Origen says, “is that you use the full power of your natural facility completely for the Christian faith.”7 In the remainder of the letter there is a very slight hint that Origen may fear that his emphasis in his school on secular subjects, and particularly on philosophy, may have nudged Gregory toward a life in philosophy. He immediately urges Gregory to take the things from philosophy that might be useful as “preparatory teaching for Christianity” and to take from the other educational disciplines such things as would “be useful” for interpreting Scripture. He compares this to the Hebrews asking the Egyptians “for vessels of silver and gold” when they left Egypt in the exodus. The Hebrews constructed “the objects in the Holy of Holies from what they took from the Egyptians,” Origen says.8 In other words, they made holy use of unholy, foreign objects. He hastens to warn Gregory, however, that such alien learning must be used with caution and discretion; otherwise it can work to the harm of both the person using it and the church, for some, he says, have used it to construct heretical fabrications in the Scriptures.9 This leads Origen to his concluding exhortation to his student: “Devote yourself 7.  Letter to Gregory 1. This and the following translations from Origen’s letter are mine from the Greek text of Crouzel (SC 148). 8.  Letter to Gregory 2 9.  Letter to Gregory 3.

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primarily to the reading of the divine Scriptures.” It is not a passive reading, however, that Origen urges on his student. Gregory is to read Scripture with Jesus’ words in Matthew 7:7 ringing in his mind. He is to “knock” at Scripture’s closed doors, and “seek the meaning of the divine Scriptures that is hidden from the majority.” But this is not enough. “The Savior urges us on to this,” Origen adds, “saying not only, ‘Knock, and it will be opened to you,’ and, ‘Seek, and you will find,’ but also, ‘Ask, and it will be given to you.’”10 Scripture, to be understood, must be studied in the context of prayer. Such was Origen’s concluding counsel to his former student: Don’t be wooed from the faith by philosophy. Philosophy can be a useful tool for understanding Scripture, but it can also be dangerous. Use it with caution. This interaction between Gregory and Origen provides us with an important perspective on Origen’s relation to Scripture and philosophy. Earlier scholars of Origen often saw him as a philosopher who loosely related Scripture to his philosophy.11 The interaction with Gregory, however, shows Origen as a person who certainly knew philosophy, but whose life was centered on interpreting Scripture. It can be said confidently that “[w]hoever would understand Origen must take the Bible into serious account, for it stood at the center of his work, his thought, and his entire life.”12 His life was that of an exegete. This is not an unusual view to find expressed today. Origen scholarship has moved on from the old approach to Origen as primarily 10.  Letter to Gregory 4. 11.  See, for example, Eugène de Faye, Origène and, to a large extent, Hanson, Allegory. 12.  Heine, “Reading the Bible,” 131; see also Origen: Commentary, FOTC 80, 3.

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a philosopher.13 Peter Martens published a book in 2012 with the title, Origen and Scripture: The Contours of the Exegetical Life in which he argues that for Origen “Biblical interpretation was . . . a way of life.”14 In an essay published in 2013, Lorenzo Perrone, in searching for autobiographical evidence in Origen’s writings said, “[T]he personal expressions to be found in Origen’s writings . . . point first and foremost to his activity as a biblical scholar.”15 Origen took his own advice, and devoted himself to the reading of Scripture. This reading, however, was not to discover historical facts in Scripture, but to ferret out its deeper, spiritual meaning. OPENING THE SEALED BOOK The fifth chapter of the Apocalypse of John opens with a vivid scene set in the throne-room of God. John sees the one on the throne holding a scroll sealed with seven seals and having writing on both sides and hears an angel crying out, “‘Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?’” When no one was found who could open the scroll John says he began to weep. He was then consoled by one of the elders who told him not to weep because “the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David” had conquered and could consequently open the sealed scroll. When John looked, however, he did not see a lion, but a lamb “standing as if it had been slaughtered.” When the slaughtered lamb took the scroll, “the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell before the Lamb.” They “sing a new song, saying, ‘You are worthy to take the scroll and to open 13.  See Edwards, Origen against Plato. 14.  Martens, Origen, 1. 15.  Perrone, “Origen’s ‘Confessions,’” 9.

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its seals, for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation.’”16 This scene, with its imagery of the sealed book and the slaughtered lamb who alone can open the book is an important key to understand Origen’s view of Scripture and its interpretation. He identifies his understanding of the crucial reference to the sealed book in a discussion in his Commentary on John written early in his life in Alexandria. And what book does John see which has writing on the front and back, and is sealed, and which no one could read and loose its seals, except the lion of the tribe of Juda, the root of David who has the key of David, and who opens and no one will close, and closes and no one will open? For the whole Scripture is what is revealed by the book which has writing on the front because its interpretation is easy, and on the back because it is hidden and spiritual.17

In this reference to the scene in the throne-room of God Origen not only identifies the sealed book with the entirety of Scripture, but he also uses the statement about writing on the front and back to point to his understanding of the two levels of revelation in Scripture: a literal or surface meaning that is understandable and beneficial to all readers, and a hidden or spiritual meaning that is understandable only to the few who have the interest and the ability to search below the surface of the words in the text. What is most important in Revelation 5 for Origen’s approach to Scripture, however, is the statement that the 16.  Rev 5:1–9 (NRSV). 17.  ComJn 5.6, trans. Origen, Commentary, FOTC 80, 164, my emphasis. Origen has blended a part of Rev 3:7 about the key of David with Rev 5 in this citation.

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sealed book can be opened only by the crucified Christ, the slaughtered lamb. It is the crucified Christ who unlocks the mysteries of Scripture. This is what Christ taught the two travelers on the road to Emmaus the evening of the resurrection when he told them that the Christ had to suffer the things that had happened to him in Jerusalem and then took them through the texts of Moses and the Prophets showing them how these scriptures spoke of himself.18 Origen joins the words from Revelation 5 with Luke 24 when he says to his audience in a homily on Exodus: I fear . . . lest by too much negligence and dullness of heart the divine volumes be not only veiled to us, but also sealed. . . . [W]e must not only employ zeal to learn the sacred literature, but we must also pray to the Lord and entreat “day and night” that the lamb “of the tribe of Juda” may come and himself taking “the sealed book” may be gracious enough to open it, for it is he who “opening the Scriptures” kindles the hearts of the disciples so that they say, “Was not our heart burning within us when he opened to us the Scriptures?”19

Christ was present, Origen believed, both speaking and spoken of, in the writings of the Old Testament. His presence was not discernible, however, but was sealed in the words of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms until his passion. The passion of Christ created the good news of the gospel. Consequently, the gospel transforms the writings of the Old Testament into a kind of gospel themselves as the light of the gospel of the cross sweeping over the texts of the Old Testament allows Christ to be seen and heard in 18.  Luke 24:26–27. 19.  HomEx 12.4, trans. Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, FOTC 71, 372, revised.

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them. “Nothing of the ancients was gospel,” Origen says, “before that gospel which came into existence because of the coming of Christ. But the gospel, which is a New Testament, made the newness of the Spirit . . . shine forth in the light of knowledge. This newness of the Spirit removed us from ‘the antiquity of the letter.’”20 The coming of Christ was like yeast added to the lump of dough of the Law and the Prophets.21 As the yeast brings the lump of dough to life, so to speak, so the passion of Christ infused new life into the words of Moses, the prophets, and the psalmists. What Origen means when he talks about the gospel making all other Scripture gospel is that finding Christ in the old Scripture depends on the death and resurrection of Christ. It is the gospel (message) contained in the Gospels (the four books) that makes all Scripture gospel or, as Origen says, using a Pauline metaphor in the On First Principles, “[T]he light contained in the Law of Moses, but hidden by a veil, shone forth at the sojourn of Jesus, when the veil was taken away and the good things, of which the letter had a shadow, little by little became known.”22 Finding Christ in Moses, David, or the prophets, for Origen, depends on reading them in the knowledge of the Christ revealed in the Gospels. He believed that the Old Testament was a sealed book, so far as learning about Christ was concerned, until it was opened by the slaughtered lamb of Revelation 5.23 20.  ComJn 1.36, trans. Origen, Commentary, FOTC 80, 41, my emphasis. 21.  ComJn 1.34, 36, trans. Origen, Commentary, FOTC 80, 41. 22.  Princ 4.1.6, trans. Origen On First Principles Vol. 2. 477; revised; 2 Cor 3:14–16. 23.  On this whole topic see the excerpt from Origen’s commentary on Psalm 1, preserved in Philoc 2.1–2.

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The unity of the Old and New Testaments centered on Christ was extremely important to Origen. He discusses it on several occasions expressing the unity in differing images. One is based on the “peacemakers” who are pronounced “blessed” and “sons of God” in Matthew’s beatitudes.24 After discussing two kinds of peacemakers25 he turns to what he calls a third kind of peacemaker. This is the person who can show what appears to be an inconsistency between parts of Scripture is not actually so, but rather is harmonious. The apparent inconsistency might be between the two Testaments or any of the other recognized blocks of Scriptural text, such as the text of one Gospel with that of another. Origen then compares the whole of Scripture to a harp with strings that can be quite discordant if a person who knows nothing about music begins to strum it. In the same way, he says, “those who do not know how to hear the harmony of God in the sacred Scriptures think the old Scripture is out of tune with the new . . . .” But when a musician such as David takes up the harp, this person produces “the music of God” knowing when to strum the strings of the law and when to strum those of the Gospels or the Prophets. Origen also takes the image of the cornerstone in Psalm 118 that Jesus applies to himself in Matthew’s Gospel26 and applies it to the important role that Christ has in our understanding of Scripture, saying that as cornerstone, he holds “together the two corners of the Old and New Testament.”27 24. Matt 5:9. Origen’s discussion of this beatitude, while missing from the preserved text of his ComMt, has been preserved in Greek in Philoc 6. For an English translation see Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 1, 321–22. 25.  These discussions have not been preserved. 26.  Ps 118:22; Matt 21:42. 27.  ComMt 17.12; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 1, 287.

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His most important discussion of Scripture’s unity when read from the perspective of Christ, however, is in his treatment of the transfiguration story in Matthew’s Gospel. This account of Jesus, Moses, and Elijah conversing on the mountain and the subsequent voice from the cloud later became a kind of icon used by many church fathers to indicate the unity of Scripture. Origen seems to have been the first to draw the symbolic connections between the three persons on the mountain and the literary collections of the Gospels, the Prophets, and the Law. He understands Peter’s suggestion to make a separate tabernacle for each of the three persons to represent an attempt to separate the Law, the Prophets, and the Gospels. The divine voice instructing the three disciples to “hear” the Son alone, however, prompts Origen to say, “For Moses, the Law, and Elijah, Prophecy, have become one only in the Gospel of Jesus.”28 READING THE SEALED BOOK What we have looked at so far provides the supportive framework for understanding Origen’s approach to Scripture. It opens the door, so to speak, to the Christian reading of the Old Testament, but it does not provide a map for the maze of texts found there in which even the most devoted Christian reader could lose her or his way. Origen attempts to provide a map of sorts early in his writing career in the On First Principles, where he proposes how Scripture should be interpreted.29 An equally important guide to how Origen understands Scriptural interpretation 28.  ComMt 12.38, 40, 43; Cels. 6.68; HomLev 6.2; ComRom 1.10; Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. I, 120–23. 29. See Princ 4.2.1–4.3.15.

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is also present scattered throughout his commentaries and homilies, where he applies various principles and techniques of interpretation and sometimes talks about them as he does so. It is to this map that Origen provides for reading Scripture that we now turn. Reading Scripture correctly Origen believed depended, first of all, on understanding how and why Scripture had been composed. He has no doubt that the Scriptures come ultimately from God. He discusses the divine inspiration of Scripture as a sort of preface to his instructions on how to interpret Scripture.30 His usual way of describing the authorship of Scripture is that it is the product of either the Holy Spirit or the Logos (Word) of God. When he uses the latter expression, he is not referring to a written or spoken word, but to the Logos (Word) of which John speaks in John 1:1 when he says, “In the beginning was the Logos (Word), and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God.” Thus, Origen means the second person of the Trinity when he refers to the Logos as author of Scripture. He did not confuse the person of the Logos and the Holy Spirit, but he did recognize some areas of overlap in the functions ascribed to them in Scripture. One such area was revealing the will of God. Origen may refer to either as the revealer of Scripture with no intended differentiation of Scripture’s divine source. Origen was a highly educated person, especially in the disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy.31 Part of the educational process that he would have participated in as a student and later as a teacher involved a set of questions that were addressed to a literary text as teacher and student began reading the text together. The number of questions 30.  Princ 4.1.1–4.1.7. 31.  See Neuschäfer, Origenes als Philologe.

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addressed to a particular text ranged from two or three to nine. Which questions were used depended on the type of text being studied.32 Three questions appear repeatedly in Origen’s exegetical studies. The more important and most often mentioned question involves the aim of the author in the text. A second question—not necessarily in the order of discussion—asks about the usefulness of the text being discussed. The principle of usefulness was a corollary for Origen of his view that every word of Scripture comes from the Holy Spirit. Paul had said in 2  Timothy 3:16 that “all scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” In a homily on Joshua, Origen argues, in connection with 2 Timothy 3:16, that we should not reject even those Scriptures we do not understand, because “we believe that ‘all Scripture inspired by divine influence is useful.’” He compares it to a physician prescribing a treatment for an ailment. The prescription performs its healing work even if we do not understand the relationship between the prescription and the ailment. In the same way, he concludes, we should believe that Scripture “is useful and benefits the soul even if our perception at the present does not understand why.”33 In a homily on Numbers 33, a text that describes the encampments of the Israelites between Egypt and Canaan and which most people both then and now would see as void of material for Christian edification, Origen insists that nothing in a writing that comes from the Holy Spirit can be useless.34 He proceeds 32.  See Heine, “Introduction to Origen’s Commentary on John”; Heine, “Prologues of Origen’s Pauline Commentaries”; and Heine, “Restringing Origen’s Broken Harp.” 33.  HomJosh 20.2, trans. Origen: Homilies on Joshua, FOTC 105, 177. 34.  HomNum 27.1–2.

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to develop a significant homily on the spiritual journey of the Christian through this world by tracing the encampments of the Israelites on their way to Canaan. A third important question that Origen raised in relation to the biblical texts he interpreted did not come from the lists of questions used in secular education. It was a theologically driven question based on his understanding of the nature of God. Is this meaning of the text, he asked, worthy of God? In On First Principles Origen says that the Spirit had two aims in the composition of Scripture. The first was to hide the deeper doctrines beneath the surface of the literal text of Scripture. This aim of the Spirit, he says, “was pre-eminently concerned with the unspeakable mysteries regarding the affairs of human beings .  .  . in order that one who is capable of being taught may, by searching out and devoting himself to the deep things of the sense of the words, become a participant in all the doctrines of the Spirit’s counsel.”35 These doctrines expressed in figures and mysteries concern the Father and the Son, and particularly the nature of the Son, his incarnation, and his activity. Also included are subjects related to those Origen called “rational beings,” by which he meant angels, humans, and demons. He also included in the mysteries hidden in Scripture the world and the reason for its existence and the problem of evil. The list he provides in Book 4 of On First Principles of the doctrines that are hidden beneath the literal meaning of Scripture to be searched out by those who are able is very similar, though not identical, to what he sets forth in the Preface to On First Principles as a

35.  Princ 4.2.7, trans, Origen On First Principles, Vol. 2.509–11.

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general “rule,” drawn from the apostolic tradition, to guide all theological discussion.36 Origen recognized that there were multitudes of people in the church who for one reason or another lacked the necessary prerequisites for this searching kind of study of Scripture and yet claimed faith in Christ. In his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew he uses the distinction that appears frequently in the Gospel between the crowds and the disciples to distinguish between these multitudes in the church who could not or did not engage in this deeper study and the smaller group that did.37 He did not doubt that these people were Christians just as much as the more inquisitive ones who would try to search out Scripture’s secrets. There was, therefore, he argues, a second aim of the Holy Spirit in Scripture.38 That second aim was to conceal the spiritual doctrines in a narrative that would benefit those persons lacking the aptitude necessary for investigating the spiritual meanings of Scripture. This second aim did not, in Origen’s thought, represent a disparaging view of the narrative of Scripture. He can, in fact, become quite defensive of the literal text of Scripture when he perceives it under attack. For example, when Origen discusses the story of the Samaritan woman in his commentary on the Gospel of John, he identifies the Scriptures with the well of Jacob in the story. The Scriptures, he says, function as introductions to the higher understanding Jesus gives, which the story refers to as a spring of water producing eternal life. But, Origen continues, before one can partake of this higher understanding one must first have drunk regularly and diligently from Jacob’s well, that is, one must 36.  Princ 4.2.7; 1. Preface. 37. See Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. I, 7–11. 38.  Princ 4.2.8.

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have attained a broad understanding of the literal meaning of the Scriptures. He then says that the gnostic theologian Heracleon had referred to the water from Jacob’s well, that is the literal meaning of Scripture, as “insipid, temporary, and deficient.” Origen considered this a slanderous attack on “the ancient words.”39 He defends the literal meaning of Scripture again much later in his life to refute the arrogant arguments of the philosopher Celsus, who ridiculed the stories in Scripture, including those about Jesus. Origen replied that it was because God cares for all people, not just the educated, that he employed a style that common people could understand in Scripture. Once they have taken their initial steps in the faith, these very people can be introduced to the doctrines hidden in Scripture. “For,” he says, “it is obvious even to an ungifted person . . . that many passages can possess a meaning deeper than that which appears at first sight.” Then he makes a very important point: the perception of deeper meaning in Scripture is not dependent solely on a person’s intelligence or education, but depends on the energy and time one invests in studying Scripture and, perhaps even more importantly, on the effort one makes to live as it teaches.40 In a homily on Exodus Origen discusses the general lack of energy and time the majority in the church invest in the study of Scripture. We must recall that very few, if any, of Origen’s congregants would have possessed a copy of Scripture of their own to read and study at home. What the majority learned about Scripture they learned in the assembly of the church, where Scripture was read and then 39.  Origen, ComJn 13.37–58, cf. 13.61, trans. Origen, Commentary, FOTC 89, 76–81. 40.  Cels 7.60; Origen: Contra Celsum, 445–46.

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interpreted in a homily. He castigates his congregation for the lack of attention they give to Scripture in comparison to the attention they focus on education in the liberal disciplines such as grammar or rhetoric. He poses the hypothetical situation of the education of their children and asks if they do not give a child “freedom from all other things” and “make him give his attention to this one study.” You provide the child, he says, with “paedogogues, teachers, books, and expenses” until the child has completed his education. Then Origen turns to the way his parishioners treat the study of Scripture. “Who,” he asks, “seeks a divine education with as much zeal and work as he sought a human education?” He complains that some leave the assembly of the church immediately after the texts for the day have been read, before there has been any explanation of them, others leave during the reading, and some are so occupied in talking that they do not even know if Scripture has been read.41 Origen believed that the stories in Scripture’s literal narratives contain many lessons that are obvious and valuable for instruction in the faith, and that the law contains numerous commands that are important to be obeyed literally. There are places in his commentaries where he interprets the text on the literal level alone, as, for example, in the first two books of his commentary on John. It is important, however, to take note of the distinction between the meaning of “literal” and “historical” in Origen’s thought, and in that of most early Christian authors as well. Occasionally the literal sense of a story may convey historical facts, but this identification is not the more usual meaning of the term “literal” in the interpretative literature 41.  HomEx 12.2; trans. Origen, Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, FOTC 71, 369.

