“A Sign for This Generation”: The Life of Jesus in Origen’s Gospel Commentaries

This study ventures an account of the dawn of critical reading of the life of Jesus in Origen of Alexandria’s Gospel commentaries. In addition to offering the first comprehensive study of the earliest extant commentaries on the Gospels (written c. 230 – 250 CE), this project tests David F. Strauss’s astonishing claim that no prior understanding of the Gospels more nearly approached the modern mythical view—of which he was the founder—than Origen’s (The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, 1835). A number of more recent New Testament scholars have echoed the sentiment that Origen anticipated modern criticism of the Gospels, but such judgments have not yet undertaken a thoroughgoing inquiry into Origen’s own account of the historical and literary challenges occasioned by the narratives of Jesus’s life.

I have set out to show that Origen’s approach to the Gospels arises from rather straightforward historical- and literary-critical judgments: namely, the Gospel narratives interweave things that happened with things that didn’t or even couldn’t have happened (at least not exactly as narrated). They do so, Origen argues, for the sake of depicting events in Jesus’s life not as matters of historical facticity alone, but figuratively. In short: Origen doesn’t just read the Gospels figuratively; he believes the Evangelists were themselves figurative readers of the life of Jesus. Since Origen, in turn, did not sense any contradiction between facing the critical challenges of the Christian Gospels and discerning the mystery of the Christian Gospel, this study will account for both as a single unified vision.