The Nature of Christ in Origen's Commentary on John

Extract

Origen's Commentary on John provides us with a fruitful acquaintance with his christological thinking. The Commentary as a text is not well presented, and for this reason the work is not as well known as it might be, although Origen is the first great commentator of Scripture whose exegetical works have come down to us. It seems important to know what he has to say in those works which he was able to write according to his inclination, and not for the purposes of an argumentum ad hominem. The Commentary on John itself provides the reason why it should be studied as an important revelation of Origen's thought, since he describes the Fourth Gospel as the greatest of the Gospel writings because it contains , and plainly ‘declared ’ in a way the Synoptics did not, although no one can understand the meaning of the Gospel unless, like John, he has been shown ‘by Jesus Himself, Jesus as He is’ (Book I, 6). The writing of this Commentary was not a work taken up lightly or without a great deal of hardship on the part of the author. It is a carefully—indeed painfully—wrought out work, agonised over to the last logical detail according to his exegetical method, and must be considered as one of the most serious attempts at a systematic construction of a christological position in the history of Christian thought.