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of the church fathers. One might, for example, explain the facts in Homer’s story of the plague that was destroying the Greek army at Troy, which Homer says was the result of the Greek god Phoebus Apollo answering the prayer of his priest, who had been humiliated by Agammenon, leader of the Greeks.42 By explaining the details about what was happening in the story the interpreter would provide a literal interpretation. This would say nothing about the historical veracity of the story; it would ask none of the questions that modern historians of Greek history would ask to establish whether the story was historically true or false. Origen himself used Homer’s Iliad to highlight the difficulty in establishing whether or not any story about an event in the past actually occurred. Some in his time, as also in modern Homeric scholarship, claimed that the Trojan war had not actually occurred because of the fictitious stories about the gods that Homer had included in the text. Origen did not accept this negative view but believed that Homer had taken a real event and adorned it with mythological stories about the gods.43 He had outlined a similar approach to Scripture much earlier in his writing career. He began his description of the second aim of the Spirit in Scripture, which was discussed above, by explaining how a narrative helpful for those who could not investigate the hidden doctrines in Scripture had been composed that included such subjects as the creation of the world and humanity, the multiplication of the human race, the righteous and unrighteous activities of human beings, wars, conquests, and legislation. In producing this narrative, he explains, the Spirit’s primary aim was to show the connection of spiritual events that was hidden within the story 42.  Homer, Iliad 1.8–52. 43.  Cels 1.42.

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of the events themselves. Events that actually occurred in history were used whenever there were those that would accurately convey the spiritual event. When this was not the case, however, things that had not happened, perhaps could not even happen, were interwoven into the narrative to communicate the truth of the spiritual event. This, he believed, was true not only in the Old Testament but in the New Testament as well.44 It is quite clear in all of Origen’s writings that the hidden meaning in Scripture was the meaning that he considered the more important and that this was the meaning he was most interested in discovering and communicating. In my opinion, Origen is referring to the distinction between those who seek out the deeper meaning in Scripture and those who are satisfied with the literal meaning in the comments he makes on Paul’s words about “what God has prepared for those who love him.” “Scripture knows the difference,” he says, . . . between those who love God and those who fear God, and it knows how much those who love him rise above those who fear him. Some things, therefore, have been prepared even for those who fear him, but he has prepared more for those who love him than what has been prepared for those who fear him.45

How did Origen go about discovering the spiritual meaning hidden in Scripture? He looked to Scripture itself for his guidelines. The Epistles of Paul were especially important to Origen in understanding how Old Testament Scripture was to be interpreted. Paul, the expert 44.  Princ 4.2.9. 45.  1 Cor 2:9; Origene Esegesi Paolina 10 (70), my translation.

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in interpreting and obeying the law,46 had to reread the Hebrew Scriptures after his encounter with the crucified, risen Christ on the road to Damascus.47 The bright light of the resurrected Christ that burst blindingly into his life consequently illumined his reading of the Hebrew Scriptures and caused him radically to rethink and reinterpret them. To oversimplify greatly the results of Paul’s rereading, we can say that he learned that the necessity of Christ’s passion and the salvation of gentiles as well as Jews had “been encoded in Scripture for centuries.”48 The epistles of Paul are filled with references and allusions to deeper, hidden meanings in Old Testament texts such as his statement that God had promised the gospel “beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures,” or that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” where “scriptures” mean the writings of the Old Testament, or that the rock from which the Hebrews drank water in the wilderness was Christ.49 THE PAULINE IMPRINT ON ORIGEN’S INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE Origen considered Paul the master exegete and theologian. He repeatedly appeals to Paul’s authority for exegetical moves that he makes in interpreting Old Testament texts. There were seven Pauline texts especially to which Origen appealed to explain or defend his interpretations: Romans 46.  Phil 3:4–9. 47.  See the account in Acts 9:1–22; retold in 22:1–16 and 26:4–23. 48.  See Acts 26:22–23; Holladay, Acts, 478. 49. Rom 1:1–2; 1 Cor 15:3–4 (NRSV), my emphasis, 1 Cor 10:4. See also Rom 2:28–29; 7:14; 1 Cor 10:11; 2 Cor 3:6, etc.

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7:14; 1 Corinthians 2:10–16; 9:9–10; 10:11; 2 Corinthians 3:6; 3:15–16; and Galatians 4:24.50 It was 1  Corinthians 2:10–16, however, that provided the essential pieces to Origen’s approach to interpreting Old Testament Scripture. We are fortunate to have some fragments preserved of Origen’s comments on these verses. We will examine what he says in these fragments on 1  Corinthians 2 for they provide a kind of macro view of the underpinnings of Origen’s spiritual exegesis of Scripture. It is the Spirit, Origen says, not the human soul, that is able to search “even the depths of God.” He means the Holy Spirit, not the spirit of a person, for the Spirit of which he is speaking must “come to be” in us so that “with the Spirit we may interpret all things, even the depths of God.”51 He proceeds to say on 1 Corinthians 10:11, “Let us understand the things given to us by God, for if the Spirit which is from God is not in us teaching us, we cannot say that ‘we know the things given to us by God,’ for indeed no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God.”52 When Origen refers to “the things given to us by God,” he means primarily the words of Scripture, for he goes on to say, “For the Spirit which is in the person who is seeking and searching for the truth enlightens him, and thus by the continual renewal of his mind he discovers things which he has not learned from human beings.”53 Origen has argued in these remarks on 1 Corinthians 2:10–12 that the interpretation of Scripture depends on the presence of the Holy Spirit enlightening the mind of the interpreter.

50.  See Heine, “Reading the Bible,” 136. 51.  Origene Esegesi Paolina 10 (70). 52.  Origene Esegesi Paolina 11 (72). 53.  Origene Esegesi Paolina 11 (72).

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This enlightening of the interpreter’s mind by the Holy Spirit does not, however, imply that the interpreter is simply a passive receptacle waiting to receive an interpretation from the Spirit. Origen certainly did stress the necessity of prayer in the interpretative process, as we have already noted above concerning his letter to Gregory, where he cites Jesus’ words in Matthew 7:7–8, “Ask, and it will be given to you.” But there, prayer is joined with “seeking” and “knocking,” both activities in which the interpreter must also engage. The same is also true in his discussion of these statements of Paul about the necessity of the interpreter of Scripture being filled with the Spirit from God. He immediately raises the question about the interpreter’s necessary activities and supplies the answer from Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 2:13. We must learn how someone is taught by the Spirit from the words of the apostle, for [he says] “interpreting spiritual things with spiritual things,” [that is] by searching out and examining this text along with this text and bringing together similar things, the mind, as it were, of Scripture is revealed. For in this way I understand the things of God and I am taught by the Spirit, not only by having learned the things of the Spirit who moved Isaiah, but also by having the same Spirit which shut and sealed the words of Isaiah. For unless the Spirit opens the words of the prophets, the things which have been shut cannot be opened.54

What Origen lays out in this discussion is a comparative method of studying Scripture in which the interpreter looks for similar words and ideas in other passages of 54.  Origene Esegesi Paolina 11 (72). The Isaiah reference is to Isa 29:11–12.

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Scripture and uses these comparative passages to come to an understanding of the meaning of the passage being interpreted.55 The general procedure Origen outlines here of comparing one passage of an author with another of the same author, stripped of its spiritual connections, was a common approach to interpreting ancient texts among ancient commentators in general. “It was used by the Greek grammarians to interpret Homer, by philosophers to interpret Aristotle or Plato, and by Hellenistic Jews such as Philo, but also by the rabbis, to interpret the Old Testament.”56 The procedure was to look to other texts by the same author where the same word or idea occurs. Origen, however, was not limited to looking for comparative passages in Isaiah or Jeremiah, for instance, in his search for the meaning of a puzzling word or concept in one or the other of these prophets. He could range over the entirety of Scripture for comparative texts because he believed that the one author of all Scripture was the Holy Spirit. Origen’s comments on comparing spiritual things with spiritual things highlight a major difference between Origen’s approach to understanding Scripture by this method and the approach, for example, of an ancient grammarian comparing one text of Homer with another to understand Homer’s meaning.57 Origen says, in the conclusion of the passage quoted above, “For in this way I understand the things of God and I am taught by the 55. See Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. I, 14–16. 56.  Heine, “Reading the Bible,” 136. 57.  Homer in Iliad 1.1 does call on the Muse of poetry to sing the wrath of Achilles, and in Odyssey 1.1 he appeals to the Muse to tell the story of Odysseus. But this is hardly the same thing as what Origen understands when he attributes the composition of Scripture to the Holy Spirit. And certainly no ancient grammarian claimed inspiration from the Muse for his interpretation of Homer.

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Spirit, not only by having learned the things of the Spirit who moved Isaiah, but also by having the same Spirit which shut and sealed the words of Isaiah. For unless the Spirit opens the words of the prophets, the things which have been shut cannot be opened.” There are two activities of the Spirit mentioned in these statements. The Spirit is at work in the interpreter in bringing together appropriate passages for comparison, and it is the same Spirit who was also at work in the prophet as he wrote the words that are now being interpreted. The Spirit who inspired must also be the Spirit who interprets. Origen continues following Paul’s reasoning in 1  Corinthians 2:14–15 arguing that the “natural person” cannot know the things of God because they are “spiritually discerned.” He then develops an essential point in his interpretative program for the spiritual reading of Scripture. This point is foreign to all ancient secular interpretative methods as well as to most modern ones. The ability to interpret Scripture correctly is directly related to the interpreter’s relationship to the Spirit who inspired Scripture. Origen speaks of this person using the Pauline phrase, “the spiritual person.”58 The spiritual person, Origen says, is . . . the one who no longer lives according to the flesh but lives according to the Spirit and continually grows in his attention to the Spirit, and by stirring up the gift of God more and more, prepares himself to become spiritual, and when he becomes such he is competent to discern “all things,” those of the Greeks, the barbarians, the wise, and the foolish, but no one can scrutinize him because of the greatness of his understanding and of his arguments. 58. See 1 Cor 2:15.

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Then, again using the words of Paul, but this time from Galatians, he provides some discernible markers that define what a “spiritual person” is. Now if you want to recognize the spiritual person, you will recognize them from their fruits. And what are the fruits of the spiritual person by which one must recognize who the spiritual person is? Listen to the apostle saying, “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control.” Where these are present, there the Spirit is present; that person is spiritual. But where some of these are lacking, that person is not yet spiritual.59

This discussion underlines a subtle, but basic principle that Origen applied to Scriptural interpretation. The general life of the person who interprets Scripture is an important factor in interpretation and this life is discernible, even perhaps measurable, by the presence or absence of the virtues Paul lists as the fruits of the Spirit. DISCERNING THE DETAILS IN THE TEXT We must take one further step in our investigation of how Origen read the sealed book. What we have considered to this point is the macro vision mentioned above of Origen’s understanding of Scriptural interpretation drawn primarily from his comments on 1 Corinthians 2:10–16. These have been centered on the nature of Scripture and the faith and character of the interpreter. We must turn now to some of the literary techniques he applied in his interpretive reading of Scripture to draw out its hidden 59.  Origene Esegesi Paolina, 11 (74); quoting Gal 5:22–23.

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spiritual sense. There were a number of such techniques Origen drew on in the development of his interpretations. We will look at only some of the more prominent ones: figurative interpretation (tropologia), allegorical interpretation (allēgoria), anagogical interpretation (anagōgē), and prospological interpretation (prosōpon). The first three techniques in this list are similar with only subtle differences. They are similar in that they all produce a meaning from a text that differs, sometimes quite strikingly, from what the literal words of the text say. Figurative interpretation understands the words of a text to be used, or at least understood by the interpreter, in a sense that they may suggest but do not mean in a simple reading of the text. Allegory was defined by the early second-century Greek author Heraclitus as a way of saying one thing but meaning something different from what was said.60 This definition suggests that if one refers to an interpretation as allegorical that the allegorical meaning stemmed from the author and that the interpreter is only uncovering the meaning that the author intentionally covered by the allegory. Anagogical interpretation refers to a lifting up of the meaning to a higher level than the simple text involves. This, again, puts the emphasis on the action of the interpreter and not of the author. Of these three techniques, only allegory is mentioned in the New Testament. It appears in Galatians 4:24, which is one of the seven Pauline texts mentioned earlier that Origen appeals to in defense of his Scriptural exegesis. There Paul says that the story of the mothers of Abraham’s two sons “is an allegory.” The two women are two covenants. Hagar, the slave, means the Sinai covenant, slavery, and the literal Jerusalem on earth; Sarah, the free woman, means 60.  Heraclitus, 9.

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the Jerusalem above and is mother of the Christians. Origen quotes this text of Paul in his On First Principles when he discusses spiritual interpretation to prove that there are allegories in the law. The law, he says, alluding to Hebrews 8:5, contains “shadows” of “good things to come.” “And, generally speaking,” he adds, “one must seek everywhere ‘the wisdom hidden in a mystery, which God foreordained before the ages for the glory’ of the righteous.”61 The description Origen gives here of allegory is in harmony with the definition by Heraclitus noted above and the assumption that the allegory was intended by the person uttering the words classified as allegorical. Origen states this expressly in his commentary on John when he says, “It is clear that Moses saw in his mind the truth of the Law and the allegorical meanings related to the anagogical senses of the stories he recorded.”62 This way of reading Scripture often makes people uncomfortable because they think it is arbitrary. I will show below that it caused the same reaction among many in Origen’s time as well. Origen, however, was a very careful reader of Scripture and he had an exceptionally wide knowledge of Scripture’s contents. He was rarely arbitrary in his thinking about it. He noted details and distinctions that the average reader, both then and now, often overlooks. There is a very instructive passage in one of his homilies on Numbers where he shows how one should decide between what to take literally and what to take allegorically in the Mosaic legislation. The discussion in Numbers involves the law of the first-fruits that were to be offered to the priests. After summarizing the law Origen says, “I think 61.  Princ 4.2.6, trans. Origen On First Principles 2, 505; 1 Cor 2:7. I have substituted quote marks for italics to indicate the quotation of Scripture. 62.  ComJn 6.22, trans. Origen, Commentary, FOTC 80, 174.

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this law, as also some others, must of necessity be observed even according to the letter. For there are a certain number of commandments of the law which even the disciples of the New Testament keep by compulsory observance.”63 He turns to Psalm 18 (19):8–11 as an example of the distinctions in legal terminology used in Scripture. He notes that the Psalmist refers to “the law of the Lord,” “the testimony of the Lord,” “the statutes of the Lord,” “the commandment of the Lord,” “the fear of the Lord,” and “the judgments of the Lord,” and that a different descriptive phrase is applied to each. He argues that if there were no difference between these terms Scripture would not have used a different description in relation to each. Because they are each described differently, he argues, we must conclude that each term is referring to something unique. He concludes this aspect of his argument by saying, We may, therefore, show from these that a law is one thing, a commandment another, a testimony another, a statute another, and a judgment another. But differences between these are also clearly indicated in the law itself, where it is said, This is the law, and commandments, and statutes, and precepts, and testimonies, and judgments which the Lord commanded Moses.64 Since then these things are so and it is shown by the testimonies of the law itself that these divisions in turn differ from one another, we ought to give very diligent attention to these matters which are recited in the law, because wherever it is written, for example, this is a commandment, we must not immediately understand that a commandment is a law, or wherever it is written these are justifications, they should not be immediately 63.  HomNum 11.1 (PG 12.641A), my translation. 64.  See Deut 4:44; Num 36:13.

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assumed to be a law or a commandment. And likewise, wherever testimony is written, or judgment, one should not be confused with the others, but each one is to be understood separately from the others.65

Origen then makes some applications showing how the knowledge of these distinctions should influence a person making decisions about what to keep literally and what to treat allegorically in the Mosaic legislation. He refers to Hebrews 10:2, where the law is said to hold “a shadow of good things to come.” This same thing should not be assumed, he says, about a commandment, statute, or judgment because the same statement about “a shadow of good things to come” is not applied to these terms in Scripture. He provides an example of how this knowledge works in the interpretation of Scripture by using Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 5:7 to interpret the law of the Passover in Exodus 12:43. “It is not written,” he says, This is the commandment of the Passover, but, “This is the law of the Passover.” And because the law is a shadow of good things to come, undoubtedly the law of the Passover is a shadow of good things to come. When, therefore, I come to that passage which is written of the Passover, I ought to understand that there is a shadow of a good thing to come in that physical lamb and take note that “Christ, our Passover lamb has been slaughtered.”66

He proceeds in the same way mentioning the feast of unleavened bread and other feast days that have the 65.  HomNum 11.1 (PG 12.641C–642A), my translation and emphasis. 66.  HomNum 11.1 (PG 12.642B), my translation and emphases.

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designation “law” attached to them in Scripture. What he has argued in this paragraph is that things labeled as “law” in the Mosaic legislation may be pointing forward to future things,67 but this does not apply necessarily to things labeled “commandment” or any of the other terms he has listed. He cites, as an example, “You shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal,” and the rest of the commandments. “You will not find that these,” he says, “are put forward under the title of law and therefore these scriptures are not voided by the disciples of the Gospel, but are fulfilled because, as I said, it is not a commandment, but law that is said to contain a shadow of good things to come, and therefore we are to keep these literally.”68 He then points out that there are passages that should be kept literally but that also have an allegorical application, such as Jesus’ teaching about marriage in Matthew 19:5–6 and Paul’s allegorical use of these words in Ephesians 5:31–32.69 Origen sometimes uses the terms allegorical and anagogical almost as synonyms. At other times he implies a distinction between the two concepts, as in the following passage. But you will ask regarding the words in the seventy-seventh Psalm,70 “How he worked his signs in Egypt and his wonders in the field of Tanis,” whether “signs and wonders” differ in substance or are the same. On the one hand, in so far as they are signs, they occurred in Egypt, and Egypt itself carries certain spiritual meanings in the anagogical sense. On the other hand, in so far as they are wonders, they occurred 67.  HomNum 11.1 (PG 12.642B-643A). 68.  HomNum 11.1 (PG 12.643A), my translation. 69.  HomNum 11.1 (PG 12.643B-C). 70.  Ps 78:12 (English).

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“in the field of Tanis.” Neither the wonders qua wonders, nor the field of Tanis qua field of Tanis are given an allegorical interpretation. But both the wonders, in so far as they are signs, and field of Tanis, in so far as it is Egypt, require an anagogical meaning.71

In his commentary on John 8:39, where Jesus says, “If you are children of Abraham, do the works of Abraham,” Origen distinguishes between imitating Abraham literally in all the things he did and imitating him by understanding his whole story allegorically. In the latter understanding Abraham’s going forth from his land refers to our leaving the connections that were not good that we had prior to obeying God and going forth to the good and abundant land that God will show us. In this way Origen works through the events in the story of Abraham in relation to a Christian obeying Jesus’ command to “do the works of Abraham.”72 He explicitly calls his interpretation of this passage allegorical and suggests that the whole story of Abraham can be read in this way, citing Paul’s words from Galatians 4:24, “which things are allegorical.”73 Some in Origen’s day, as I said above, did not agree with his way of interpreting Scripture. Many to whom he preached thought Scripture should be interpreted literally in all its aspects, whether it was the beginning of Genesis or the end of Revelation. In a sermon on Psalm 80 (81) we get a glimpse of the tension between Origen and his congregation as he dialogues with what he assumes is their reaction to what he is saying. 71.  ComJn 13.454, trans. Origen, Commentary, FOTC 89, 165. 72.  ComJn 20.66–79, trans. Origen, Commentary, FOTC 89, 219–23. 73.  ComJn 20.74, trans. Origen, Commentary, FOTC 89, 222.

