This collection of thirty essays examines the life, work and legacy of Origen of Alexandria, the polarising third-century ‘man of the church’, whose industry as a biblical exegete, homilist and speculative theologian earned him both fame and notoriety in the Christian tradition. The seven articles in Part i (‘Origen in his Contexts’) paint a portrait of the historical context in which Origen developed his approach to scriptural studies and record his debt to Greek philosophical traditions as well as individual thinkers like Clement of Alexandria and Philo Judaeus. The contribution by Arthur P. Urbano on the scattered evidence for Origen's life and the difficulty of reconstructing his biography is admirable in its thoroughness and clarity. The three essays in Part ii (‘Origen and Hermeneutics’) are uneven, ranging from an English précis of Bernhard Neuschäfer's 1987 monograph Origenes als Philologe to an illuminating case study by Geoffrey D. Dunn, which demonstrates Origen's awareness of techniques of classical rhetoric in his Commentarium in epistolam ad Romanos. The four contribitions in part iii (‘Origen and the Bible’) provide a comprehensive survey of Origen's biblical scholarship as it survives in the original Greek and in Latin translation with essays on his commentaries on the Old Testament, the Gospels and the letters of Paul, followed by another on his homilies. Boasting eight articles, part iv (“Origen's Theology”) is the centrepiece of the collection. Rebecca Lyman's overview of Origen's ‘bold and exploratory theology’ (p. 273) sets the stage well, but several papers in this section are very technical and written on a register that is not welcoming to scholars or students new to the study of Origen. The five articles in part v (‘Receptions of Origen’) chart the tumultuous legacy of his work from its reception in the fourth century, when Origen polarised Christian thinkers around the Mediterranean rim, to its publication in Greek and Latin in the early modern period. While the individual essays in this section are each lucid and insightful, the omission of a contribution on the reception of Origen in the medieval Latin tradition between Augustine and Erasmus is a glaring and unfortunate oversight. The volume closes with the three studies that comprise part vi (‘Modern Contributions to the Study of Origen’). The first two follow Origen's trail in modern scholarship from Pierre Daniel Huet's three-volume Origeniana (1668) to Henri de Lubac's Histoire et esprit: l'intelligence de l'ecriture d'après Origène (1950) and the first volume of his towering Exégèse médiévale: les quatre sens de l'ecriture (1959). The final essay trumpets Marina Molin Pradel's exciting discovery in 2012 of twenty-nine of Origen's homilies on the Psalms in the original Greek, which ‘present us not only with the familiar picture of Origen, but also lead us to discover new aspects of his personality and of his exegetical and theological reflection’ (p. 573). Taken together, the essays in this collection provide a valuable resource for scholars eager to understand Origen's intellectual context, biblical scholarship, exegetical methods, theology and legacy in the Christian tradition.
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