New Testament.

        Especial interest attaches to Origen's New Testament. He was fully aware of the differences that existed among Christians about what books should be included in the New Testament; and, in view of these, he was careful to divide the books which he thought belonged to the New Testament into two classes, the accepted or acknowledged books, which all Christians accepted as scripture, and the disputed books, which some did not accept. As acknowledged books Origen listed the Four Gospels, fourteen letters of Paul (including Hebrews and the letters to Timothy and Titus), the Acts of the Apostles, I Peter, I John, and the Revelation of John-twenty-two m all. The disputed books, which he himself accepted as belonging to the New Testament, were James, II and III John, Jude, II Peter, Barnabas, and the Shepherd of Hermas. This gave him eight general epistles and two revelations, John and Hermas. This New Testament of twenty-nine books is precisely that of the Sinaitic manuscript of the fourth century, discovered by Tischendorf in 1859.

        Although Origen paid little attention to literary finish in his writings, he had great literary as well as doctrinal influence. His bold liberal views were much criticized subsequently (Anastasius, bishop of Rome, condemned him in A.D. 400), but no man had more loyal and distinguished followers. His books in Caesarea passed into the hands of his great admirer Pamphilus, who formed about them the most famous Christian library of antiquity, so diligently studied and faithfully catalogued by Eusebius (Church History vi. 32. 3). A few years later Pamphilus wrote a Defense of Origen, in five books, to which Eusebius added a sixth, probably after Pamphilus' martyrdom in n.D. 309 (Church History vi. 23. 4; Photius Bibliotheca 118). “What we know of and about Origen,” said Harnack, “we owe almost exclusively to Pamphilus and Eusebius.” Half a century later, in n.n. 360, Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil the Great made an anthology of what they thought the best passages in Origen, which was called the Philocalia, and preserves much that would otherwise have been lost.

        It will be seen that two-thirds of Origen's homilies are lost, and of his commentaries nineteen-twentieths of the Greek original have disappeared. The work On the Resurrection is gone, as is the great one On First Principles, except for what is almost a rewriting of it in Latin by Rufinus. The Miscellanies, too, in ten books, are gone, as well as the overwhelming bulk of the letters. To this neglect of his works, what seemed the dangerous liberality of his views no doubt contributed. Yet Origen certainly deserved to be called the father of Christian theology and the founder of biblical science.

        In 1941 the British were using caves near Toura in Egypt for ammunition dumps, and in one of them was discovered an assortment of works by Origen and Didymus of Alexandria (late fourth century). The most interesting of the Origen papyri is the Discussion of Origen with Heraclides and the Bishops with him, concerning the Father, the Son, and the Soul. This work, previously unknown, is contained in a sixth-century codex which “presumably derives from Origen's text as preserved at Caesarea.”[73] As a theological expert, Origen had been called upon by several bishops otherwise unknown, and he proceeded, with copious quotations from the Bible, to set them straight on such matters as the relation of the Father to the Son (Heraclides did not understand this correctly), the nature of the resurrection body, how the soul can be called “blood” in Leviticus 17:11, and the sense in which the soul is immortal. The discussion was taken down in a kind of shorthand and later corrected, presumably by the participants. The document is a unique representative of this kind of reporting in early Christianity.[74]

        Other works by or derived from Origen include a treatise On the Pascha and a homily on I Samuel,[75] extracts from Books I and II of the treatise Against Celsus,[76] and extensive fragments from Books V and VI of the Commentary on Romans.[77] The Romans fragments show that Rufinus' Latin translation was not as bad as has sometimes been supposed.[78]