Introduction to This Volume

How this book is arranged

This is the twelfth 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 completes the writings of Origen with his Homilies on Jeremiah and the Greek fragments and scholia that remain.

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 the modern English versions prepared for SermonIndex.

In this volume

The Homilies on Jeremiah are twenty sermons preached by Origen to a church congregation at Caesarea, and they are among the few of his sermons that survive in the original Greek. They show him at work as a preacher: reading the text, pressing its meaning on his hearers, and turning to the life of the church.

The rest of the volume gathers what remains of Origen’s commentaries in Greek. Much of it comes from catenae, which are “commentary chains” in which a later compiler set the comments of several Fathers beside each verse. A fragment may be shortened or reworded by the compiler, and some of the pieces are ascribed to Origen by editors without full certainty. The introduction to each work says what is known.

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.