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Then let us see what God commands us. For he says, in a kind of style that I need him in order to understand what he means, “Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.”74 Let those who want us not to interpret allegorically consider, and tell us how we must open our mouth wide, without interpreting allegorically themselves. For the Logos does not want us to open it by spreading our lips widely does he? And how is it not shameful to suppose that God has said these things? How, then, will someone interpret these words if he does not treat the passage figuratively? How will one suppose that these things have been said in a manner worthy of God? For the promise which says, “I will fill it,” also impels us to seek that we may understand the words, “Open your mouth wide,” for when our mouth has been opened wide, God will fill it.75

In this argument Origen appeals to one of the three criteria listed earlier in this chapter that he uses in determining how to interpret a passage of Scripture: Is this interpretation worthy of God? Does the literal sense of this passage express something that is worthy of God either saying or doing? What would it mean literally for God to say, “Open your mouth wide”? A few pages later he brings the homily to a conclusion with a sort of bantering tone, as he says, interpreting Psalm 80:17 (81:16), “And he fed” us “from the fat of wheat and satisfied” us “with honey from the rock,” and “the rock” is “Christ.” “He led them up to the strength of the land; he fed them the fruits of the fields; they sucked honey from a rock.” We who believe in Christ are the ones who suck honey, for what 74.  Ps 80 (81):11. 75.  Origenes Werke Dreizehnter Band, 501–2.

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is sweeter than the words of God? We, therefore, suck honey from the rock. For this reason too, this rock, gives us this word of which we say, “How sweet to my throat are your oracles, beyond honey and the honeycomb.” Solomon, in his Proverbs, says of this honey that we suck from the rock, “When you have found honey, eat what is sufficient,” and elsewhere, “Eat honey, my son, for it is good.” And he commands me to eat honey because this honey is good to eat. I am interpreting allegorically again; and some of you, again, are upset at my allegory. Perhaps the person who takes offense at what is being said about, “Eat honey, my son, for this is good,” says it is good to eat honey, and God, through the Holy Spirit, is commanding us to eat honey. But perhaps the Logos is ordering us to eat the sweet word which is from the rock, so that always loving to be nurtured by the holy word we may eat milk and honey in Christ Jesus, to whom is glory and power forever and ever. Amen.76

Origen seems to me here to be prodding his audience in a teasing manner, as if to say, Think about the implications of reading these words literally. Does the almighty God really want to instruct us through the Holy Spirit to eat honey? Might he not rather want to instruct us to feast on “the sweet word” of our Savior? Whether one agrees or disagrees with Origen’s interpretation of Scripture, his approach can hardly be called arbitrary. There was method in his approach and careful distinctions were made. There is one further literary technique that Origen frequently uses that differs from the three that we have just considered. Modern scholars call this technique 76.  Origenes Werke Dreizehnter Band, 507–8, my translation. The Scriptures quoted are 1 Cor 10:4; Deut 32:13; Ps 118 (119):103; Prov 25:16: 24:13.

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prosopological exegesis.77 It focuses on identifying who is speaking in a text and sometimes also to whom the words are addressed. This approach to reading texts had its roots in the classical period of Greek literature. I was a classical philology major with a specialization in patristic literature in my graduate program. I read a lot of Greek drama, especially the tragedies. In every Greek text of a tragic drama just before the actual text begins, there is a page with the heading in Greek: ta tou dramatos prosōpa, followed by a list of the names of the characters in the drama. Very literally that Greek phrase means, the faces in the drama, but in more meaningful English, it means the characters in the drama. This phrase came out of the way Greek drama was performed. Every character wore a mask, a face that identified that character in the play. An exegetical procedure developed out of this in antiquity focused on identifying in what prosopon or “character” the author of the writing was speaking. The church fathers were educated men who had studied in Greek and Roman schools and had learned the techniques of how to study ancient texts and often applied these techniques to the Scriptures. Justin is the earliest Christian writer who makes conscious reference to this technique and actually alludes to its presence in the classical authors.78 Origen has a discussion of the technique in his very early small commentary on the Song of Songs, where he says, “The things that are said in Scripture cause a lot of confusion for a person who has not understood the unique feature of the characters (prosōpōn) in Scripture,

77.  The definitive work on this subject is Rondeau, Les commentaries patristiques. 78.  See Justin, First Apology, 36.

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that is, those who speak and those to whom the speech is addressed.”79 This method was applied primarily to the Psalms and the Prophets and it was used especially to discover Christ either speaking or being spoken of in these writings. We must recognize, as in the previous techniques, that Origen does not arbitrarily decide that Christ is the speaking voice in a psalm or that it is to him that the speech is addressed. The basic question he asks when trying to determine the speaker in a psalm is, “Who could or would most appropriately say this?” He denies, for example, that the “you” in the statement, “He gave his angels a command concerning you, that they should raise you up in their hands, lest perhaps you strike your foot against a stone,”80 should be understood to be Christ.81 In homily one on Psalm 77 (78):2, “I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter problems from the beginning,” Origen says, “As it is our custom in the Psalms and the Prophets to investigate what character is speaking, so here also we must investigate who the speaker is.” He notes that Matthew attributes these words to Jesus.82 I would have doubted that this statement should be taken “in reference to the Savior,” Origen says, had not Matthew applied the words to Jesus. His reasons for doubting that the words should be taken of Jesus arose from the following words in the psalm where the Psalmist refers to “things that we have heard and known, that our ancestors have told us.”83 Origen did not think these words were fitting to be said by the Savior because Jesus did not 79.  Philoc 7.1. 80.  Ps 90:11–12. 81.  HomLk 31.4. So also on Ps 45:1 in ComJn 1.283–87. 82.  See Matt 13:35. 83.  Ps 78:3.

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know about things from hearing them from the ancestors. He then says, “Had not Matthew, therefore, said that the psalm is from the character of the Savior, I would not have dared refer the things recorded to the Savior. .  .  . What shall I do, however, since Matthew says these things?” Matthew’s application of these words to Jesus, in other words, was a kind of apostolic trump card that convinced Origen that the words should be understood as spoken by Christ. He notes immediately, however, that the following words should not be understood as spoken by Christ, but that the speaking character has changed, as frequently happened in the Psalms.84 Origen did not attribute words to Christ in the Psalms or Prophets carelessly. He looked carefully at what was said and considered who of the possible speakers would most likely have spoken the words in question. Origen was an avid, careful, prayerful reader of Scripture. He plumbed Scriptures depths and offered his findings to the church. His primary concern was that his interpretations of Scripture be beneficial to the people of God. He was not, in the words of Henri de Lubac, an exegete in the sense of studying the text scientifically. His Scriptural exegesis was “a theological meditation on sacred history.” Scripture “was always, not in general, but hic et nunc, the Word of God.” It was “the two-edged sword whose sharp point pierces to the division of soul and spirit.”85 QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. How would you describe Origen’s approach to interpreting Scripture? 84. See Philoc 7; Origen: Commentary on Romans 2.11, FOTC 103, 135; and ComJn 6.53, Origen, Commentary, FOTC 80, 183. 85.  de Lubac, History and Spirit, 471, 431.

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2. How does Origen use Jesus’ words in Matthew 7:7 as a key for interpreting Scripture? 3. How does Origen understand the vision of the throne room of God in Revelation 5 to be related to the interpretation of Scripture? 4. Do you think the adjective “allegorical” adequately describes Origen’s interpretation of Scripture? Why or why not?

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THE FOCAL POINTS OF ORIGEN’S THEOLOGY Origen’s theological thought revolves around three central actions of God presented in Scripture: creation, incarnation, and consummation. He discusses much more, of course, than these three topics, but these topics are central to his theological thinking and, in my opinion, form the core of his theological work. It is not possible to maintain rigid divisions between the topics for they are often tightly intertwined in his discussions of them.1 Origen’s conception of these three themes is complex, partly because the themes themselves are complex and all lie outside of human experience, and partly because much of what he actually said about them has been lost. His thirteen-book commentary on the first four chapters of Genesis where he discussed creation, for example, is 1.  See, for example, Origen On First Principles, Vol. 1, lvi–lxxxviii; Tzamalikos, Origen: Philosophy of History, 70–349.

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lost;2 his discussion of these topics in his theological work, On First Principles, is, for the most part, lost in the Greek language in which he wrote. A fourth-century Latin translation has preserved this latter work, but the accuracy of the translation is sometimes questionable, especially in the discussions of the creation. In addition, some of the terminology Origen used in discussing these topics seems to have been misunderstood occasionally by both his ancient and modern interpreters resulting in skewed pictures of what he taught. A number of studies of Origen appearing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have addressed some of these skewed views with considerable success so that a clearer picture of Origen’s thought is beginning to emerge.3 In line with this newer research, this chapter will depart from much of what was considered to be Origen’s thought up through at least the mid-twentieth century in an attempt to understand him more accurately. One of the most significant differences that this chapter will reflect in relation to studies of Origen from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries has to do with the starting point of Origen’s thought. Earlier studies saw him as primarily a philosopher who built his system of thought from philosophical principles drawn largely from Plato to which he attached a thin Scriptural veneer to make it appear Christian.4 It is now widely accepted that Origen was 2.  See, Heine, “Origen’s Alexandrian Commentary on Genesis,” 63–73; Metzler, Origenes Werke mit deutscher Übersetzung. 3.  See for example, Harl, “La préexistence des âmes”; Tzamalikos, Origen: Philosophy of History; Edwards, Origen against Plato, esp. 87–122; Behr, Origen On First Principles Vol. 1, xv–lxxxviii; Bruns, Trinität und Kosmos; Ramelli, “‘Preexistence of Souls?’” 4.  See for example, the three-volume study by Eugène de Faye, Origène sa vie, son oeuvre, sa pensée.

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a biblical, not a philosophical, theologian. It is indisputable that he had a wide knowledge of the teachings of the philosophical schools of his day, but this knowledge was not the basis of his system of thought. Origen’s thought began with Scripture. Philosophical ideas were sometimes employed in his interpretation of Scripture, but it was Scripture, not philosophy, that provided the structure of his thought.5 CREATION The creation story in Genesis had been the object of speculation by many Christians before the time of Origen. Daniélou notes that Eusebius refers to several authors who had written on the story of the six days in Genesis 1, that the chapters on creation seem to have held special interest for those Christians labeled gnostics, and that both John (John 1:1–14) and Paul (Ephesians 5:31–32) suggest that the creation narrative was an object of interpretation and speculation in the earliest days of the church.6 He notes that Anastasius Sinaiticus, the seventh-century abbot of the monastery of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai, says that the second-century Christian “Papias . . . ‘interpreted the entire Hexaemeron [i.e. the six days of creation] as applying to Christ and the Church,’ just as did Pantaenus.’” Eusebius quotes from a letter of Alexander, bishop of Jerusalem, who knew Origen, which suggests that Origen may have known Pantaenus.7 If this is true then he may also have known Pantaenus’ views on creation. Theophilus of Antioch in the mid- to late-second century devoted a lengthy 5.  See the section, “Devote yourself to the reading of Scripture” in chapter 3 above, and Martens, Origen and Scripture. 6.  Daniélou, Origen, 108–9. 7.  Eusebius, H.E. 6.14.9.

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section in his apology to a speculative discussion of the creation story.8 Origen thus entered an established tradition of exegesis of the creation story when he wrote his commentary on Genesis 1–4. Unfortunately, most of this prior exegesis on Genesis is lost, as well as Origen’s own commentary. Consequently, we cannot know if or how he may have used this previous exegesis and to what extent his work marked a new departure. The church historian Socrates relates that in book nine of his commentary on Genesis Origen’s interpretation of Adam and Eve as types of Christ and the church was not an innovation but followed the mystical tradition of the church.9 In his first homily on Isaiah10 Origen discusses the prophet’s vision of God in Isaiah 6. He understands there to have been only two seraphim, who are identified as Christ and the Holy Spirit. The two seraphim, he says, cover God’s face and feet with their wings. God’s face, moreover, represents the beginning of the cosmos and his feet its end. The uncovered midsection means, he asserts, that human beings can know only what lies between the beginning and the end of the cosmos.11 There are two important implications in this understanding if we take it as a starting point for our subject. One is that Origen was fully aware that everything he said about either the beginning or the end of the creation was speculation.12 This awareness is confirmed in a statement from the prologue to his commentary on Genesis that Pamphilus has 8.  Theophilus of Antioch, 2.10–30 (pp. 39–75). 9.  See Heine, “The Testimony and Fragments,” 137. 10.  HomIs 1.2; cf. 4.1; Cels 6.8. 11. Cf. ComCt 3.13.15–20, where he uses similar language of the beginning, middle, and end in discussing Wisdom 7:17–18. 12.  See also Princ 1.6.1.

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preserved in his Apology, where Origen says, “[W]e are not unaware of our ignorance of the great realities and of those things that are beyond us.”13 The second implication from his understanding of Isaiah’s vision is that eschatology and cosmology are closely related in his thought, so closely in fact, that they are sometimes considered, in the On First Principles at least, to be mirrored images of one another. He says in the On First Principles, “The end is always like the beginning.”14 Origen’s understanding of creation depends of course, on the first four chapters of Genesis, but it also draws heavily on such disparate passages of Scripture as the prologue to John’s Gospel, Proverbs 8:22–25, 1 Corinthians 15:24–28, and Colossians 1:16 among others. Our primary source of knowledge of the content of the lost commentary on Genesis is the few comments he makes about the work in his polemical treatise Contra Celsum 6.49–61 along with some scattered fragments quoted or referred to in other ancient authors.15 He indicates that his 13.  Apology 7. Pamphilus says that this quotation comes from the prologue to Origen’s books on Genesis (PG 17.544 B; St. Pamphilus Apology for Origen, trans. T. P. Scheck, FOTC 120, 42). See also Princ 1.6.1. 14.  Princ 1.6.2; 2.1.3; 3.6.8. I have been unable to find this explicit statement in Origen’s works outside the On First Principles. The idea did not originate with him. Philo (On Creation 13.44) saw a conjunction between beginning and end at work in the cycle of nature whereby a plant produces fruit containing seed which is the end product of the plant, and the seed then produces a new beginning from the end. The earliest Christian use of the idea of a connection between end and beginning seems to be in The Epistle of Barnabas 6.13. Cf. also the Gospel of Thomas, Logion 18. For Jewish, and especially apocalyptic, similarities see Russell, Method & Message, 282. 15.  See Heine, “The Testimonia and Fragments,” and Origenes Werke: Die Kommentierung des Buches Genesis, where these fragments are collected.

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commentary extended to the statement, “This is the book of the generation of human beings,” in Genesis 5:1. The précis Origen gives in Contra Celsum 6.49 of the subjects discussed in the commentary, however, covers only Genesis 1:1–5 and ends with “etc.,” suggesting that this was the pattern followed in the remainder of the commentary.16 What Origen reveals in this passage is that he had asked a series of questions of the Genesis text all structured in the format: What was such and such? For example, the first question he lists is, “What was the heaven and the earth that came into existence in beginning?”17 This is not a question about the time the creation occurred, or the amount of time needed for the creation process, or in what manner it came about. “What is (or was)” introduces a question about the essence or nature of a thing. This indicates that the first subject Origen treated in his commentary on Genesis was the question of the essence or nature of the created heaven and earth in Genesis 1:1–2. Celsus had claimed that “Moses and the prophets . . . had no idea what the nature of the world and of mankind really is.”18 Origen was not, of course, responding to Celsus when he wrote his commentary on Genesis, for he wrote this early in his life, and seems to have learned of Celsus’ attack on Christians only late in his life.19 Celsus’ remark, nevertheless, reflects the kinds of things philosophically inclined non-Christians would have directed at the Mosaic account of creation. When one asks what something 16.  Cel 6.49. 17.  The definite article “the” is intentionally absent. It is not in Origen’s text in the Cel, nor is it present in the text of Genesis 1:1 in either the Septuagint or the Hebrew Bible, and it is also absent in John 1:1. 18.  Cels 6.50, trans Origen: Contra Celsum, 367. 19. See Cels, Preface 1, 3.

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is, it is a question about the underlying substance of the thing in question. Celsus’ assertion pointed to the opinion that Christians had no understanding of the underlying substance of either the world or humanity. It seems likely that Origen’s commentary on Genesis offered a response to such a criticism in its discussion of creation. In Contra Celsum 6.51 Origen makes a remark that suggests how he had approached answering the question, “What was the heaven and the earth that came into existence in beginning?” in his commentary on Genesis. He says, “This is not the time to set out in detail the subject concerning intelligible things and sensible things.” Then he remarks that he had done this many years ago when he wrote on “the Mosaic account of the creation of the world.”20 Earlier in Book 6 of the Contra Celsum, drawing on Paul, Origen explains what he understands the terms “intelligible” and “sensible” to mean. He quotes 2  Corinthians 4:17–18 where Paul says, “[W]e look not at the things that are seen, but at the things that are not seen; for the things that are seen are temporal; but the things that are not seen are eternal.” Then Origen comments, “To those who can understand,” Paul “obviously means sensible things, though he calls them ‘the things that are seen,’ and intelligible things which are comprehensible by the mind alone, though he calls them ‘the things that are not seen.’ He [i.e. Paul] also knows that sensible things are temporal and visible, while intelligible things are eternal and invisible.”21 In the first book of his Commentary on John, written early 20.  Cels 6.51 (Origen: Contra Celsum, 367). 21.  Cels 6.19–20 (Origen: Contra Celsum, 332–33; translation modified; my emphases), See also Heine, “Testimonia and Fragments,” 127, and Princ 2.9.1 as translated by Behr, who has (correctly in my opinion) relegated the excerpt from Justinian to a footnote in Origen On First Principles, Vol. 2, 237–39.

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in his life, Origen had made a similar statement: “I would . . . say that those who have contemplated the bodiless realities that Paul called ‘invisible’ and ‘not seen,’22 that exist in thought apart from everything perceptible by sense, are ruled by that preeminent nature of the only begotten.”23 He gives a very precise definition of what he means by invisible in a comment on John 1:18, where he says, Perception is twofold, namely sensual and intellectual; the first apprehends material objects and the second immaterial. For this reason we say that those things that are assumed by the mind and perceived by it are invisible. We do not mean that they are not seen but that they are not such by nature as to be seen. For nothing material is invisible, even if it should be out of sight at some time and not seen. “Invisible” does not mean “not to be seen,” but not to be such by nature that this is possible. Consequently, “not to be seen” and “invisible” are not convertible expressions. The fact that the invisible is not seen follows from its being invisible.24

Celsus had set his argument in the context of Plato’s Phaedrus, accusing Christians of having borrowed from Plato; Origen accuses Plato of having filched his concepts from the Hebrew prophets. He considers himself to be following Paul’s understanding and language who, he asserts, was educated in the prophetic writings. When Origen speaks of “intelligible things” being made by God in the beginning, he means things perceivable only by the intellect or thought, and when he refers to “sensible things” 22.  See Col 1:16; Rom 1:20; 2 Cor 4:18. 23.  ComJn 1.200, trans Origen: Commentary, FOTC 80, 73 (emphasis mine, translation modified). 24.  FragJn 13, Origenes Werke Vierter Band, 494–95.

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being created in the beginning he means things perceivable by the senses. He then says that he had explained these things in his earlier commentary on Genesis. This means that Origen understood the opening chapter of Genesis to contain an account of an invisible, “intelligible” creation. He was surely encouraged to think in this direction by the Septuagint translation of Genesis 1:2, which reads, “And the earth was invisible and unformed.”25 He refers to the world perceptible to the senses as “an image of the intelligible and invisible one, for the truth,” he adds “will be in the world to come.”26 The latter assertion reflects Origen’s view that the end will be like the beginning. This is made explicit in his comment that “there is . . . another world in which there are things that are not seen, besides the manifest and perceptible world that consists of heaven and earth. . . . [T]his in its entirety is an invisible world, a world which is not seen, and an intelligible world on whose appearance and beauty the pure in heart will look.”27 This initial creation was followed by the forming of the visible, physical universe. We can conceptualize the creation perceptible to the senses, but what did he mean by the invisible, intelligible creation? THE INTELLIGIBLE CREATION Origen understood Genesis 1:1—5:2 to relate two separate creations marked off by the parallel statements in Genesis 2:4 and 5:2, each of which points back to the words that 25.  My emphasis. The Septuagint was the default version of Scripture Origen read. See Heine, “Origen and the Eternal Boundaries,” 407–8. 26.  Analecta Sacra III, 30, my emphasis. See also ComJn 19.146. 27.  ComJn 19.146; trans. Origen: Commentary FOTC 89, 200–201 (translation modified).

