Interpretation

        Origen must have been a man of prodigious energy, for he worked with titanic force in every field of Christian literature. Besides pioneering in the textual study of the scriptures, his work in interpretation covered every book of the Old and New Testaments. This ranged all the way from his scholia, or brief notes on difficult or decisive texts, through homilies, prepared or extempore, to those full-size commentaries which Ambrose prevailed upon him to undertake. His homilies or expository sermons numbered twenty-eight on Numbers, twenty-six on Joshua, thirty-two on Isaiah, forty-five on Jeremiah, twenty-five on Matthew, thirty-nine on Luke, twenty-seven on Acts, and so on; these are only a few of the items given in along list of the works of Origen found in a letter from Jerome to Paula and Eustochium. Not until he was sixty, it must be remembered, would Origen permit his homilies to be taken down when he delivered them. The list reaches at least 444 for the Old Testament (a few figures for individual psalms have been lost) and 130 for the New. But, of these, only 21 have survived in the Greek original and only 186 in the Latin translation.

        Even more important for interpretation, of course, were his commentaries, which ran to twenty-five books on the Minor. Prophets, twenty-five on Matthew, thirty-two on John, fifteen on, V Romans, fifteen on Galatians, and so on; Origen held that each text. had an inner, spiritual, mystical sense, in addition to its literal and historical meanings. Like most ancients, pagan, Jewish, or Christian, he made much use of allegory in interpretation; it was, of course, by the use of allegory that the Stoics had succeeded in, making Homer the Bible of the Greeks.

        In Jerome's list, which is probably far from complete, the coin-, mentaries ran to at least 177 books (rolls) for the Old Testament, and 114 for the New, or 291 in all; of these, only 16 books are pre, served in Greek. It is safe to say that they represent no more than five per cent of the total bulk of the commentaries; nineteen — twentieths of them have disappeared. Even in Latin we have lesst than half the commentary on Matthew, and Rufinus' recast of the one on Romans and part of the one on the Song of Songs.

        It must be added that no small amount of Origen's exegetical work survived piecemeal in the catenas-those collections of valuable observations found in early writers. These began to be made very early, and by A.D. 500, in the hands of Procopius of Gaza, were in full swing.