On Text.

        Ever since the founding of the Alexandrian Museum more than four centuries before, Alexandria had been the home of textual study, especially of Homer, and Origen now turned a scholar's eye upon the text of the Greek Old Testament, which formed so, great a part of the Bible of the early church. He knew it was a translation from the Hebrew, so he obtained a Hebrew Bible, in', his day of course a mass of rolls, and learned Hebrew. The standard Greek form of the Old Testament among the churches was the Septuagint version, but other translations had been made in the second century by Aquila, Theodotion,[71] and the Ebionite Symmachus. Origen sought for still others and found them, one at Nicopolis, near Actium. He also found three more translations of the Psalms, one of them, Eusebius says, in a jar in Jericho.

        Origen conceived the magnificent idea of setting out these four versions side by side, with the Hebrew and a Greek transliteration of it in parallel columns, to facilitate their study. This enormous work, which could obviously be at least six times the size of the Old Testament, seems to have been actually copied out but could a hardly have been published. This was Origen's celebrated Hexapla, his “sixfold” Old Testament, a work which, judging from the Nsize of the Vatican manuscript, written a century later, must have reached nine thousand pages.[72] It does not seem likely that it was ever recopied, but the original passed into the hands of Origen's admirer Pamphilus and remained for many years in the library that he gathered in Caesarea to enshrine the memory of Origen.

        The great Sinaitic manuscript of the Greek Bible, now in the British Museum, has notes in a hand of about A.D. 600, at the end of Esther and of Esdras (Ezra-Nehemiah), that state that the manuscript had been compared with a very ancient one which in turn had been corrected in prison by the martyr Pamphilus with the aid of Origen's own copy of the Hexapla. Jerome consulted the Hexapla in the library at Caesarea toward the end of the fourth century. The library, with the Hexapla in it, seems to have existed until the Saracens took Caesarea early in the seventh century (A.D. 638), for in 616-17 Paul of Tella, a Syrian bishop, translated the Septuagint column of it into Syriac, retaining Origen's critical marks; and his translation, about half of which is preserved in an eighth-century manuscript, is now the best window through which we can observe the textual work of Origen.