Introduction to This Volume

How this book is arranged

This is the tenth volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church in order of date, from the generation after the apostles down to the eighth century. This volume holds three of Origen’s commentaries on Scripture.

Within each work the text is divided into chapters and numbered sections, so that any passage can be found again and cited. The small bold figures in the text are the section numbers.

The translations

The text is in English only. Wherever a modern English version has been prepared for SermonIndex it is used here; otherwise the book prints an older public-domain translation. In both cases the wording is the translator’s own: older translations have not been altered beyond dividing them into sections. The sources for every work are listed at the back of the book, together with the licence under which each text is released. All the works in this volume are printed in older public-domain translations.

In this volume

Origen was above all a student of the Bible, and most of what he wrote was commentary. He began his Commentary on John in Alexandria and carried it on at Caesarea. It survives only in part, and this volume prints Books 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 10. The Commentary on Matthew also survives only in part, and this volume prints the introduction and Books 1, 2 and 10 to 14.

Origen read Scripture on several levels, the plain sense, the moral sense and the spiritual sense, and he looked for Christ and the soul’s path to God behind the words. This way of reading is clearest in his Commentary and Homilies on the Song of Songs, which he read as the love between Christ and the soul or the Church. Those two works are known to us through the Latin translations of Rufinus and Jerome.

Dates and authorship

Dates are approximate and are debated by scholars. Each work begins with a short introduction that states what is known about its author and its date, and what is uncertain.