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precede them.28 He appears to have understood the first section, Genesis 1:1—2:4, to be an account of the creation of an intelligible heaven and earth perceivable only by the intellect. There is no explicit statement of this in the extant material we have of his discussions of the early chapters of Genesis, but he clearly is thinking this way in his considerations of Genesis 1:1 and he is also, as we will see later, thinking in this way in what he says about the creation of male and female in Genesis 1:26–27. We might think of this intelligible creation as an outline or architectural plan in the Logos or Wisdom of God of the form of things that would then be given substantial existence in the creation of the physical universe. This first creation account ends with the words, “This is the book of the generation of heaven and earth, when it came into existence on that day that God made the heaven and the earth.”29 The second section, from Genesis 2:5—5:2, would then contain an account of the creation of the physical earth and its inhabitants. This account ends at Genesis 5:1–2 with the words, “This is the book of the generation of humanity, on which day God made Adam, in the image of God he made him, male and female he made them and he blessed them and he gave them the name Adam on the day he made them.” Origen’s idea of a prior intellectual creation must not be regarded as physical or substantial in any way. It was an invisible, that is, intellectual creation that existed only in the Word (Logos) or Wisdom of God. Origen never conceived of this creation as having any other kind of existence prior to the physical creation, and especially not 28.  Modern Old Testament scholars have long noticed the division in the story in Genesis 1–4 into two separate accounts, but they have approached the issue in a very different way than Origen. 29. Gen 2:4, translated from the Septuagint.

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an independent existence outside the Logos or Wisdom of God. It existed in the realm of thought alone, like a building plan in the mind of an architect. He suggests taking the Johannine phrase, “In the beginning was the Word (Logos)” in connection with the statement of Wisdom in Proverbs, “God created me the beginning of his ways for his works,” to mean that “all things came to be in accordance with the wisdom and plans of the system of thoughts in the Word (Logos). For,” he says, “I think that just as a house and a ship are built or devised according to the plans of the architect, the house and the ship having as their beginning the plans and thoughts in the craftsman, so all things have come to be according to the thoughts of what will be, which were prefigured by God in wisdom, ‘For he made all things in wisdom’” (Ps 103:24).30 When Origen, following the Psalter, says that God made all things “in wisdom” he is not thinking of the prepositional phrase as having the adverbial meaning “wisely”; he understands it as locating, so far as Wisdom can be said to be a location, where “all things” were made, that is, in God’s Wisdom. There is an analogous passage in the opening of his homilies on Genesis, where Origen asks, “What is the beginning of all things except our Lord and ‘Savior of all,’ Jesus Christ ‘the firstborn of every creature’?” He then adds, “In this beginning, therefore, that is, in his Word, ‘God made heaven and earth’ as the evangelist John also says in the beginning of his Gospel. . . . Scripture is not speaking here of any temporal beginning, but it says that heaven and earth and all things which were made were made ‘in the beginning,’ that is, in the Savior.”31 The phrase “in the be30.  ComJn 1.113–14; trans. Origen: Commentary FOTC 80, 57 (my emphasis). 31.  HomGn 1.1; trans. Origen, Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, 47 (translation modified).

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ginning” in Genesis 1:1, in other words, Origen claims, is not a phrase referencing the time of creation, but refers to the Logos-Christ as the location of the intellectual heaven and earth that was later to receive substantial existence. Origen never understood this intellectual creation in God’s Logos-Wisdom, or, perhaps, from our inadequate human analogy, in his intellect or mind, to have any kind of separate existence outside the realm of thought (again to use our inadequate human analogy). In On First Principles Origen quotes Psalm 103:24, “‘You made all things in wisdom,’ and says, “if ‘all things have been made in wisdom,’ then since wisdom has always existed, there have always existed in wisdom, by a pre-figuration and pre-formation, those things which afterwards have received substantial existence.”32 Notice that the “all things” that existed in wisdom as pre-figurations and pre-formations did not at this time have substantial existence. They existed only in Wisdom. In a text from the third book of his commentary on Genesis, which has been preserved in the Greek language in which Origen wrote, he says, When God thinks about the beginning of the creation, since nothing happens without a cause, he goes through in his mind each of the things which will exist, perceiving that when this has occurred, this follows, and if this which comes next occurs, this follows, which, when it exists, is followed by this, and, advancing to the ends of things in this way, he knows what will be, though he is not at all the cause of each thing that occurs.33 32.  Princ 1.4.5; trans. Origen on First Principles, Butterworth, 42; see also Princ 1.2.2; 1.4.4; and ComJn 1.244. 33.  Philoc 23.8. For a similar argument, also in Greek, see PEuch 6.3, and see also Philoc 25.2, which preserves a Greek text from Book

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He is talking about God in his foreknowledge prior to the material creation, thinking through, in our human analogy, everything that will be and happen in the subsequent physical world of human beings. Since Origen places this activity at “the beginning of the creation” he must be referring to the first chapter of Genesis.34 There is an even clearer statement of the role of God’s foreknowledge in creation in one of the recently discovered Greek homilies of Origen on the Psalms, where he discusses the words, “Remember your congregation which you acquired from the beginning” (Ps 73 [74]:2). He finds the key to understanding this statement in the words of Romans 8:29–30 “Whom he [i.e. God] foreknew he apprehended before, whom he apprehended before he predestined, whom he predestined he called, whom he called he justified, whom he justified he glorified.” Origen comments, God “foreknew in [the] beginning and acquired in his foreknowledge all the things destined to come under him,” which means that God foreknew before the creation all who would be a part of his “congregation” mentioned in the psalm. “I know the beginning from which God acquired each of us” he adds, “I know this beginning which is alive, and living and saying: ‘God created me the beginning of his ways for his works’ (Prov 8:22). The beginning is Christ. He, therefore, acquired [it] from the beginning, from Christ, who is the beginning and who is the end, who is the alpha and who is the omega.”35 1 of the ComRom. 34.  I presented material similar to portions of the preceding in a paper for the Society of Biblical Literature program unit, “Early Exegesis of Genesis 1” led by Christoph Markschies and Volker Henning Drecoll, in 2016. 35. Hom 1 in Ps 73.4, in Origenes Werke Dreizehnter Band, 229– 30 (my emphases). See Harl, “La préexistence des âmes,” 251–52,

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The view of an intellectual plan of creation preceding the actual physical creation was present in Jewish circles in Origen’s time. Some rabbis identified Torah with Wisdom, as Wisdom is described in Proverbs 8:22, and believed that Torah was present with God before the creation of the world and that God consulted Torah (i.e., the ideas in Torah) for the details of the creation.36 The first-century A.D. Jewish philosopher Philo, whose works Origen had read and regarded highly, also considered there to have been an immaterial plan of creation that God used in making the world. Philo locates this immaterial plan in the Word (Logos) of God as Origen does.37 Origen had read Philo’s works and was, in all probability, influenced by them in his thinking about creation. Origen’s adversaries, perhaps because they misunderstood him, or perhaps because they maliciously misrepresented him, presented the picture that has controlled most later scholarship’s description of Origen’s view of an intellectual or spiritual world inhabited by independent rational beings, independent of the being of God and, in some sense at least, outside the control of God, who chose either to turn away from God or to cling to him in varying degrees of intensity.38 Most later scholars, including myself, have presented this as Origen’s view. I now believe whose discussion is based on the Latin version of Rufinus. 36.  See Neusner, Genesis Rabbah, 1–2, 10–11. 37.  See Philo, On the Creation, chs. III–V, pp. 13–19. 38. See Origen: On First Principles, Vol. 2, 601–2, where Behr has printed the passage composed from excerpts taken from several later antagonists of Origen, which was included as a Greek text of Origen in the critical edition by Koetschau (Origenes Werke Fünfter Band: De Principiis) and translated in the English translation of Butterworth as the words of Origen (Origen On First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth).

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we were mistaken and that a continued careful reading of Origen’s texts will provide further confirmation of this.39 THE MATERIAL CREATION The material or visible creation, the subject matter in Genesis 2:5—5:2 as Origen seems to have understood it, at least, was focused on the origin of human beings.40 He points out that a different verb is used to describe this in the two accounts of creation. The account in Genesis 1:26–27 uses the verb “to make” in the Septuagint translation.41 God says, “Let us make a human being in our image and likeness.” And when it was accomplished, the author of Genesis says, “And God made the human being, according to the image of God he made him, male and female he made them.”42 The account in Genesis 2, however, says that God “formed the human being from dust of the earth.”43 Origen understood this change of verbs to be significant. “We do not understand,” he says in a homily on Genesis, “this person indeed whom Scripture says was made ‘according to the image of God’ to be physical. For the form of the body does not contain the image of God, nor is the physical person said to be ‘made,’ but ‘formed.’ .  .  . For the text says, ‘And God formed the human being,’ that is, 39.  For others who share at least some of the main lines of the view I have sketched here see Harl, “La préexistence des âmes,” 238– 48, Edwards, Origen against Plato, 89–92, Ramelli, “‘Preexistence of Souls’?” 167–81, Tzamalikos, Origen: Cosmology and Ontology of Time, 92–94, and Behr, Origen On First Principles, Vol. 1, lvi–lxii. 40. See HomGn 1.12; Cels 4.74. 41.  English translations, following the Hebrew text, use the verb “to create” in Gen 1:27. 42. Gen 1:26, 27. 43. Gen 2:7. See also 2:8, 15. The same is said of all animals and birds (2:19). See HomGn 1.13.

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fashioned, from the slime of the earth.’”44 He notes the same distinction in a homily on Jeremiah where he says on the Lord’s words to the prophet, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,”45 When you have read Genesis and have observed what is said about the creation of the world, you will discover that Scripture very articulately did not say before I made you in the womb I knew you. For when the one “according to the image” was created, “God said, Let us make a human being according to our image and likeness.” He did not say, Let us form. But when he took “dust from the earth,” he did not make the human being, but “he formed the human being” and “placed the human being whom he formed in the garden to work it and guard it.” . . . [W]hat is made does not come into existence in the womb; what is formed from the dust of the earth is created in the womb.46

Perhaps Origen’s strongest statement about this distinction, however, occurs in his comments on Matthew 19:4–5, where Jesus responds to the Pharisees using the words of Genesis 1:27 and 2:24. Origen comments, I do not think that the statements in Genesis were . . . made of the same beings. There were those who were made in the image of God, and there were those who were made from the dust of the earth and from one of Adam’s ribs. For where you have the words, “He made them male and female,” it is about those made in the image 44.  HomGn 1.13, trans. Origen, Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, 63, modified. 45. Jer 1:5. 46.  HomJer 1.10.

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(Gen 1:27). But where it says, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother,” and the rest, it is not speaking of those made in the image, for at some time or other after those, “The Lord God formed the man, by taking dust from the earth,” and from his rib he formed the helper. Note also that in the case of those made in the image it does not speak of man and woman, but of “male and female.” We have also observed this in the Hebrew language. . . . For it is never said that woman was made in the image, nor man, for that matter, but those who are superior, namely male, and second, female. Furthermore, if a man leaves father and mother, he clings not to the female, but to his wife and, since man and woman are one in flesh, they become one flesh.47

This distinction between the significance of the different verbs used to describe the origin of human beings is basic to Origen’s understanding of creation. References to it occur repeatedly in his writings.48 There is a strong influence from the Jewish philosopher Philo in this aspect of Origen’s understanding of creation. Philo had noticed the distinction between the verbs used in Genesis 1:26–27 and 2:7 and asserted that the person formed in Genesis 2:7 was not the same as the one mentioned in Genesis 1:26. He referred to them as two races, the first made after the divine image and the second 47.  ComMt 14.16, Commentary of Origen on Matthew. Vol. 1, 178. Origen’s comments about the different words in the Hebrew text of Genesis are correct. There is also a different Hebrew verb (meaning to form or fashion) used in Genesis 2:7 in contrast to 1:26 and 27 where verbs meaning to make and to create are used. 48. See SelPs on Ps 149:2 (PG 12.1680B); SelGn on Gen 2:15 (PG 12.97D); Pitra III, 279 on Ps 118 (119):73; HomJob Pitra II, 361–91; SelEz (PG 13.781B); ExpProv (PG 17.200B); Cels 4.37; DialHer 15–16; ComJn 13.328–30; 20.182–83, 235; FragJn 28; PEuch 28.3.

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formed from earth. The first was immaterial, perceptible only by the intellect, sometimes, referred to as mind, and the second was physical, perceptible by the senses, made from earth, and named Adam, which means earth.49 Origen believed that Moses had been aware that it is not the body of flesh formed from the dust of the earth described in Genesis 2 that bears the image of God, but the immaterial soul of the human being that he believed was described in Genesis 1. He also believed that the Apostle Paul knew this distinction and considered it to be a foundation of Paul’s teaching about human salvation, as he makes clear in a passage in the Dialogue with Heraclides, where he says, “In creation, therefore, the human being first created was the one in the image (Gen. 1.26) in whom is nothing material. For what is made in the image is not made from matter.” This creation of humanity did not involve the use of dust from the earth as the second did. He believed that Paul, as well as Moses knew that being in God’s image meant being “nonmaterial.” Because in Colossians 3:9–11 Paul speaks of putting off “the old human nature” and putting on “the new” which is “being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.”50 Origen’s use of Paul’s words from Colossians hints at the close relationship he perceived between the action of God in creation and his action in salvation brought about in the incarnation, which will be discussed later. Origen noticed not only that there is a difference in the verbs that are used in the account of the creation of human beings in Genesis, but also that a special noun is sometimes used in the New Testament to refer to the 49.  Allegorical Interpretation, II.2.4; II.4.9; I.28.88; I.29.90; On Creation 46.134. 50.  DialHer 15.28—16.4, trans. Origen Treatise, 69–70; Colossians quotation from NRSV.

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creation of the material world. It is the Greek noun katabolē, which literally means a “throwing down.” The word had two normal uses in Greek literature: it could be used for the sowing of seed in which the “throwing down” implication of the word is obvious, or for the laying of a foundation, which highlights its connotation of the “beginning” of something. The word appears eleven times in the New Testament, nine times being used in conjunction with the term “world,” once where “world” is implied, and once in reference to human reproduction.51 When it is used of the world in the New Testament most English translations render it “the foundation of the world.” It appears most frequently in Origen’s writings in quotations of passages from the New Testament—primarily Matthew 13:35 (which quotes Psalm 77:2), Matthew 25:34, and Ephesians 1:4—where he draws no attention to the appearance of the word at all.52 He sometimes equates the word with “beginning” and makes no comment about it. For example, in his first homily on Psalm 77 he quotes the words from verse 2 as they appear in the psalm, “I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter problems from the beginning,” and then he adds, “or ‘from the foundation of the world’.”53 The latter phrase comes from the way the verse is quoted in Matthew 13:35. What did Origen understand the phrase the “throwing down of the world” to mean? There is only one reliable 51.  Philo does not use the phrase “throwing down of the world”; he uses the word primarily in reference to the sowing of seed, whether animal or plant seed. 52.  See, for example, Philoc 25.4; PEuch 5.5; 6.3; SerMt 51 (Greek fragment p. 113); ComMt 15.28. 53.  Origenes Werke Dreizehnter Band: Die neuen Psalmenhomilien, 351. See also ibid. 356 where the term has a similar meaning, but in relation to the Mosaic legislation.

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passage where he discusses his understanding of this phrase in his preserved works that sheds light on that question.54 It is found in his Commentary on John where he discusses Jesus’ statement in John 8:23, “You are from below, I am from above. You are of this world. I am not of this world.” Origen sees the key to this statement to lie in the words “below” and “above.” He first compares this statement of Jesus with the statement Jesus makes in John 3:31, where he contrasts the one who “comes from above” and the one who is “of the earth” by asking if being “of the earth” is the equivalent of “being from below.” Next he asks if being “from below” and being “of this world” are the same, and whether to be “of the earth” differs from being “of this world.” He brings this segment of his investigation to a close by suggesting that his hearers or readers inquire what the statements, “I am from above,” and “I am not of this world” mean, “[f]or” he adds, “it is worthwhile to see what it is to be ‘from above,’ and what it is to be ‘not of this world.’”55 He next suggests for consideration whether one who originates “from material substance . . . is not of the earth because” of forsaking “the better things.” Such a person, he adds, “is also from 54.  This text is reliable because it is preserved in the Greek manuscript tradition of the Commentary on John. In the last quarter of the fourth century Epiphanius inaugurated a malevolent attack on Origen’s teachings. He was soon joined in this by Jerome. At the beginning of the fifth century Origenism was condemned by a council held at Alexandria, and in the mid-sixth century the Second Council of Constantinople condemned Origen’s teachings. All of the translations of Origen’s works into Latin were produced in this milieu of antagonistic conflict, some by Jerome, others by Rufinus, who was not antagonistic toward Origen, but who may sometimes have misrepresented what Origen said, and one, at least, it seems by an unknown translator in the sixth century. 55.  ComJn 19.127–29; trans. Origen: Commentary, FOTC 89, 196–97.

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below.” Then he distinguishes being from “below” from being “of the earth” by the fact that the term “below” can refer to a way of thinking as well as to a place.56 We should note here that this is not a statement about an original fall of souls from the heavenly realm that occurred before the earth was created. This is a statement about the condition that people experience in life because of choosing to live with their thoughts focused on material realities rather than on immaterial ones. The person who is “from below” is defined as one who is a “citizen of things that are seen, and pass away, and are temporary.”57 The Savior, however, after descending into “the lowest parts of the earth” then “ascended above all the heavens and prepared a way for those .  .  . who have genuinely become his disciples that leads to the things that are above all the heavens, that is to the things that are incorporeal.”58 Here Origen shows clearly that “above” in his thinking is identified with realities that are immaterial, which means that “below” indicates those realities that are material.59 Origen then switches to contrasting this perceptible world consisting “of heaven and earth” with what he calls “another world in which there are things that are not seen.”60 This may be a reference to the world of Genesis 1, which the Septuagint translation refers to as “invisible.”61 Origen describes it as “in its entirety .  .  . an invisible world, a world which is not seen, and an intelligible world 56.  ComJn 130–33; trans. Origen: Commentary FOTC 89, 197. 57.  ComJn 19.134; trans. Origen: Commentary, FOTC 89, 198. 58.  ComJn 19.137 (See Eph 4:9–10); trans. Origen: Commentary, FOTC 89, 198. 59. See ComJn 19.138–39; trans. Origen: Commentary, FOTC 89, 198, 199. 60.  ComJn 19.146; trans. Origen: Commentary, FOTC 89, 200. 61. Gen 1:1.

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on whose appearance and beauty the pure in heart will look.”62 This seems to be referring to that “world” that Origen earlier located in God’s Logos/Wisdom.63 His immediately following remarks suggest this strongly, where he raises the question of whether the first-born of creation, identified in Colossians 1:15 with Christ, might be a world. Based on the fact, as he understood it at least, that Christ contains “the principles of absolutely everything according to which all things made by God in Wisdom have come to be,” Christ would then “also be a ‘world.’” This world, Origen continues, surpasses “the world of sense perception,” not being constituted on a material basis but on its participation in the Wisdom or Logos “which set matter in order.”64 It is in this context of his discussion of the concepts “above” and “below” with their identifications with immateriality and materiality that Origen refers to the term “the throwing down of the world.” The invisible, immaterial world “has nothing below,” he asserts, as the visible, material world “has nothing above.” “For how,” he asks, “can this world, whose creation is a throwing down, have anything above? .  .  . The whole world .  .  . and the things in it are included in the ‘throwing down.’” He then adds that true disciples of Jesus, however, are “outside the throwing down of the world in its entirety.”65 The implication that Origen draws from the phrase “throwing down of the world” is 62.  ComJn 19.146; trans. Origen: Commentary, FOTC 89, 200– 201 (translation modified). 63.  See the section above, The Intelligible World. 64.  ComJn 19.147; trans. Origen: Commentary, FOTC 89, 201 (with slight modifications). See at note 110 below in relation to Origen’s understanding of the term “world” as a homonym. 65.  ComJn 19.149, 150; trans. Origen: Commentary, FOTC 89, 201, 202.

