Of the chronology of Origen’s writings on St. Paul there is not much to be said. The Stromateis, of which the third book appears to have contained notes on Romans, the fourth on 1 Corinthians, and the tenth on Galatians (see below, pp. 492-493), were written at Alexandria, i.e. before 231, under the emperor Alexander Severus, i.c. after 292 (Eus. H# vi, 24), The commentary on Romans is ‘mentioned in that on St. Matthew, and the com- mentary on 1 Thessalonians in the contra Celswin (see below, pp. 490, 496): the commentary on St. Matthew and the contra Celswm were, however, almost Origen’s latest works, so that in neither case does the information carry us very far. On
*It may be stated here once for all that the section on Origen is due to Dr, Preuschen.
t The 2 homilies may possibly belong to the Second Epistle : the list only says ‘in epistolam ad Thessalonicenses.’
the other hand, the homilies on 1 Corinthians had been written before the homilies on St. Luke (p. 492°, below), and these latter are placed imme- diately after the departure of Origen from Alex- andria. But it may be taken as probable that nearly all of his formal exegesis of the Epistles by way of commentaries and homilies belongs to the later or Czesarean period of his life, A.D. 231- 250.
The best account of the various editions of Origen’s works is that given in bishop Westcott’s article in the Dictionary of Christian Biography, iv. 140-142. No single Greek treatise was printed before the 17th cent.; of the Latin works of Origen collected editions appeared in 1512 (Jacques Merlin, Paris, 4 vols. ; reprinted at Venice in 1516, at Paris in 1519, 1522, 1530) and 1536 (Erasmus, Basle, 2 vols.; reprinted with some additions in 1571). The first collected edition of Greek works was that of Peter Daniel Huet, afterwards bishop of Avranches, Origenis in sacras scripturas com- mentaria quecumque greece reperiri potuerunt, 2 vols., Rouen, 1668 (reprinted at Paris 1679, at Cologne 1685): neither Latin works nor Catena fragments were included. Latin and Greek were first brought together in the great Benedictine edition of de la Rue, Origenis opera omnia que greece vel latine tantum extant et eius nomine circumferuntur, 4 vols., Paris, 1733-1759 ; the last volume, edited by Charles Vincent de la Rue after the death of his uncle, Charles de la Rue, is that which specially concerns us: from this edition all quotations in this article are taken. Migne, Patrol. Gr., vols. 11-17 (Pauline epistles in vol. 14, ce. 837-1310), is a reprint, with a few additions, of de Ja Rue. Lommatzsch, 25 vols. (epistles in vols. 5-7), Berlin, 1831-1848, has the merit of handy size. The new Berlin edition of Origen has as yet only published St. John of all the NT commentaries. Editions of separate portions will be noticed under the epistle to which they belong.
(i.) Romans.
The commentary* in 15 books (Cassiodorus, Inst. Div. Litt. 8, has ‘viginti’; but xx easily grows out of xv) is mainly known to us through the Latin version which Rufinus of Aquileia towards the end of his life made at the request of his ‘brother,’ the deacon Heraclius—after his translation of Origen in Gen., in Hxod., in Levit., im Jos., in Jud., in Ps, xxxvi., Xxxvii., XXxviii., but before his translation of the Clementine Recog- nitions and of Origen in Num. (see his ‘ peroratio in -explanationem Origenis super ep. Pauli ad Rom.,’ de la Rue, iv. 688); probably, therefore, about A.D. 405. The ‘preface’ and the ‘perora- tion’ to this version raise important questions both about the state of the text of Origen’s writings at the end of the 4th cent., and about the methods adopted by Rufinus in editing his exemplar for Latin readers.
(a) The incompleteness of the Greek text : ‘Super omnes autem difficultates est quod interpolati sunt ipsi libri; desunt enim fere apud omnium bibliothecas (incertum sane quo casu) aliquanta ex ipso corpore volumina, et hee adimplere atque in latino opere integram consequentiam dare non est mei ingenii sed . . . muneris fortasse divini’ (Pref. in explanationem, etc., iv. 458). Preuschen in Harnack, Altchr. Litteratur i. 373, makes this into a double statement of incompleteness and in- terpolation; and if that were so, we should have to compare Rufinus’ earlier treatise, de adulteratione librorum Origenis (A.D. 397: de la Rue, iv., Ap- pendix, p. 48), where, on the strength of parallel
* The commentary on Romans was written before that on St. Matthew; cf. tom. xvii. in Matt. § 32 (de la Rue, iii. 821), referring to Ro 71; eipyTos 0 wAEiove qe ae eee Oinyoupeévois TO Kaprov +o 7745 xpos ‘Pupenious tmiororys ev Trois eis adray sEnynrizols.
PATRISTIC COMMENTARIES
PATRISTIC COMMENTARIES 491
cases in the writings of other Fathers, and of a complaint by Origen himself in a particular instance, he maintained the theory of a whole- sale falsification of the Origen literature by heretics. Jerome had no difficulty in proving (adv. Ruf. il. 19) that the generalization was quite unreasonable. As a matter of fact, the Apollinarians are the only heretics against whom the charge of deliberate and systematic falsification of documents can be sustained, and they would certainly not have selected Origen for their authority ; moreover, even if Origen’s dogmatie writings had been manipulated, there is not the least reason to think that his exegesis would have been exposed to similar treatment. But, in truth, Rufinus, as the connecting particle enim shows, is not making two statements, but one: interpolare is ‘to alter,’ ‘to corrupt,’ not necessarily by interpolation: in this case the ‘ interpolation’ consists simply in the imperfection of the booksellers’ copies, and Rufinus himself appears to realize that that may have been merely accidental. The fact itself is interesting enough, and agrees curiously well with the evi- dence of the Athos MS (Laura, 184, B. 64) of the Epistles, which von der Goltz * has shown to con- tain not only a genuine Origen text of St. Paul, but some important Origen marginalia, among them the starting-points of the separate réuo of the commentary on Romans: for it is noted that tomes 11 and 14 were not extant (ov ¢éperar). But as the Latin version gives a continuous commentary ex- tending over the whole epistle—although arranged in 10 books in place of the original 15 t—we are bound to suppose that Rufinus had succeeded in securing a completer copy, so that the ‘interpola- tion’ has hardly affected the form in which the commentary has reached us.