Abstract
Peter W. Martens,
Origen and Scripture: The Contours of the Exegetical Life
, Oxford Early Christian Studies, Oxford University Press: New York, 2012; 304 pp.: 9780199639557, £65.00 (hbk)
Origen has been a controversial biblical interpreter since the patristic era, and has attracted much scholarly attention in this regard, right up to recent years. By taking Origen’s depiction of the ideal scriptural interpreter as his focus – the first to do so – Peter Martens deepens our understanding of this feature of Origen’s theology of Scripture and sheds light on a number of other controversial issues.
Part 1 seeks to show that Origen the philologist and Origen the allegorical interpreter are not at odds. For Origen, the ideal scriptural interpreter, had digested and employed a wide range of Graeco-Roman scholarship (ch. 2). Allegorical interpretation, using standard techniques such as etymology and analysis of number symbolism was part and parcel of such an analysis for Origen (ch. 3). An allegory, or symbol, figure or sign pointed to something else, a mystical reality. Martens adds little here to an extensive debate, with which he has engaged in more depth elsewhere.
Part 2 seeks to show that Origen contextualized his portrait of the ideal scriptural interpreter within the drama of salvation. The Graeco-Roman scholarship he drew upon depended ultimately on God’s creative and providential action, and hence was a legitimate resource for Christian theology (ch. 4). For Origen devotion to the study of Scripture was a way of pursuing the incorporeal God rather than the things of the world around (ch. 5). That goal governed the proper manner of interpreting Scripture, seeking its teaching about spiritual realities. Chapters 6 and 7 show how Origen cast the ideal interpreter into relief through the contrasting images of heretical and Jewish readers. Martens clarifies Origen’s criticisms of both groups helpfully as fundamentally doctrinal: so-called Gnostics were at fault primarily for departing from the Church’s rule of faith; Jews not for literal reading per se, but for continued adherence to the literal demands of the Jewish Law and the denial of predictions of Jesus as Messiah in Scripture.
The contextualization of the interpreter in the drama of salvation has most force with respect to the subjects of the last three chapters. Moral transformation enabled good reading and elicited divine aid, especially with prayer (ch. 8). The Scriptures (p. 197) ‘are an instrument of divine providence, intended to advance the salvation of its readers and hearers’ (ch. 9), whose varied texts produce one harmonious message whose key theme was Christ, effecting moral and noetic transformation. Reading Scripture thus prepared for and anticipated the eschatological contemplation of God (ch. 10).
Origen’s theology of Scripture turns out to be more significant than the space accorded it here suggests, and one is left wondering how Origen’s picture of scriptural interpretation as a way of life fits into its wider early Christian and antique context. Nevertheless, Martens here demonstrates something of the integrative power of Origen’s vision of the scriptural interpreter with remarkable economy and careful, extensive scholarship.