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that this material world belongs to a lower order than the immaterial one. The concept “down” in the term joins it with what is “below” as opposed to what is “above.” There is no suggestion in his discussion that he understood the term to mean that the material world had been created to serve as a place of instructional punishment for souls that had fallen away from the world “above,” as his detractors claimed.66 There is an additional text in Greek in the On Prayer that, while not adding any information about Origen’s understanding of the term “throwing down,” does show that, as we saw above, Origen believed that everything that happened in the whole creative process was foreknown,67 planned, and foreordained by God,68 and that there were no surprises such as independently existing rational beings using their free will to turn away from God and thereby causing the necessity for God to create the physical world.69 God’s foreknowledge is a key concept in Origen’s teaching about creation. He insists that God knew in advance everything that would come about in the process of creation and that he knows everything that will occur into the ages of the ages, and that nothing has happened or will happen outside that foreknowledge. In summary, Origen’s understanding of creation, in my view, at least, began with the plan for creation in God’s mind. It is this plan that is described in the first chapter of Genesis, as Origen seems to have understood it. He 66.  This was a part of Epiphanius’ accusations against Origen (See Epiphanius II, 64.4.5–8) and was perpetuated by Origen’s later enemies. 67.  PEuch 6.3; trans. Origen On Prayer, 251–52. 68.  See at note 33 above. 69.  This is suggested in Princ 3.5.4.

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thought of God’s mind as his Logos or Wisdom and, in his own thought at least, he could extrapolate Logos or Wisdom from the person of God and conceive of it as a separate existing entity with a separate function, but always one with and in harmony with God. This plan of creation, however, involved not only the things that would be made in the process of giving substantial existence to the various parts of the plan; it also included God’s foreknowledge of everything that would happen in the created world of humanity from its beginning to its end. The concepts in this plan were then given substantial existence, described, in Origen’s understanding it seems, in the second chapter of Genesis, where the focus is on the creation of and provision for humanity. INCARNATION In 1953 the German New Testament scholar Hans Conzelmann published a game-changing study of the Gospel of Luke with the striking title Die Mitte der Zeit (The Middle of Time).70 Starting with Jesus’ statement in Luke 4:23, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your ears,” he argued that Luke saw Christ as “the centre of the story of salvation” and that Christ’s ministry marked the dividing line between the first epoch in that story, that of Israel, and the third, the epoch of the church.71 Long before Hans Conzelmann, Origen had set Christ in the center of the story of salvation, though in a somewhat different way than Conzelmann did. In this section we will look at how Origen presents Christ as the 70.  This was later translated into English with the rather bland title, The Theology of St. Luke. 71.  Conzelmann, The Theology of St. Luke, 170.

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centerpiece of the story of salvation. In his Commentary on the Song of Songs he places Christ between the Hebrew church, stretching from the beginning of the Old Testament up to the rejection of Jesus, and the gentile church reaching from that time till the fullness of the gentiles has entered.72 Origen’s biblical theology is a theology of the incarnation of the Son of God. It is patterned after the prologue to John’s Gospel in John 1:1–18 and the Pauline kenosis (emptying) passage in Philippians 2:6–11. Statements from these two passages are woven into the texture of how he perceived and presented Christ. He begins, as do both the Johannine and Pauline passages, with Christ’s divine nature. When he interprets Jesus’ words in John 8:42, “I have proceeded from God and have come; for I did not come on my own, but he sent me,” he wonders if these words might be equivalent to the prophet Micah’s statement, “The Lord proceeds from his place.” He reasons as follows: “[W]hen the Son is in the Father, ‘being in the form of God’ before he ‘empties himself,’ God is his place, as it were.” He then suggests that if one were to consider Christ “before he has ‘emptied himself,’” he would see him “in the essential form of God” and, in the prophet’s words, as “the Lord who has not yet proceeded from his place.” If one compares this understanding of the nature of Christ, he argues, with the picture of Christ seen after he “had taken up ‘the form of a servant’ and had ‘emptied himself,’” one can “understand how the Son has proceeded from God and has come to us, and has come out, as it were, of the one who sent him.”73 He uses the same Pauline statements in relation to the 72.  ComCant 4.1.15–16. 73.  ComJn 20.152–55; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 89, 238, modified; Mic 1:2–4: Phil 2:6–7. See also HomJer 10.7.

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transfiguration of Jesus when he suggests that Jesus appeared to the three disciples on the mountain “‘in the form of God’ in which he existed long ago” but to those waiting at the foot of the mountain he was seen “‘in the form of a servant’.”74 This divine Son of God, whose place was with God or in God, entered human existence by being born of a virgin. Origen takes note of the pre-existence of the Son by stating that his birth was not the passing from non-existence to existence, as the birth of all other human beings, but, in the Pauline words of Philippians 2, was “a passage from being ‘in the form of God’ to ‘taking up’ the ‘form of a servant.’”75 This humiliation of the divine Son involved the taking on of true human flesh with its weaknesses, limitations, and especially its mortality. He did not have flesh “as an apparition, but in truth,” Origen asserts.76 The humiliation was necessary, among other reasons, he believed, because human beings cannot begin their knowledge of Christ with his divinity; they must begin with his humanity and mortality.77 While Origen is aware that various aspects of Christ’s humanity appear in the Gospels in their presentation of Christ’s ministry, it is in the events of Christ’s final days that he sees the humanity of Christ most manifest.78 He looks at the events of the final days of Christ’s life through the lens provided by Psalm 2, which speaks of the kings of the earth gathered against the Lord’s anointed one. It is 74. See ComMt 12.37. 75.  FragMt 3; see also ComJn 1.233. 76.  SerMt 92; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 2, 700. 77.  ComJn 1.107. 78. See Princ 2.6.2.

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especially in the context of Christ praying in Gethsemane just prior to his arrest that Origen stresses the human emotions felt by Christ. In his Commentary on Matthew, he imagines Jesus praying in the presence of invisible spiritual enemies arrayed against him.79 He first quotes Matthew’s words, “And taking Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, he began to be sad and distressed.”80 Then he adds, “Or as Mark put it, ‘He began to be afraid and distressed.’”81 He ponders “if perhaps Jesus saw something especially mysterious in the time prior to his suffering when he went and wanted to pray.” “Perhaps,” he suggests, “he saw ‘the kings and princes of the earth’ standing gathered ‘together against the Lord and against’ himself, ‘his Christ’.82 And because those multitudes were drawn up, as it were, and were mighty in evil, ‘he began to be sad and distressed’ or even ‘afraid’.”83 In his Commentary on John Origen cites the same verse from Psalm 2 in relation to Jesus praying in Gethsemane, but he adds some words from Psalm 26 and says that this psalm prophesies of the Savior “at the time of his passion, and also of the evil one, with all his forces, when he struggles against him.”84 While Origen attributes human emotions to Jesus in these words, he also is careful to point out that this did not affect his divine nature. It was because of this, he asserts, that Matthew says, “He began to be sad and distressed,” for Jesus experienced only the beginning of these emotions. He began to be sad 79. Cf. ComMt 13.8, 9; see also ComJn 1.192. 80. Matt 26:37. 81.  Mark 14.33. 82.  See Ps 2:2. 83.  SerMt 90; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 2, 698. 84.  ComJn 32.296.

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and distressed because of his human disposition, but he experienced only their beginnings because of his divine nature which was removed from such passions.85 Origen believes that the divine, impassable nature of Christ remains distinct from his human nature. “It is true to say,” he asserts, “that he is human and that he is not human. He is human insofar as he is capable of death, not human insofar as he is more divine than human.”86 Both natures, nevertheless, are real and are, in some mysterious sense, united much as a husband and wife are said to be one flesh, or the person joined to the Lord is said to be one spirit.87 “For this man Jesus,” he says, “becomes one with the Logos more than all of those who become ‘one spirit’ with him because they are joined ‘to the Lord.’”88 The work Christ had come to perform demanded that he be human. “Without the human being,” Origen says, “we would have received no benefit from the Word, if he had remained God as he was in the beginning with the Father, and not taken up the human being who was first of all humans, and more precious than all, and purer than all, being able to receive him.”89 In a striking comment on Revelation 19:11–13, where John sees the triumphant Word of God mounted on a white horse, Origen says the Word is not naked but “is clothed with a garment sprinkled with blood, since the Word who became flesh, and died because he became flesh, is invested with traces of that passion, 85.  SerMt 90. 86.  ComJn 10.23; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 80, 260, translation modified. 87. See Cels 6.47; ComJn 32.325–26, and Cels 2.9. 88.  ComMt 15.24; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 1, 215. 89.  ComJn 10.26; Origen Commentary, FOTC 89, 261, translation modified.

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since his blood also was poured forth upon the earth when the soldier pierced his side. For, perhaps,” he continues, “even if in some way we attain the most sublime and highest contemplation of the Word and of the truth, we shall not forget completely that we were introduced to him by his coming in our body.”90 Christ’s work was to rescue humanity from sin. Like the New Testament with its various ways of stating this, but all involving the death of Christ, Origen used different images to depict how Christ’s death was effectual to rescue humanity. All his images, however, share in the general concept that Christ’s death was a victory over hostile Satanic powers. In one passage he blends the imagery of the sacrifice of a lamb that John the Baptist had used91 with Isaiah 53:7 and says. “[T]he fact that he became a servant was moderate indeed compared to the fact that he became an innocent little lamb . . . . For the Lamb of God became as an innocent little lamb led to be slaughtered that he might take away ‘the sin of the world.’”92 In connection with this imagery Origen refers to the death of Christ as a “drug” that “has made the powers which war against the human race ineffectual.” Using the imagery of conflict drawn from Paul, he speaks of Christ disarming and triumphing over these powers on the cross.93 This leads him to say, “[If] anyone is ashamed of the cross of Christ, he is ashamed of the economy of salvation . . . . And the one who believes and has come to know these things must also ‘boast in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,’ . . .”94 The 90.  ComJn 2.61; Origen Commentary, FOTC 80, 110. 91.  See John 1:29. 92.  ComJn 1.233; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 80, 81. 93.  See Col 2:14–15; ComMt 12.18. 94.  ComMt 12.18; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol.

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crucifixion of Jesus, he asserts, is a necessary part of the Christian preaching about him. “It is a defective message,” he says, “to preach him and be silent about his cross. And it does not seem to me,” he adds, “to be as defective to say that Jesus is the Christ while being silent about some of his other prodigious works as being silent about the fact that he has been crucified.”95 Origen believed that the cross of Jesus with its emphasis on the mortality of Jesus, stood at the center of salvation. Origen also believed that the saving efficacy of the cross was retrospective as well as present and futuristic. When John the Baptist identified Jesus as “the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,”96 Origen understood “the sin of the world” to mean of the whole world.97 John does not say, Origen points out, basing his comment it seems on the present tense participle in John 1:29, “[H]e who will take it away but is not already also taking it away; and he does not say he who took it away but is not also still taking it away. For the ‘taking away’ affects each one in the world until sin be removed from all the world.”98 “[T]he religion of the ancients,” Origen says, referring it seems to the Hebrew saints such as those listed in Hebrews 11, “was . . . acceptable to God by its . . . faith in, and expectation of Christ.”99 When he is identifying the “scattered children of God” of John 11:52 for whom Jesus would also die, Origen suggests that they might be “those who were already 1, 107. 95.  ComMt 12.19; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 1, 107. 96.  John 1:29. 97. See ComJn 6.301–5. 98 ComJn 1.234–235; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 80, 81. 99.  ComJn 2.209; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 80, 151.

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righteous in God when these words were spoken, being either the patriarchs, or the prophets, or some other elect people of God who had previously died.”100 There are two complimentary, but somewhat mysterious passages in the Commentary on Matthew that suggest Origen’s understanding of the all-embracing power of the redemptive effect of the crucifixion of Jesus. The first concerns the place of the crucifixion. Origen says he knows a tradition “that the body of Adam, the first man, was buried there where Christ was crucified.” The significance of this, he believed was that “the father of all humanity” might receive “the remission of sins” and obtain “the benefit of the resurrection.”101 The other passage involves the time that Jesus’ died. Origen identifies the human being made in the image of God on the sixth day of creation—he even suggests that this creation occurred at the sixth hour—with the man crucified at the sixth hour.102 Origen believed that Adam, as the father of humanity, was somehow present in the crucified Christ and consequently all humanity, past as well as future, was beneficiary of the redemptive work accomplished in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. 100.  ComJn 28.179–83; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 89, 329. 101.  SerMt 126; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 2, 740. 102.  SerMt 134; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 2, 748); cf. ComJn 1.108. A small Greek fragment parallel to part of this text says: “And since man came into existence on the sixth day, it is also likely that he fell on the sixth hour, and perhaps this is why he who suffered for the salvation of mankind was hanged on the sixth hour.” Mark has the fullest chronology of the crucifixion. He says that Jesus was put on the cross the third hour, and that the darkness over the land began at the sixth hour and lasted until the ninth when Jesus expired (Mark 15:23, 33–37). Matthew (27:45–49) and Luke (23:44–46) mention the time only in relation to the duration of the darkness and Jesus final breath.

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The unity of the divine and human in Christ becomes most important to Origen in the final glorification of Christ, for it was the physical Jesus, he believes, who was “highly exalted” and ascended to heaven as one with the divine Word (Logos). The Logos who, as John says, was “with God” in the beginning and “was God”103 was incapable of being exalted any higher. It was in consequence of his death that Jesus was highly exalted. Origen is not, however, thinking of some kind of gnostic abandonment of the physical Jesus on the cross by the divine nature, because it was the divine Son who emptied himself and took up the form of a servant, becoming the lamb of God to take away the sins of the world. The consequent exaltation involved both the spirit and the body, “and,” he adds, “it was the body that he received from the power of the most high and from the virgin for performing a ministry of this kind.”104 Meditating on Christ’s passion and his subsequent ascension to the Father, Origen states that after the conquest of his enemies by his passion—described by Origen as a military victory—Christ needed to be cleansed from these deeds of valor by the Father. This, he thinks, is why he forbid Mary to touch him at the tomb. It is quite clear that he is thinking of the physical body of Jesus needing cleansing. He describes this ascent to the Father almost lyrically, drawing on phrases and images from the Psalms and the Prophets. When he goes, however, bearing victory and trophies, with the body which arose from the dead (for how else are we to understand, “I have not yet ascended to my Father”? and, “But I am 103.  John 1:1. 104.  SerMt 50; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 2, 625–26.

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going to my Father”?) then certain powers say, “Who is this that is coming from Edom, with scarlet garments from Bosra, so beautiful”? And those escorting him say to those stationed at the gates of heaven, ‘“Lift up your gates, and the king of glory will come in.” And they inquire further, as it were, .  .  . when they see his blood-stained right hand and his whole body filled with the works of prowess: “Why is your apparel red and your garments like the residue of a full wine-vat which has been trampled down”? To which he answers, “I have crushed them in pieces.” It is truly for these reasons that he needed to wash “his robe in wine, and his garment in the blood of the grape.” For after he took our infirmities and bore our diseases, and after he took away the sin of the whole world, .  .  . perhaps then he received the baptism which is greater than any which could be imagined by men, concerning which I think he said, “And I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and how distressed I am until it be accomplished.” . . . But since . . . after he had performed manly deeds against his adversaries he needed to wash “his robe in wine, and his garment in the blood of grapes,” he went up to the Father, the husbandman of the true vine, that, having washed there after the ascent to the height when he led captivity captive, he might descend bearing various gifts.105

It is the body of the physical Jesus still stained with the blood of his passion that is the subject of this discussion. Origen believed that the physical body of Jesus 105.  ComJn 6.287–92; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 80, 246–47, my italics.

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ascended into the New Jerusalem after the resurrection. When he treats the passage about Jesus’ jubilant triumphal entry into Jerusalem in his Commentary on Matthew, his description of the entry into Jerusalem morphs into the welcome into the New Jerusalem given to the physical Jesus by the heavenly powers much like his description in the Commentary on John. Again, it is the physical nature of the ascending Christ that is marked as the object of astonishment among the heavenly powers. Jesus “enters the true Jerusalem” Origen says. “And the heavenly powers, referred to as ‘the whole city,’ are astonished, and ask, Who is this? This resembles what is prophesied in the twenty-third Psalm,” he says, “concerning the ascension of the Saviour and the astonishment of the heavenly powers at the new sight of his physical vehicle.”106 By blending Johannine and Pauline understandings of the nature of Christ with passages from Isaiah, the Twelve Prophets, and the Psalms, Origen understood Christ to be the divine Son of God embodied in the flesh of the human Jesus of Nazareth. While there were certainly differences between these two natures, which were most evident in the final events of the story of Jesus involving his death and resurrection, the two natures were nevertheless one. Each experienced aspects of the other which were mutually foreign to their individual natures. CONSUMMATION In his early Alexandrian work, On First Principles, Origen describes the kind of eschatological thinking that was prevalent among many in the church. He notes that 106.  ComMt 16.19; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 1, 259, my italics; Ps (23) 24:7–10.

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different people have different ideas about what the good life is, even in this life. Some think it consists of physical pleasure, others of public service, and still others of learning. He says that such diversity also exists in the conceptions of Christians about the life to come. Some, following the letter of Scripture or, more precisely, “their own desires and lusts,” think the future holds promise of physical pleasure, and want the post-resurrection body to consist of flesh capable of eating, drinking, and doing everything that the physical body does. They imagine that in the resurrected life there will be marriages, child-birth, and “the rebuilding of the earthly city of Jerusalem” from the “precious stones” listed in Revelation 21, and that they will be served and made wealthy by the peoples listed in Isaiah 60 and 61. They also quote Jesus’ statement in Matthew 26:49, made at the institution of the Lord’s supper, about drinking wine again with the disciples in the “Father’s kingdom,” and the beatitude in Luke 6:21 and Matthew 5:6 about those being filled who now are hungry and thirsty. They think, furthermore, that they will occupy positions of political authority based on Jesus’ statement in Luke 19:19. They anticipate, in other words, a future existence that, in most respects, replicates this present life except that their circumstances will be greatly improved. Origen responds to this view of the consummation in the On First Principles by presenting what he calls the view held by people who accept “the interpretation of Scriptures in accordance with the sense of the apostles.” Such people, indeed, anticipate an eschatological eating, but of “the bread of life,” not bread made from flour. They will also drink, but of the wine served by Wisdom at her banquet described in Proverbs 9:2–5. Such food will restore the human being to “the image and likeness of God” described in 127

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Genesis 1:26. Those who had begun the Christian way but were not yet sufficiently instructed will have their education completed “in that Jerusalem, the city of saints,” where they will be formed into an “elect and precious” “living stone” as indicated in 1 Peter 2:4–5.107 What positive concept of the future life of the redeemed did Origen think Scripture presented? He understands Jesus’ words, “I am not of this world” (John 17:14, 16) to indicate the existence of another world besides this present visible world. He asserts that it is difficult to describe this other world because of the concept among Greek philosophers of a bodiless world of “ideas.” He is adamant that Christians do not mean a world that exists only in the imagination or in thoughts when they speak of another world. This other world is “something more glorious and splendid than this present world.”108 In his earlier Commentary on Genesis Origen had discussed the use of homonyms in Scripture, that is, words that have more than one meaning. He notes there that “world” is one such word in Scripture.109 It is true in current English as well that the term “world” has several possible meanings. We may mean the physical earth when we speak of the world, or we may use it in a political sense to mean nations when we speak of world leaders, or we may use it in such a narrow sense as the personal circumstances of an individual when we ask, for example, “How are things in your world?” In On First Principles Origen applies this understanding of “world” as a homonym by discussing different 107.  Princ 2.11.1–3; trans. Origen On First Principles, Vol. 2, 269–73. 108.  Princ 2.3.6; trans. Origen On First Principles, Vol. 1, 171. 109.  This text is preserved in Philoc 14.

