Origen in the library
The Hexapla and biblical scholarship
Origen moves to Caesarea after the breach with Alexandria and spends the rest of his career there. He builds a library. He trains students. He writes.
The scale of his output is almost incomprehensible. He writes commentaries on almost every book of the Bible. He writes homilies — hundreds of them, which his students take down in shorthand as he preaches. He writes systematic theology, apologetics, and pastoral letters. Jerome, who inherits his library, says that Origen wrote more than any person can read.
His masterwork of scholarship is the Hexapla — a six-column edition of the Old Testament that places the Hebrew text, a Greek transliteration, and four different Greek translations side by side. He wants to know exactly what the text says, in all its versions. He wants to find where the translations agree and disagree, and why.
It is the first serious work of biblical textual criticism in history. It fills fifty volumes.
Origen believed that every word of scripture was inspired and therefore meaningful — that there was no throwaway verse, no passage without significance, no genealogy too boring to yield insight. He developed a three-level method of interpretation: the literal meaning, the moral meaning, and the spiritual or allegorical meaning.
His allegorical method sometimes ran away from him into interpretations that have no check in the text. Later theologians will criticize him sharply for this. But the underlying conviction — that scripture deserves the most serious and careful attention a human mind can give it — shaped every serious biblical scholar who came after him.
“The Scriptures were composed through the Spirit of God, and have a meaning, not such only as is apparent at first sight, but also another, which escapes the notice of most.”
— Origen, On First Principles IV.1.7, c. 220 AD
“Every scripture inspired by God is also profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in righteousness,”
Origen spent his life convinced that the text of scripture could bear any amount of attention — that no matter how carefully you read it, there was always more.
He was right about that. He was sometimes wrong about what the more was.
The discipline of sitting with the text, returning to it, refusing to be satisfied with the surface reading — this is his lasting gift. The Hexapla, the commentaries, the homilies are all expressions of one conviction: the word of God is inexhaustible.
When did you last spend real time with a single passage — not for a sermon, not to find an answer, but simply because you believed it had more to give than you had yet received?