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meanings of the term “world” in relation to Jesus’ statement that he is not of this “world.”110 He says that “some” use the term world to designate the universe consisting of heaven and earth. Within this realm, “world” refers to the celestial bodies such as the sun or moon, called “wanderers,” that is, planets (planētas), along with the sphere of heavenly bodies called non-wandering (aplanē). This sphere of non-wandering heavenly bodies was considered to encompass that of the wandering bodies. This division and description of the heavenly bodies was the prevailing scientific view of the universe in Origen’s time. It was the view of Ptolemy, the important second-century A.D. Alexandrian astronomer.111 Origen used various scriptural images to identify it with the final destination of the saints. The sphere of non-wandering bodies does not pass away, he thought, because it “has not admitted any causes of corruption.”112 This, he suggests, is the world of the saints described in 2 Corinthians 4:18—5:1. This “eternal house” was “not made with hands” and, therefore, is not seen, in contra-distinction to everything in the visible, material world described in Isaiah 66:2 as made by God’s hand. Origen is careful, however, to emphasize that “not seen” is not the equivalent of “invisible” because the latter refers to what does not have a nature capable of being seen, that is, it lacks a material body.113 The things Paul refers to as 110.  There are similar discussions of “world” as a homonym in ComMt 13.20 and ComJn 6.301–5. 111  See Ptolemy’s Almagest, 327. A comparison of Origen’s argument in Philoc 23.6 with Ptolemy’s Almagest, 327 (VII.2) shows that he knew and followed Ptolemy’s description of the universe. 112.  Princ 2.3.6; trans. Origen On First Principles, Vol. 1, 175. 113.  There is a subtle distinction between Origen’s terminology here and what he says on the texts cited above in the section on creation about things that are invisible. Here he is referring to the Greek

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“not seen,” Origen asserts, “possess a nature that is able to be seen, but .  .  . have .  .  . not yet been seen by those to whom they are promised.”114 This, Origen says, is what “they” consider in Scripture to be called “the good land and the land of the living.” While Origen presents this in On First Principles as the view of “some,” which leaves it ambiguous as to whether he too embraced the view that this was what Jesus meant when he said “I am not of this world” and pointed to another heavenly world elsewhere, his discussions of the subject in his later works suggest that this view, either in whole or in part, was important, at least, to the view that he held of the future world. In his later works Origen tends to give more attention to the literal sense of the scriptural text, without abandoning the view that the text could, in addition, contain a hidden, spiritual meaning. In his discussion of Matthew 24:9–24, for example, he begins by saying, “This text is clear on its own without any explanation because the disciples of Christ have often been delivered ‘to tribulations’ and killed because of the Word and ‘hated by the nations’ because of Christ.” His close contact with persecutions and martyrdoms since his childhood must inform his understanding of this passage, though he does not mention them. He objects to the idea that this delivery of Christians to tribulations and martyrdom is to occur only after nations and kingdoms have risen up in war against one another and says, “[E]ven before these things happen Christians have been delivered ‘to tribulations’ and, because they give term asōmatos, meaning incorporeal and hence lacking the physical requirements necessary to be seen; in the texts on creation he was discussing the term aoratos, which can be used to mean invisible, but which Origen is taking in the sense of “not seen,” but not in the sense of incapable of being seen. 114.  Princ 2.3.6; trans. Origen On First Principles, Vol. 1, 175.

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testimony to the truth, they have been killed and ‘hated by all nations’ with whom they have lived.” He brings this discussion around to where he can point out that people who experience catastrophes are prone to search for scapegoats on whom they can hang the blame for the catastrophes. He gives the specific example of an earthquake that had occurred in his time when the general population had fastened the blame on Christians and consequently “churches were persecuted and burned.” He then notes Jesus’ closing statement in the passage, about the gospel being preached to all nations prior to the final consummation, and argues that this has not yet occurred. He follows this with a series of assertions introduced by the interesting phrase, “not yet.” “Not yet have there been many betrayers of the church, and not yet have many ‘false prophets’ appeared. . . . So too, not yet have they been ‘hated’ by ‘all races’ . . . , so also not yet has the ‘Gospel of the kingdom’ been preached ‘in all the world.’” That little phrase implies, of course, the anticipation that what has been said will occur sometime in the future. He then introduces a short moral application of the passage with the words, “We have explained these words in accord with the simple tradition,” and suggests that there may be a “moral sense” in the passage as well, which he then proceeds to set forth.115 In the following paragraphs I will set forth what I consider to be Origen’s later thoughts on the consummation. Origen’s understanding of the consummation, or of eschatology, seems to have developed somewhat, at least, from his earlier Alexandrian works to his later Caesarean 115.  SerMt 39; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew Vol. 2, 600–603. The Latin translator of the SerMt tended to use the word “moral” to translate most of Origen’s descriptive terms for his exegesis (See the section, Discerning the Details in the Text in chapter 3 above).

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works. Vogt argued that there is a perceptible shifting of Origen’s eschatological views in his later works, notably the Commentary on Matthew and the Contra Celsum, from his early works such as the On First Principles, and in an earlier publication I expressed my agreement with Vogt’s views, which I still affirm.116 In his later thought, exemplified especially in the two works mentioned above plus the later books of the Commentary on John, and the twentynine Homilies on the Psalms discovered in Munich in 2012, there appears to be a rethinking of certain aspects, at least, of eschatology and the use of biblical concepts and imagery to express it. In this reconception of his eschatological views Origen draws on scriptural images, which he often assimilates to one another: the Sabbath rest following the six days of creation as presented in Hebrews 3–4 joined with inheriting the land in Matthew 5:5; the exodus, including the celebration of the Passover and other festive days, coupled with the entry into the city of God discussed in Hebrews 12:22–23. We will look at how Origen interprets these images eschatologically. ENTERING GOD’S REST AND INHERITING THE LAND The author of Hebrews117 has a fascinating exegetical argument in chapters 3–4 of the treatise based on Psalm 95:7–11. There the Psalmist refers to the rebellion of the Israelites against the Lord at Meribah because they had no water. Their lack of faith in the Lord caused the Lord to swear, “They shall not enter my rest.” The author of 116.  Vogt, “Exegese,” 143–59; Heine, Origen: Scholarship, 238–41. 117.  Origen treats the author as Paul throughout his discussions of the epistle in spite of what Eusebius says he had said about the author (see H.E. 6.25.13–14).

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Hebrews takes the words of the psalm, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion. . . ,” to mean that the promise of entering God’s “rest” is still open “today” because the Israelites were not allowed to enter it. He denies that the attainment of this rest was realized when Joshua lead the Israelites into the land of Canaan.118 The author of Hebrews understands the “rest” mentioned to refer to God’s resting on the seventh day when he ceased his work after the six days of creation.119 He concludes his argument with the statement, “Therefore, a Sabbath observance remains for the people of God.” These two chapters in Hebrews provide some key concepts that Origen applied to eschatology in his later life. He reads the text of these two chapters literally. The two chapters are already, of course, a figurative reading of Numbers 14:20–23 based on the interpretation given to this event in Psalm 95:7–11. The “promised ‘rest’” in Hebrews 3–4, as Attridge points out, “is not the earthly land of Canaan but a heavenly reality, which God entered upon the completion of creation.”120 Origen accepts this idea literally and uses it for some of his understanding of the consummation. The philosopher Celsus had written an attack on Christianity in the second century in which he alleged that Christians say they will go “to another earth, better than this one,” and that they got this idea from the Greek poet Homer and the Greek philosopher Plato. Origen responds that, to the contrary, the Greeks got their ideas from Moses. Moses, he claimed, was far earlier than the Greeks, and he had “taught that God promised a pure land, which was 118.  See Heb 4:8. 119.  See Gen 2:2; Heb 4:4. 120.  Attridge, Epistle to the Hebrews, 123.

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‘good and large, flowing with milk and honey,’ to those who lived in accordance with His law.”121 This promised land, Origen goes on to argue, could not refer to the land of Judea into which Joshua had led the Israelites because of the curse God pronounced on the earth as a result of Adam’s sin in Genesis 3. That curse included the entire earth and Judea is a part of the earth that was cursed. Therefore, he reasoned, the promise made by God in Exodus 3:8 about a “land good and large, flowing with milk and honey” cannot be understood to have reference to the land of Judea. But, if not Judea, to what, then, does the promise in Exodus 3:8 refer? Origen believes that Paul, whom he believed to be the author of Hebrews and to have had apostolic insight into the meaning of the Scriptures, is interpreting this promise about the land in Exodus when he says in Hebrews 12:22, “But you have come to mount Sion and to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God, and to an innumerable company of angels.” Origen then appeals to the prophets to confirm that his interpretation of the good land promised by Moses is true. “All the prophets,” he says, “teach that there will be a return to Jerusalem for those who have gone astray and fallen from it, and, in general, that they will be restored to what is called the place and city of God by the one who says ‘His place is in holy peace,’ and who affirms that ‘Great is the Lord, and much to be praised in the city of our God, in his holy mountain, a well-rooted joy of all the earth.’”122 Origen did not believe that the prophets were speaking of a future return to the Jerusalem located in Judea

121.  See Exod 3:8. 122.  For these paragraphs see Cels 7.28–29; trans. Origen Contra Celsum, 417–18, with slight modification.

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when they spoke in this way, but thought they were referring to a heavenly city not located on this earth. Origen’s interpretation of Jesus’ answer to Peter’s question about what the disciples would receive as a result of following him points to this same understanding. His interpretation goes well beyond Jesus’ response that the disciples would sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. Jesus says, in his answer to Peter, that this will occur in “the regeneration” (Matt 19:28). Origen identifies this “regeneration” as “a new coming to be, when a new heaven and a new earth are created for those who have renewed themselves, and a new covenant is delivered along with its cup.”123 He proceeds to discuss the “washing of regeneration” mentioned by Paul as the necessary precursor of the end-time regeneration. The former occurs in water; the latter in fire and Spirit. Those who experience the latter are conformed to the body of Christ’s glory and sit with the glorified Christ on twelve thrones. As he concludes his discussion of this subject Origen refers to Jesus’ response to Peter about receiving fields and houses more numerous than those forsaken. He locates these fields and houses “in that ‘rest’ which lies in the divine paradise and the city of God, of which ‘glorious things were spoken,’ and ‘in’ whose ‘fortifications God is known when he assists it.’ Consequently,” he continues, “one can say to those who inherit houses there, ‘Just as we have heard, so have we seen in the city of the Lord of hosts, in the city of our God,’ of which it is said, ‘Inspect its fortifications.’ For people such as this, it is blessed to inherit eternal life. They possess as their inheritance large fields and trees cared for by God, plus houses made of living stones in which ‘everyone who has left brothers or sisters’ and the other things mentioned 123.  ComMt 15.22; see Matt 19:28; Rev 21:1; Matt 26:27–29.

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will rest.”124 Origen also considered the “bright cloud” that overshadowed the three disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration in Matthew 17 to be “an example of the coming rest.”125 He gives a slight hint of what that future rest might consist when he says in a homily on Psalm 36 (37) that the psalm verse that says, “the meek will inherit the land” “supplements what has been written” in the beatitudes “in the Gospel, for not only will the meek inherit the land, but they will also ‘delight in an abundance of peace.’”126 He then seems to contrast this understanding of the reward of the saints with that he had described as hoped for by many Christians in his early On First Principles, where he referred to expectations of physical pleasures in the heavenly life. He says, On the one hand, let the people who are bodily, earthly, and fleshly delight in strong drinks and in foods that are abolished in the belly which will be abolished,127 although they never want to abolish it, but on the other hand let the saints take delight, “in an abundance of peace” instead of in these delicacies which they have despised. For peace is a luxury and it is not a small peace but an abundance of peace that the Word promises will exist in the days of Christ.128

124.  ComMt 15.25; Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. I, 216–17; see Ps 86 (87):3; 47 (48):1, 4, 9, 14; 1 Pet 2:5. 125.  ComMt 12.42; Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. I, 124. 126.  This is the reading in the LXX; the NRSV, translating the Hebrew text has “abundant prosperity” instead of “peace.” 127. See 1 Cor 6:13. 128 Hom 2 on Ps 36 in Origenes Werke Dreizehnter Band, 135.

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Origen did not conceive of this land and city to be a purely intellectual or spiritual idea. While he certainly did not think of them in the physical way that many early Christians did, as described at the beginning of this section, he did believe that there is some kind of perceptible substance to this land and city. Origen passes over giving an explanation of the “good land” and “the city of God” in his argument with Celsus, saying that he was postponing such explanations for his “commentaries on the prophets.” He also notes that he had provided a partial discussion of the city of God in his expositions of the forty-fifth and forty-seventh psalms.129 His works on these two psalms, along with his commentaries on the prophets, however, have perished. He makes a passing reference to five verses about inheriting the land in Psalm 36 (37) in the Contra Celsum.130 These verses are discussed in five homilies on the psalm, four of which are among the new Greek homilies discovered in Munich in 2012, and the other in a Latin translation known for some time. I referred to his discussion of Psalm 36:11 in the preceding paragraph. In his discussion of Psalm 36:22, “[T]hose who bless him will inherit the land, but those who curse him will be destroyed,” he points out that it will be a land of good things, and describes it as “the good land” and the “land which flows with milk and honey,” connecting the promise with the Mosaic descriptions of the land promised to the Hebrews.131 In the conclusion of this homily he also connects the second part of the verse about those cursing God being destroyed with the parable

129.  Cels 7.31. 130.  Cels 7.29 131.  See Exod 3:8, Lev 20:24, Num 3:27, and Deut 6:3.

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of Jesus in Matthew 25, which is one of Jesus’ eschatological parables.132 In discussing Psalm 37:9, “Those who wait for the Lord shall inherit the land,” Origen introduces the concept of another earth which appears, at least, to be a physical earth, as he describes the land to be inherited. It is some other land which some call counterearth. That is what the Scriptures call the good land, flowing with milk and honey, which the Savior promises to the meek, saying, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land.” This133 is not the earth, but the dry land, just as, again in relation to a certain heaven, this is not heaven, but the “firmament.” For God knows the difference between the firmament and heaven .  .  .  , and the difference between the dry land and earth. We are hastening, therefore to the promise of the true heaven, not what is named heaven, and to the truth of the firmament; not to what is called earth, but the truth of what the dry land is.134

The creation story in Genesis 1 furnishes the framework for this interpretation. There heaven and earth are said to be created in Genesis 1:1, then in Genesis 1:6–7 the firmament, that is a solid body135 to separate the waters, is created and called heaven, and in Genesis 1:9–10 the dry land is said to appear and is called earth. The “true heaven” and “the truth of what the dry land is” are the bodies created in Genesis 1:1. In his comment on Psalm 37:9 Origen removes the Christian hope from this material universe, 132. Hom 3 on Ps 36 in Origenes Werke Dreizehnter Band, 155–56. 133.  “This” in the present context means this physical earth. 134 Hom 2 on Ps 36 in Origenes Werke Dreizehnter Band, 132–33. 135. See HomGn 1.2.

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that is, from the firmament and the dry land. The Christian hope, he says, is located in “some other land,” which some call “counter-earth.”136 The idea of a counter-earth appears to have been something that the Pythagoreans had first suggested.137 Eusebius reports that “Philolaus the Pythagorean,” explaining the structure of the solar system, “says that fire is in the center, for this is the hearth of the universe. Second comes the counter-earth, and third the inhabited earth.” Philolaus then says that the earth that is inhabited “lies opposite to and moves around the counter-earth, which is also why those on this earth do not see those on that one.”138 Origen may mean Clement of Alexandria, his earlier Christian contemporary, when he refers to “some” who call the land to be inherited by the saints counter-earth. Clement also attributes the idea of a counter-earth to the Pythagoreans. He then identifies the concept as the “chosen land” mentioned in Jeremiah 3:19 and says that those who inherit this land will reign over the earth.139 It is not possible from our current texts to say how important the concept of a counter-earth was to Origen’s eschatological views, or whether he himself held this view at all. It is clear, however, that he thinks of the “land” of the saints to lie elsewhere than on this present earth. Origen also makes some eschatological comments on Psalm 37:34: “And he will lift you up to inherit the land.” He interprets the verse quite literally. He suggests that this 136.  This word is rare in Origen’s works. I am aware of its appearance only here in the psalm homily under discussion, and once in a fragment on Genesis 1:26 (Origenes Werke mit deutscher Übersetzung: Band 1/1, 160), plus a use of it in reference to people in Princ 2.3.6. 137.  See Aristotle, De Caelo 293a (Book II.1). 138.  Eusebius Werke, 15.57. 139.  Clemens Alexandrinus. 5.14.139.

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verse contains an indication of the location of the land to be inherited by the saints, and he thinks this indication is in the phrase, “[H]e will lift you up.” He quotes Ecclesiastes 5:1, “God is in heaven above, but you are on the earth below,” and concludes from this that the land of promise is above and, consequently the Psalmist says, “[H]e will lift you up to inherit the land.”140 “For,” he adds, “unless one is lifted up and ascends on high and is made heavenly, it is not possible that the inheritance of that land follow.” Assuming the firmament of Genesis 1:6–7 to be a solid body, the land of promise is thought to be located on the topside of the firmament. This is the “good land, a holy land, a spacious land, the land of the living, a land flowing with milk and honey.”141 These comments seem to assume the ancient mythical view of the universe as a tiered solid structure. This stationary view of the universe does not appear to me to be compatible with what is said above about the movement of earth and counter earth in relation to one another in the quotation from the psalm homily that is in Greek. Since the statement about the “good land” sitting on the topside of the firmament that is above the earth comes from a later Latin translation, we must question, I think, how much these remarks owe to the view of the translator. Origen’s discussion of the saints’ inheritance of “the land” and entering into God’s “rest” shows that he certainly believed that there will be a consummation of the present world order and that there will be a subsequent life in another world order that will be a superior life. These images do not, however, give any clear indication of what he 140  The verb “to exalt” means “to lift up.” Origen interprets the words of the verse very literally from this meaning of the verb. 141. Hom 5 on Ps 36 in Origène Homélies sur les Psaumes 36 à 38, 236–38. Cf. Princ 2.3.7.

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anticipated that life to be, except the negative one that it would not be a life of physical pleasure. THE CITY OF GOD, THE NEW JERUSALEM The story of the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem just before his arrest and crucifixion carries symbolic overtones for Origen. Origen’s remarks are found in his comments on the story in Matthew 21, and John 12.142 I have already referred briefly to the fact that Origen’s description of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem morphs into a description of his entry into the heavenly Jerusalem.143 We shall now look in more detail at connections Origen makes between Jesus’ triumphal entry and his ascension to the heavenly city of God. Origen gives a subjective interpretation of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem in the Commentary on John. There Jerusalem is taken to be the human soul which the Logos is entering; the ass on which he rides is the text of the Old Testament interpreted by the two disciples who loose it; and the colt of the ass is the New Testament.144 The association of Jerusalem with the human soul is further confirmed a little later when he is interpreting the prophecy from Zechariah 9:9–10. There the prophesied king is said to “cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem” (NRSV). These words are a comfort, 142.  ComMt 16.18ff; ComJn 10. The story is also told in Mark 11 and Luke 19. Origen did not write a commentary on Mark and that on Luke is lost. There are two short homilies on the story in Luke (HomLk 37–38) but they do not make any eschatological connections with the story nor do any of the fragments on Luke. 143.  See above at the conclusion of the section on the incarnation (p. 126). 144.  ComJn 10.174–79.

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Origen argues, to the person who is protected from “the fiery darts of the enemy” because he has “received Jesus into his own temple.”145 This seems to be Origen’s understanding of the story at this time, but he follows it by mentioning an alternate view held by some in which the ass is regarded as Jewish believers and the colt as gentile believers. This in turn elicits a different view of Jerusalem. “Perhaps,” he says, “‘the Jerusalem which is above’ is now meant, into which the Lord will ascend conducting believers from the circumcision and from the gentiles.”146 Origen’s interpretation of the triumphal entry in John’s Gospel definitely preceded that found in the Commentary on Matthew for Origen makes a few comments on Matthew’s account in the Commentary on John and then promises a more complete treatment later when he is able to write on the Gospel according to Matthew. In the Commentary on Matthew he also looks back at the Commentary on John and says that he had examined the subject briefly when he was writing the Commentary on John.147 In the Commentary on Matthew, the Jerusalem that Jesus approaches and to which Zechariah refers in his prophecy is “the heavenly Zion which received the one who had been crucified, rather than the Zion which crucified the Lord.” This heavenly Zion is identified with that described in Hebrews 12:22 where Christians are said to “‘have drawn near to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to a myriad of angels in festal assembly,’ and again in the Epistle to the Galatians, ‘But the Jerusalem above, which is our mother, is free.’” 145.  ComJn 10.204–5; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 80, 301. 146.  ComJn 10.180–82; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 80, 296, modified; see Gal 4:26. 147.  ComJn 10.191; ComMt 16.19; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 1, 261; see also ComMt 16.20.

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Here the ass and the colt are referred to as believers from the Jews and the gentiles both of whom had been bound by sins and were released from this binding by Jesus’ disciples to whom he had given the power to forgive sins. What Jesus needs the ass and colt for, Origen says, is to “give them rest when he sits on them.”148 It will be noticed that in this interpretation of the triumphal entry in the Commentary on Matthew no mention is made of the subjective meaning of Jerusalem as the human soul. It is rather the eschatological heavenly Jerusalem of Hebrews 12 that Jesus approaches and he wants to give those released “rest,” another important eschatological image for Origen also drawn from the Epistle to the Hebrews (3:7—4:11). It should also be noted that the interpretation of the triumphal entry presented here is a fuller development of the view that Origen reports in the Commentary on John was held by “some.” Origen’s thought appears to have taken a more eschatological turn between his writing the Commentary on John and the Commentary on Matthew. In the later commentary there is nothing said about Jesus entering the soul; rather Jesus “enters the true Jerusalem.” The literal entering of the earthly Jerusalem and the events that transpired concerning Jesus’ death and resurrection are important to Origen’s figurative interpretation of the heavenly city of God. Jesus had, “‘to go to Jerusalem,’” Origen says, “so that when he had suffered many things and been killed in that Jerusalem, he might produce the first fruits from the dead in the Jerusalem ‘above.’” He then interprets what he means by saying, “For so long as ‘Christ’ ‘had’ not ‘been raised from the dead . . . , and those being conformed to his death and resurrection were not 148.  ComMt 16.15; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 1, 254.

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raised with him, the city of God, the temple, the purifications, and the other things were being sought below.” It was necessary that Christ go to the literal Jerusalem and suffer in order to establish the things above, so that he might be glorified by the heavenly elders who comprehend his acts of kindness, . . . and be glorified by scribes of the people who engage in Scriptures not written “with ink but” which are explained by “the Spirit of the living God,” and be killed in the Jerusalem below but, after he arose, rule on “mount Zion and in the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.”149

His description of this triumphal entry leaves no question that it is the heavenly realm that Jesus enters. “And the heavenly powers,” he says, “referred to as ‘the whole city,’ are astonished, and ask, ‘Who is this? This resembles what is prophesied in the twenty-third [fourth] Psalm concerning the ascension of the Saviour and the astonishment of the heavenly powers at the new sight of his physical vehicle. . . . There are similar prophecies in Isaiah,” he adds, “about the ascent of the Saviour after the dispensation, for it is written, ‘Who is this coming from Edom, from Bosra with scarlet garments, this one who is beautiful in his robe?’ If you read through the whole passage you will be able to understand what the astonished powers say at the ascent of the Saviour’s body and the answer they are given.”150 149.  ComMt 12.20; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 1, 108; see 2 Cor 3:3; Heb 12:22. 150.  ComMt 16.19; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew. Vol. 1, 259–60; cf. the similar description of the ascension, which also attributes the bewilderment of the heavenly powers to the physical body of Jesus ascending at notes 105 and 106 above.

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This text suggests something more than an intellectual substance for the heavenly Jerusalem, for it is the approach of the Savior’s “physical vehicle,” that is, the physical body of Jesus, that causes the surprise of the heavenly powers. Origen expresses the same view in his Commentary on John when he discusses Jesus’ words at Judas’ departure to betray Jesus, “Now is the Son of Man glorified.”151 He argues that this statement has to be about the human Jesus, for the divine Logos could not be glorified more than he already was as the one who was in the beginning with God and was divine. It is the man Jesus, Origen insists, that is highly exalted through the passion and resurrection. By glorifying God in his death, the human Jesus “was no longer different from the Word, but was the same with him.”152 Origen’s discussions of these Scriptural images again leave his exact understanding of the nature of the eschaton frustratingly vague. They do suggest, however, that he was beginning, at least, to think in terms of some kind of substantial existence for the saints after the consummation of this present physical world. THE CELEBRATION OF FESTIVE DAYS IN HEAVEN In John 2:13 it says, “The Passover of the Jews was near.” Origen asks why John has added the phrase “of the Jews” to identify the Passover, since no other people celebrated such a feast. He suggests that when the Passover is not celebrated “according to the intention of the Scripture,” it is a human Passover, but when it is celebrated “in spirit and truth by 151.  John 13:31. 152.  ComJn 32.325; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 89, 403.

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those who worship God in spirit and truth” it is a divine Passover. The addition of the phrase, “of the Jews” is added, he suggests, to contrast the imminent Jewish Passover with “the divine one.” He then notes that in Exodus 12:11 the Passover is called “the Passover of the Lord.” This prompts him to ask why Paul says in 1  Corinthians 5:7, “For .  .  . Christ our Passover is sacrificed,” and not, “Christ the Passover of the Lord is sacrificed?” He suggests an eschatological answer to this question. “[E]very feast which is truly the Lord’s,” he says, “.  .  . will be celebrated, not in this age nor upon the earth, but in the coming age and in heaven, when the kingdom of heaven is present.” Origen confirms that festal days will be celebrated in the coming age by quoting the question of the Hebrew prophet Hosea, “What will you do in the days of festal assembly, and in the days of the feast of the Lord?” He further confirms the eschatological meaning of the Passover of the Lord by quoting what he considers to be Paul’s words in Hebrews 12:22–23 about the saints coming to “a festal assembly” in “the heavenly Jerusalem,” and concludes with Paul’s statement in Colossians 2:16–17 that the earthly feast days and Sabbaths are “a shadow of things to come.” It is only the hidden, mysterious wisdom of God however, he asserts, that can show us how we will celebrate the “festival in the heavenly places of which there was a shadow among the corporeal Jews.” “It is also the task of this wisdom,” he adds, “to contemplate the things established by law concerning foods, which are symbols of the things which will maintain and strengthen our souls there.” Furthermore, the shadow-reality contrast applies not only to foods and Sabbaths, “but the feasts too are a shadow of things to come.” He concludes this discussion of the Passover of the Jews by alluding again to a heavenly celebration 146

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of the Passover in the eschaton based on Hebrews 12:22, which he considers to refer to a “third” Passover “which will be celebrated with ten thousand angels in a most perfect assembly and a most blessed exodus.”153 Origen expands the concept of the celebration of the Passover in the eschaton to include all the Jewish festal days in a homily on Numbers in which he discusses the Jewish festive days in general. He believes that if the instructions about them are taken literally they appear more as superstitions than religious observances. The Apostle Paul, however, knew, he says, that the Holy Spirit was not speaking about the rite observed literally by the Jews, and consequently said, “Let no one judge you in relation to food, or drink, or a portion of a feast day or new moon, or Sabbath. These are shadows of future things.” Origen has understood Paul’s statement in Colossians 2:16 differently than modern New Testament scholars. The phrase about a feast day in Colossians is en merei eortēs, which translated word for word means “in part of a feast.” English translations of Colossians have some such phrase as “regarding a feast.” Origen, however, sees the word “part or portion” as a more significant term in the phrase, pointing to the eschatological significance of what Paul is saying, namely that the festal days are only partially celebrated in this life. They are, in other words, only “a portion” of a feast day. This leads him to conclude, “If then the Sabbath is a shadow of future things . . . , and the new moon is a shadow of future things, certainly the other festivals are likewise shadows of future things.”154

153.  This discussion of the Passover is based on ComJn 10.67– 111; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 80, 270–79. 154.  HomNum 23.5 (PG 12.754B); Col 2:16–17.

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In order to understand how the festive days are performed in the future, he asserts, one must momentarily disregard this earth with its objects known by sense perception and contemplate “how heaven and earth will pass away . . . , but a new heaven and a new earth will be brought forth. In addition,” he goes on, “remove the light of this sun from your view and give to that coming world the sevenfold light of the sun; no rather, on the authority of Scripture, grant that the Lord himself is the light.”155 He then suggests that we imagine the presence of all the angels and heavenly powers, and in the context of all these glorious beings try to conceive how the feast days can be celebrated there and “what magnitude of exaltation” will be present.156 It is only the blessed who will participate in this heavenly gathering. “Sinners,” Origen says, “are punished by not being there with the others.”157 Origen had earlier argued, as also in other texts,158 that Christians keep the festive days even in this life, but in a spiritual, not literal manner. He is now, however, pressing this forward from a spiritual to an eschatological sense, much as he had also moved the concept of the triumphal entry from a subjective entry into the soul to an eschatological ascension of the physical body of Jesus.159 Even the spiritual keeping of the festivals, he insists, is only a partial observation. This argument is based on the combination of Paul’s words in two different texts.160 He argues as follows: 155.  See Isa 30:26; 60:19; cf. Rev 21:23; 22:5. 156.  HomNum 23.11 (PG 12.754C-D). 157.  HomJer 12.3. 158.  See, for example, ComJn 10.88–110; Cels 8.17. 159.  See the discussion above at pages 142–44. 160.  See the section, The Pauline Imprint on Origen’s Interpretation of Scripture, in chapter 3 above.

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For as the apostle said, “We know in part and we prophesy in part,” so it is, consequently, that we celebrate the festal day in part. But that you may know that these things are so, let us return to Paul’s own words about feast days and new moons, and see how he spoke observantly: “Let no one, therefore,” he said, “judge you in respect to food or drink or part of a feast day.” Notice carefully how he did not say “a feast day,” but “part of a feast day.” Situated in this world, we celebrate a feast day “in part,” not in its totality. For we are hindered by the burden of flesh. Even if we do not will it, we are battered by the lusts of the flesh and pierced by its cares and anxieties. “For a corruptible body,” as that most wise Wisdom says, “weighs the soul down and oppresses a mind thinking on many things.” The saints, therefore, celebrate the feast day in part in this world because they also know in part and prophesy in part. But when those things that are perfect come those things that are in part are destroyed. For just as what is in part ceases with perfect knowledge, and what is in part ceases with perfect prophecy, so too that festival which is in part ceases with the perfect festival. For a world like ours cannot grasp what is perfect, where, as we said, physical necessity brings to mind now food, now drink, now sleep. It also stirs up all kinds of anxiety over what is necessary for the present life. Without doubt, all these things interrupt the continuity of the festival of God. But when that shall come which is said of those who are restored into the holy places—if we too deserve to be of those who are so restored, who do not hunger, thirst, sleep, or labor, but are ever watchful, as the angels are said to be—when we deserve to be restored to that order, then the festival will be true and incorruptible, and Jesus

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Christ, our Savior and Lord will be the prince, bridegroom, and lord of that festival.161

These passages about the celebration of the festivals in the heavenly realm suggest strongly that Origen did not conceive of the future life as an absorption of intelligent beings into the oneness of God.162 He speaks of being restored to the heavenly places, but not of losing individual identity. His discussion suggests that human existence in this restoration will have some similarity to the angelic powers. In the Commentary on Matthew he argues that if all things are made new in the eschaton163 then “all the truly blessed things of life there must be of a different kind.” This includes familial relationships. He argues that even memory of earthly relationships will be deleted.164 He considers terms of familial relationships used of the future life in Scripture to be homonyms. The post-resurrection life, he asserts, is discussed only figuratively in Scripture.165 In opposition to those Christians who thought, like the Sadducees had fallaciously argued, that there would be marriages in the future life as in the present life and that physical relationships would be continued, he cites Jesus’ response that, “those raised from the dead become ‘like the angels in heaven,’ and just ‘as the angels in heaven neither marry nor are married,’ so . . . also are those raised from 161.  HomNum 23.11 (PG 12.755A-C); quoting 1  Cor 3:19; Col 2:16; Wis 9:15. 162.  See de Faye, Origène, Vol. 2, 250–55, who argued in the early twentieth century that this was Origen’s view. De Faye based his argument on Jerome’s and Justinian’s comments on Rufinus’ version of Origen’s eschatology in the On First Principles. 163.  See Isa 43:18–19; Rev 21:5. 164.  ComMt 17.33; The Commentary of Origen on the Gospel of St Matthew. Volume 1, 312–13. 165.  See his extensive argument in ComMt 17.33–36.

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the dead.” Origen thinks, however, that this statement of Jesus about likeness to the angels implies something more than the absence of marital relationships in the future life. He suggests that being “like the angels” also suggests a transformation of the earthly body into one that is “heavenly and luminous as are the bodies of the angels.”166 But what does Origen mean by a “heavenly and luminous” body? In his discussion of the transfiguration story in Matthew, he asserts that there is a relationship between Jesus being glorified in the resurrection and “his transformation and his face appearing ‘as the sun’” on the mountain.”167 First, we must ask, what Origen understood the three disciples to have seen on the mountain when they saw Jesus with Moses and Elijah. He makes it clear that not just anyone would have seen the three figures had they been present. He notes that the journey up the mountain took place six days after some preceding teaching of Jesus. He takes the mention of six days to be significant, suggesting that they represent the six days of the material creation related in Genesis and, Origen suggests, indicate that one who makes the trip up the mountain represents one “who transcends the affairs of the world in that he looks no longer to ‘the things that are seen’ (for these are ‘temporary’) but looks already to ‘the things that are not seen’ and only to ‘the things that are not seen’ (because these are ‘eternal’).”168 Anyone, therefore, Origen concludes, who wants Jesus to give him a private viewing of the transformation must meet these prerequisites. Otherwise 166.  ComMt 17.30; The Commentary of Origen on the Gospel of St Matthew. Volume 1, 306; commenting on Matt 22:30. See Crouzel, Origen, 250–52. 167.  ComMt 12.43; The Commentary of Origen on the Gospel of St Matthew. Volume 1, 126. 168. See 2 Cor 4:18.

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his soul will be detracted by the things of the world and forced down to their level.169 Origen also suggests in this same discussion, drawing on Paul’s words in Philippians 2:6–7, that what the three disciples on the mountain saw was Jesus “‘in the form of God’ in which he existed long ago, and what those at the foot of the mountain saw was Jesus in “the ‘form of a slave.’”170 It seems clear that what Origen understood the three disciples on the mountain to have seen was not the physical body of Jesus that they had known at the foot of the mountain. The body of Jesus had been changed, and it is also suggested that the perception of the disciples had been changed. Nevertheless, Jesus had a body and the disciples recognized him as their Lord and Master with whom they had been associated below. In another passage in which Origen discusses a similar subject, but this time by blending Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 5:4 and Philippians 3:21, he says that the saints “who are in this tent” groan, “being weighed down” by the body of lowliness and do all things to be worthy of being found in the mystery of the resurrection, when God “will transform” not “the body of lowliness” that all have, but that of those who are genuinely disciples of Christ, that it might be “conformed to the body of the glory” of Christ. Again, he speaks of the transformation of a body, but not the physical body that everyone on earth has. It is the body of those disciples who have already on earth begun the process of being focused on the things of Christ. Such disciples, he anticipates, 169.  ComMt 12.36; The Commentary of Origen on the Gospel of St Matthew. Volume 1, 119. 170.  ComMt 12.37; The Commentary of Origen on the Gospel of St Matthew. Volume 1, 120.

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will be “‘conformed to the body of the glory’ of Christ.171

It has perhaps been noticed how often the term “body” appears in Origen’s discussions in these last few paragraphs, though his use of the word does not always have the connotations that we usually associate with that term. Origen believed that the soul always occupies a body, and that the body is always appropriate for the environment in which the soul finds itself. When the soul is on the physical earth it is enclosed in a physical body. When it is no longer on this physical earth, it will be enclosed in a body appropriate to its new environment. He illustrates this by comparing it to a newborn infant putting off the placenta when it leaves the world of the mother’s womb to enter life on earth.172 The sac in which it had been enclosed is no longer necessary or useful. In the same context he draws on 2 Corinthians 5:1–4, where Paul compares the physical body inhabited in this life to a tent that is exchanged for a house to argue that one exchanges the temporary, perishable physical body for an immortal body.173 The most important Pauline metaphor for Origen’s understanding of the spiritual body, however, is that of the continuity and discontinuity between a seed that is sown and the plant that grows from it.174 Origen does not claim to be able to describe what the spiritual body is. He is content to quote Paul’s statement that “God gives it a body as he has chosen.”175 171.  ComMt 13.21; The Commentary of Origen on the Gospel of St Matthew. Volume 1, 148. 172. See Cels 7.32. 173. See Cels 7.32. 174.  1 Cor 15:35–53; Cels 5.16–19. 175.  1 Cor 15:38 (NRSV); Cels 5.19, 22.

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What do Origen’s interpretation and use of these Scriptural images suggest about his understanding of the consummation in his late life? In an essay on Origen’s exegesis in the Contra Celsum, Vogt argued—on the basis of Origen’s use of Paul’s comments in Galatians 5:17 about the opposition between the flesh and the spirit in all human beings, and his words in Colossians 2:16 about celebrating a “part of a feast”—that Origen believed that the total human being consisting of body and spirit cannot celebrate a festival in body and spirit in this life. Either the body will prevail and the feast will be kept literally by eating of the prescribed foods and performing the prescribed rites, or the body will be suppressed, the literal foods and rites ignored, and a spiritual understanding of the feast will be celebrated. It is clear however, Vogt concludes, “that Origen . . . expects a celebration of the whole person, in both spirit and body, at the eschaton.”176 Vogt further suggested that in the Contra Celsum Origen, somewhat like Augustine in his Retractiones, retracted some of his early views, especially his eschatological views expressed in the Commentary on Genesis. He seems also, in my opinion, to be reconsidering the eschatological view he had expressed in the On First Principles. It seems to me that Origen works much more like an exegete of the Bible in his later life. With the exception of the Contra Celsum, which he says Ambrose coerced him to write, his late works are commentaries on the Bible: commentaries on Matthew and Luke, commentaries on the Hebrew prophets, and homilies on both the Old and New Testaments. In these commentaries he speaks about theological topics as they appear in biblical texts, and he speaks in the language of the biblical texts. He does not try to bring the varying 176.  Vogt, “Exegese” 155–58.

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biblical images into a system. He is content, rather, to let the images speak in their suggestive ways. This allows, among other things, for a variety of viewpoints. The kaleidoscope of scriptural eschatological images that Origen draws on in his late works—inheriting the land, entering God’s sabbath rest, entering the New Jerusalem, and celebrating the festivals with the heavenly hosts— is far removed from the simple, unified proposition that the end will be like the beginning, which he used in his early On First Principles. He was perhaps already reconsidering this proposition in his homilies on Isaiah where he argues that the two seraphim cover God’s face and feet and indicate that the beginning and the end are both unknown to us. Human beings can know only the uncovered midsection meaning the historical time between the beginning and the end.177 This intermediate period between beginning and end is the time of human beings on the physical earth. It is also the period of the incarnation, including its preparation and anticipation in the old Scriptures and its announcement and remembrance in the new. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. Describe the difference Origen perceived between the creation of humanity related in Genesis 1:26 and in Genesis 2:7. What exegetical basis did he have for his view? How would you evaluate his exegesis and conclusions? 2. How do John 1:1–18 and Philippians 2:6–11 influence Origen’s understanding of Christ? 177.  See the citation of this Isaiah passage above in the section on creation at fn. 10.

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3. What do you think is the most surprising aspect of Origen’s description of the glorification of Christ after the crucifixion? 4. Which of the metaphors Origen uses to describe the future life do you find most appealing? Why?

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SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING SECONDARY SOURCES Crouzel, Henri. Origen. Translated by A. S. Worrall. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989. de Lubac, Henri. History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture according to Origen. Translated by Anne Englund Nash. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2007. Edwards, Mark Julian. Origen against Plato. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002. Heine, Ronald E. Origen: Scholarship in the Service of the Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Heine, Ronald E. “Reading the Bible with Origen.” In The Bible in Greek Christian Antiquity, edited and translated by Paul M. Blowers, 131–48. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. Martens, Peter W. Origen and Scripture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

PRIMARY SOURCES Origen: An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer, First Principles: Book IV, Prologue to the Commentary on the Song of Songs, Homily XXVII on Numbers. Translation and introduction by Rowan A. Greer, preface by Hans Urs von Balthasar. New York: Paulist, 1979.

157

ORIGEN

Origen: Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans Books 1–5. Translated by Thomas P. Scheck. FOTC 103. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001. Origen: Commentary on the Gospel according to John, Books 13–32. Translated by Ronald E. Heine. FOTC 89. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1993. Origen: Contra Celsum. Translated with an introduction & notes by Henry Chadwick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965. Origen: Homilies on Genesis and Exodus. Translated by Ronald E. Heine. FOTC 71. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1982. Origen: Homilies 1–14 on Ezekiel. Translation and introduction by Thomas P. Scheck. ACW 62. Mahway, NJ: Newman, 2010. Origen: On First Principles. Translated by John Behr. Oxford Early Christian Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

158

BIBLIOGRAPHY ANCIENT SOURCES The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Volume 2. Introduction, texts, and translations by Herbert Musurillo. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972. Analecta Sacra Spicilegio Solesmensi Parata. Edited by Joannes Baptista Card. Pitra. Vol. III Patres Antenicaeni. Venis, 1883. C. Plini Caecili Secundi Epistularum Libri Decem. Edited by R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Classical Texts. Oxford: Clarendon, 1963. Clemens Alexandrinus. Volume 2: Stromata Books 1–6. Edited by Otto Stählin. Leipzig: Hinrichs’sche, 1906. The Commentary of Origen on the Gospel of St Matthew. Volumes 1 & 2. Translated with introduction and brief annotations by Ronald E. Heine. OECT. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. The Didache. In The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed., edited and translated by Michael W. Holmes, 344–69. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. The Epistle to Diognetus. In The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed., edited and translated by Michael W. Holmes, 694–719. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. Eusebius The Ecclesiastical History. Translated by Kirsopp Lake. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. 1926. Reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959. Eusebius The Ecclesiastical History and the Martyrs of Palestine. Translated with introduction and notes by H.  J. Lawlor and J. E. L. Oulton. Volume I: Translation; Volume II: Introduction, Notes, and Index. London: SPCK, 1927, 1928. Eusebius The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine. Translated by G. A. Williamson, revised and edited with a new introduction by Andrew Louth. London: Penguin, 1989.

159

Bibliography Eusebius Werke Achter Band Die Praeparatio Evangelica, Zweiter Teil Die Bücher 11–15. Edited by Karl Mras. GSC 43.2. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1956. Grégoire le Thaumaturge, Remercient à Origène suivi de la letter d’Origène à Grégoire. Greek Text, introduction, translation, and notes by Henri Crouzel, S.J. SC 148. Paris: Cerf, 1969. Heraclitus: Homeric Problems. Edited and translated by Donald A. Russell and David Konstan. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005. Hippolyte Commentaire sur Daniel. Introduction by Gustave Bardy; text and translation by Maurice Lefèvre. SC 14. Paris: Cerf, 1947. Hippolytus Refutatio omnium haeresium. Edited by Paul Wendland. GCS 26. 1916. Reprint, Hildescheim: Olms, 1977. Irenaeus. Against Heresies. In The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume 1, edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Reprint, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969. On the Apostolic Preaching: St Irenaeus of Lyons. Popular Patristics Series 17. Translated & with an introduction by John Behr. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997. Origene Esegesi Paolina I Testi Frammentari. Opere di Origene XIV/4. Edited with introduction, translation, and notes by Francesco Pieri. Rome: Città Nuova, 2009. Origène Homélies sur les Psaumes 36 à 38. SC 411. Texte critique établi par Emanuela Prinzivalli; introduction, traduction, et notes par Henri Crouzel et Luc Brésard. Paris: Cerf, 1995. Origenes Werke Dritter Band: Jeremiahomilien, Klageliederkommentar, Erklärung der Samuel- und Königsbücher. Edited by Erich Klostermann, revised by Pierre Nautin. GCS 74. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1983. Origenes Werke Dreizehnter Band: Die neuen Psalmenhomilien. Edited by Lorenzo Perrone in cooperation with Marina Molin Pradel, Emanuela Prinzivalli, and Antonio Cacciari. GCS NF 19. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015. Origenes Werke Fünfter Band: De Principiis. Edited by Paul Koetschau. GCS 22. Leipzig: Hinrichs’sche, 1913. Origenes Werke mit deutscher Übersetzung: Band 1/1 Die Kommentierung des Buches Genesis. Introduced and translated by Karen Metzler. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010. Origenes Werke mit deutscher Übersetzung: Band 10: Die Homilien zum Buch Jesaja. Introduced and translated by Alfons Fürst and Christian Hengstermann. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009.

160

Bibliography Origen: Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans Books 1–5. Translated by Thomas P. Scheck. FOTC 103. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001. Origen: Commentary on the Gospel according to John, Books 1–10. Translated by Ronald E. Heine. FOTC 80. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1989. Origen: Commentary on the Gospel according to John, Books 13–32. Translated by Ronald E. Heine. FOTC 89. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1993. Origen: Contra Celsum. Translated with an introduction and notes by Henry Chadwick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965. Origen: Homilies 1–14 on Ezekiel. Translation and introduction by Thomas P. Scheck. ACW 62. Mahway, NJ: Newman, 2010. Origen: Homilies on Genesis and Exodus. Translated by Ronald E. Heine. FOTC 71 Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1982. Origen: Homilies on Jeremiah, Homily on 1 Kings 28. Translated by John Clark Smith. FOTC 97. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998. Origen: Homilies on Joshua. Translated by Barbara J. Bruce, edited by Cynthia White. FOTC 105. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002. Origen: On First Principles. Volumes 1 and 2. Edited and translated by John Behr. OECT. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Origen: On First Principles. Translated by G.  W. Butterworth. 1932. Reprint, New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Origen: The Song of Songs Commentary and Homilies. Translated and annotated by R.  P. Lawson. ACW 26. Ramsey, NJ: Newman, 1956. Origen: Treatise on the Passover and Dialogue of Origen with Heraclides and His Fellow Bishops on the Father, the Son, and the Soul. Translated and annotated by Robert J. Daly, S.J. ACW 54. Mahwah, NJ: Newman, 1992. The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Books II and III. De Fide. 2nd, rev. ed. Translated by Frank Williams. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Pamphilus. St. Pamphilus Apology for Origen with the letter of Rufinus on The Falsification of the Books of Origen. Translated by T.  P. Scheck, FOTC 120. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010.

161

Bibliography Philo. On the Creation. In Philo, Vol. 1, with an English translation by F.  H. Colson and G.  H. Whitaker. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962. The Philocalia of Origen. The text revised with a critical introduction and indices by J. Armitage Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1893. Ptolemy’s Almagest. Translated and annotated by G.  J. Toomer. London: Duckworth, 1984. The Scriptores Historiae Augustae. Translated by David Magie. 3 vols. Vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library. 1921. Reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967. The Shepherd of Hermas. In The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed., edited and translated by Michael W. Holmes, 442–685. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. Tertulliani Opera. Part II Opera Montanistica. Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina. Turnholt: Brepols, 1954. Theophilus of Antioch ad Autolycum. Text and translation by Robert M. Grant. Oxford: Clarendon, 1970.

MODERN SOURCES Attridge, Harold W. The Epistle to the Hebrews. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1989. Behr, John. Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Berglund, Carl Johan. “Origen’s Vacillating Stances toward His ‘Valentinian’ Colleague Heracleon.” Vigiliae Christianae 71 (2017) 541–69. Birley, Anthony R. The African Emperor Septimius Severus. 1972. Reprint, London: Batsford, 1988. Brown, D. MacKenzie. Ultimate Concern: Tillich in Dialogue. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Bruns, Christoph. Trinität und Kosmos. Münster: Aschendorff, 2013. Chadwick, Henry. Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon, 1966. Conzelmann, Hans. The Theology of St. Luke. Translated by Geoffrey Buswell. New York: Harper & Row, 1961. Cox, Patricia. Biography in Late Antiquity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Crouzel, Henri. Origen. Translated by A. S. Worrall. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989.

162

Bibliography Daly, Robert J., S.J., “The Discovery of the True Origen by TwentiethCentury Scholars.” In The Oxford Handbook of Origen, edited by Ronald E. Heine and Karen Jo Torjesen. Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Daniélou, Jean, S.J. Origen. Translated by Walter Mitchell. 1955. Reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2016. Dawson, John David. Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. de Faye, Eugène. Origène sa vie, son oeuvre, sa pensée. 3 vols. Paris: Leroux, 1923, 1927, 1928. de Lubac, Henri. History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture according to Origen. Translated by Anne Englund Nash. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2007. (French original, 1950.) Edwards, Mark Julian. Origen against Plato. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002. Ferguson, Everett. The Rule of Faith: A Guide. Cascade Companions. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015. Frend, W. H. C. Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church. 1965. Reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981. ———. “Persecution: Genesis and Legacy.” In The Cambridge History of Christianity, Volume 1: Origins to Constantine, edited by Margaret M. Mitchell and Frances M. Young with the assistance of K. Scott Bowie, 503–23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ———. The Rise of Christianity. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985. Gamble, Harry Y. Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Grafton, Anthony, and Megan Williams. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. Grant, Robert M. Eusebius as Church Historian. 1980. Reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006. Hanson, R. P. C. Allegory and Event. Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1959. Harl, Marguerite. “La préexistence des âmes dans l’oeuvre d’Origène.” In Origeniana Quarta, edited by Lothar Lies, 238–58. InnsbruckVienna: Tyrolia, 1987. Heine, Ronald E. “The Introduction to Origen’s Commentary on John compared with the Introductions to the Ancient Philosophical Commentaries on Aristotle.” In Origeniana Sexta, edited by Gilles Dorival and Alain le Boulluec with the aid of M. Alexandre, M. Fédou, A. Pourkier, J. Wolinski, 3–12. Leuven: Peeters, 1995.

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Bibliography ———. “Origen and Celsus on the Allegorical Reading of Homer and Moses.” In Companion to the Reception of Homer, edited by Christina-Panagiota Manolea. Leiden: Brill, forthcoming. ———. Origen: Scholarship in the Service of the Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. ———. “Origen’s Alexandrian Commentary on Genesis.” In Origeniana Octava Volume I, edited by L. Perrone, 63–73. Leuven: Peeters, 2003. ———. “The Prologues of Origen’s Pauline Commentaries and the Schemata Isagogica of Ancient Commentary Literature in Studia Patristica, Vol. 36, edited by M. F. Wiles and E. J. Yarnold, with the assistance of P. M. Parvis, 421–39. Leuven: Peeters, 2001. ———. “The Testimonia and Fragments Related to Origen’s Commentary on Genesis.” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 9 (2005) 122–42. ———. “Reading the Bible with Origen.” In The Bible in Greek Christian Antiquity, edited and translated by Paul M. Blowers, 131–48. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. ———. “Restringing Origen’s Broken Harp.” In The Harp of Prophecy: Early Christian Interpretation of the Psalms, edited by Brian E. Daley, S.J., and Paul R. Kolbet, 47–74. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. ———. “Three Allusions to Book 20 of Origen’s Commentary on John in Gregory Thaumaturgus’ Panegyric to Origen.” In Studia Patristica, Vol. XXVI. Edited by Elizabeth A. Livingstone. Leuven: Peeters, 1993. Holladay, Carl R. Acts: A Commentary. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2016. Kimelman, Reuven. “Rabbi Yohanan and Origen on the Song of Songs: A Third-Century Jewish-Christian Disputation.” Harvard Theological Review 73 (1980) 567–95. Martens, Peter W. Origen and Scripture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Nautin, Pierre. Origène Sa vie et son oeuvre. Paris: Beauchesne, 1977. Neuschäfer, Bernhard. Origenes als Philologe. Basel: Reinhardt, 1987. Neusner, Jacob. Genesis Rabbah: The Judaic Commentary to the Book of Genesis A New American Translation, Vol. 1. Atlanta: Scholars, 1985. Niehoff, Maren R. “Origen’s Commentary on Genesis as a Key to Genesis Rabbah.” In Genesis Rabbah in Text and Context, edited by Sarit Kattan Gribetz, David M. Grossberg, Martha Himmelfarb, and Peter Schäfer, 129–53. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016.

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Bibliography ———. “Origen’s Commentaries on the Old Testament.” In The Oxford Handbook of Origen, edited by Ronald E. Heine and Karen Jo Torjesen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Pearson, Birger A. “Earliest Christianity in Egypt. Some Observations.” In The Roots of Egyptian Christianity, edited by Birger A. Pearson and James E. Goehring, 132–59. Studies in Antiquity & Christianity. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986. Perrone, Lorenzo. “Origen’s ‘Confessions’: Recovering the Traces of a Self-Portrait.” In Studia Patristica, Vol. LVI.4 Rediscovering Origen, edited by Markus Vinzent. Leuven: Peeters, 2013. Platnauer, Maurice. The Life and Reign of the Emperor Lucius Septimius Severus. London: Oxford University Press, 1918. Ramelli, Ilaria L. E. “‘Preexistence of Souls’? The ἀρχή and τέλος of Rational Creatures in Origen and Some Origenians.” In Studia Patristica, Vol. LVI.4: Rediscovering Origen. Edited by Markus Vinzent, 167–226. Leuven: Peeters, 2013. Russell, D. S. The Method & Message of Jewish Apocalyptic. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974. Rondeau, Marie-Josèphe. Les commentaries patristiques du Psautier, Volumes 1 and 2. Orientalia Christiana Analecta CA 219, 220. Rome: Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1982, 1985. Skarsaune, Oskar. The Proof from Prophecy: A Study in Justin Martyr’s Proof Text Tradition. Leiden: Brill, 1987. Stroumsa, G. G. “Clement, Origen, and Jewish Esoteric Traditions.” In Origeniana Sexta: Origène et la Bible/Origen and the Bible, edited by Gilles Dorival and Alain le Boulluec, 53–70. Leuven: Peeters, 1995. Tzamalikos, P. Origen: Cosmology and Ontology of Time. Leiden: Brill, 2006. ———. Origen: Philosophy of History & Eschatology. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Urbano, Arthur P. “Difficulties in Writing the Life of Origen.” In The Oxford Handbook of Origen, edited by Ronald E. Heine and Karen Jo Torjesen. Oxford: University Press, forthcoming. Vogt, Hermann Josef. “Die Exegese des Origenes in Contra Celsum— Das neue Interesse an der Eschatologie.” In Origenes als Exeget, edited by Wilhelm Geerlings, 143–59. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999. Walzer, R. Galen on Jews and Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949.

165

INDEX OF SCRIPTURE

OLD TESTAMENT

Deuteronomy

Genesis

4:44 6:3 32:13

1:1 1:26 1:26, 27 1:27 2:2 2:4 2:7 2:15

98, 113 110 107, 109 109 133 102 107, 109 109

Psalms 2:2 24:7–10 45:1 47:1, 4, 9, 14 73:2 78:3 78:12 80:11 86:3 90:11–12 95:7–11 103:24 118:22 118:103

Exodus 3:8 12:11 12:43 20:3

134, 137 146 84 52

Leviticus 20:24

137

21, 119 126 90 136 105 90 85 87 136 90 132 103 65 88

Proverbs

Numbers 1:21 3:27 14:20–23 33 36:13

83 137 88

8:22 8:22–25 9:2–5 24:13 25:16

51 137 133 68 83

167

105, 106 97 127 88 88

INDEX OF SCRIPTURE

Ecclesiastes 5:1

• 140

DEUTEROCANONICAL BOOKS

Song of Solomon 1:5–6

50, 51

Wisdom of Solomon

Isaiah 6 29:11–12 30:26 43:18–19 53:7 60 60:19 61 66:2

7:17–18 9:15

96 77 148 150 121 127 148 127 129

• NEW TESTAMENT Matthew 5–7 5:5 5:6 5:9 7:7 7:7–8 11:12–13 12:29 13:35 13:53–54 15:1–2 16:6 17 19 19:4–5 19:5–6 19:28 21 21:42 22:30 24:9–24 25 25:34

Jeremiah 1:5 3:19

108 139

Daniel 12:4

27

Micah 1:2–4

117

Zechariah 9:9

96 150

141

168

23 132 127 65 60 77 49 20 90, 111 52 47 49 136 48 108 85 135 141 65 151 130 138 111

INDEX OF SCRIPTURE 26:27–29 26:37 27:45–49

135 119 123

9:1–22 18:24–25 26:22–23

Mark

Romans

11 14:33 15:23, 33–37

141 119 123

1:1–2 1:20 2:28–29 7:14 8:29–30 8:32 9–11 11:28

Luke 4:23 6:21 19:19 23:44–46 24 24:26–27

116 127 127 123 26 63

1:1–14 1:1–18 1:13 1:18 1:29 2:13 3:31 8:23 8:39 8:42 11:52 11:54 12 13:31 17:24

2:7 2:9 2:10–16 2:13 2:14–15 3:19 5:7 6:13 9:9–10 10:4 10:11 15:3–4 15:24–28 15:35–53

67, 98, 124 85 117 40 100 121, 122 145 112 112 86 117 122 35 141 145 128

82 74 76, 80 77 79 150 84, 146 136 76 75, 88 75, 76 75 97 153

2 Corinthians 3:3 3:6 3:14–16 3:15–16 4:17–18 4:18 4:18—5:1 5:1–4 5:4

Acts of the Apostles 2:5–10 8:26–39

75 100 75 75 105 20 50 50

1 Corinthians

John 1:1

75 38 75

38 38

169

144 75, 76 64 76 99 100, 151 129 153 152

INDEX OF SCRIPTURE

Galatians 1:4 4:24 4:26 5:17 5:22–23

Hebrews 20 76, 81, 86 142 154 80

2:15 3–4 3:7—4:11 4:4 4:8 8:5 10:2 11 12 12:22

Ephesians 1:4 4:9–10 5:31–32

111 113 85, 95

12:22–23

Philippians 2 2:6–7 2:6–11 3:4–9 3:21

118 152 117 75 152

1 Peter 2:4–5 2:5

3:7 5 5:1–9 19:11–13 21 21:1 21:5 21:23 22:5

114 97, 100 121 150, 154 146, 147 110

2 Timothy 3:16

128 136

Revelation

Colossians 1:15 1:16 2:14–15 2:16 2:16–17 3:9–11

20 132 143 133 133 82 84 122 143 134, 142, 144, 147 132, 146

68

170

62 63, 64 62 120 127 135 150 148 148