In 1835, the appearance of David F. Strauss’s The Life of Jesus Critically Examined signaled a new epoch in the study of Christian origins. Strauss’s novel application of the concept of myth to the Gospels in order to explain the formation of their narratives has since been judged to mark the “before” and “after” of contemporary Gospel criticism, and the Life of Jesus’s broader religious and cultural impact finds peers only in the likes of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses and Darwin’s Origin of Species.Footnote ² Passing generations of scholarship have only proved the perduring strength of Strauss’s fundamental proposal: namely, that “the Christian religion, like all others, has its myths”;Footnote ³ and that the myth of the Gospels consists in those narratives “relating directly or indirectly to Jesus, which may be considered not as the expression of a fact but as the product of an idea of his earliest followers.”Footnote ⁴ The Gospels, in short, present an idea of Jesus “invested with imagery.”Footnote ⁵

More than an ex nihilo fabrication, Strauss introduced his concept of the “evangelical mythus” with an imposing reconstruction of the history of Gospel interpretation leading up to his work. Here, a lone figure rises from antiquity so as to “almost transcend the limits” of premodernity and “verge towards” Strauss’s own mythical view: Origen of Alexandria.Footnote ⁶ By including him at the headwaters of The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, Strauss recognized the considerable challenge Origen’s work on the Gospels poses to a total identification of the premodern with the precritical. Origen resists straightforward taxonomy. And his presence within Strauss’s genealogy of the critical examination of the life of Jesus should stir contemporary readers from slipping into their own forms of genealogical presumption regarding when, exactly, reading of the Gospels first became critical or what the term “critical” even means.Footnote ⁷

1.1 Genealogies of Jesus

It has become something of a truism that readers in antiquity never find themselves more alienated from the critical standards of their contemporary counterparts than in their predilections for what has become known (often with suspicion) as allegorical reading. This book, along with Strauss, contends the opposite. In fact, it is precisely on this point – viz., the proximity of the critical and allegorical view of the Gospels – that Strauss hangs Origen’s transcendence of his own age, where many might imagine the interpretive approaches of modernity and antiquity stand at the furthest remove.Footnote ⁸

There is good reason, then, to countenance Origen as a kind of critical reader of the Gospels. But what kind? Strauss’s presentation underscores the difficulty of fashioning a portrait adequate to such a unique figure. On the one hand, no other reader of the Gospels prior to the seventeenth century even merits Strauss’s mention. On the other hand, one cannot mistake inclusion for unqualified approval. Though readers should be wary of receiving Strauss’s presentation of Origen uncritically, his concluding judgments of Origen, once generalized and restyled as questions, retain their force.Footnote ⁹ Did theological presuppositions and ecclesial commitments ultimately dull Origen’s critical capacities vis-à-vis the life of Jesus?Footnote ¹⁰ Did Origen find himself “constrained” to adopt an allegorical approach to the Gospel narratives solely because of “contradictions which had arisen between them and his own mind,” that is, because there was much in “the New Testament writings which so little accorded with his philosophical notions”?Footnote ¹¹ Since Strauss himself answers these questions with an unequivocal “yes,” Origen’s value for him amounts to no more (and no less) than a stage sublated into the realization of the ideal of the “more modern mythical view.” Yet Strauss’s judgment of Origen’s place in the history of “critical examination of the life of Jesus” is as brief as it is striking, and a genealogy of his evangelical mythus is not the only way to tell the story.

Strauss sets the question but does not settle it. He is right to offer Origen a place within the history of critical reading of the Gospels – even a venerable one, as its very founder. However, his presentation is also paradigmatic of perennial doubts regarding Origen’s interpretive capacities. Strauss’s qualified approbation has not lacked accompaniment from the voices of more recent generations of Gospel scholarship, as Origen continues to accrue (at least measured) endorsements into the present day.Footnote ¹² The sentiment that Origen “anticipated modern criticism,” however, has not yet arisen from a thoroughgoing inquiry into Origen’s own account, on his own terms, of the historical and literary challenges occasioned by the narratives of the life of Jesus. So, the judgment remains premature. Strauss and his heirs place the burden upon this study to retrieve Origen’s own first principles of Gospel reading. What Is a Gospel, according to Origen?

1.2 What Is a Gospel? Subject and Purpose

“Gospel.” What does the word mean? And why is it applied, especially, to four books of the New Testament – that “according to Matthew,” “according to Mark,” “according to Luke,” and “according to John”? Following the New Testament tradition’s own breadth of usage, Origen understands the term in several ways.Footnote ¹³ But for present purposes, one meaning takes precedence: narratives of the life of Jesus. Although this preliminary definition might seem self-evident, it is not nearly so trivial as it might first appear.Footnote ¹⁴ So for the sake of a brief introduction to the topic at hand, it is necessary to recapitulate how Origen comes to this conclusion and why it is essential to do so.

In its barest lexical sense, “Gospel” (εὐαγγέλιον) means a “discourse that bears tidings of something which, due to some benefit it confers, will likely gladden the hearer when (s)he receives what is announced.”Footnote ¹⁵ In simpler terms, this definition amounts to a more precise articulation of the common gloss of “Gospel” as “good news” (εὐ-αγγέλιον). In more analytical terms, one could call this the final cause of a “Gospel”; the function or purpose of this kind of discourse is to relate tidings of joy and well-being to its hearers. The Christian Gospel, in particular, consists in relating the “saving advent” of Christ.Footnote ¹⁶

However, this definition does not suffice either for the strict purposes of this study or for Origen’s own introduction of the topic, insofar as it also applies to “those writings not entitled ‘Gospels’.”Footnote ¹⁷ In Origen’s view, the Acts of the Apostles, the various epistles, and John’s Apocalypse – even the Law and the Prophets and thus the whole of Christian scripture – proclaim the coming of the Lord.Footnote ¹⁸ Defining the term “Gospel” by purpose or function is necessary, therefore, but not sufficient.

So Origen proceeds to provide another way of clarifying what is meant, strictly speaking, by the word “Gospel”: by contents or subject matter (its material cause or principle, as it were). “In the precise sense of the expression,” everything written in the rest of the New Testament (and Old, by extension) “will not be ‘Gospel’ when compared to the narrative of the deeds, sufferings, and words of Jesus.”Footnote ¹⁹ Similarly, though Origen acknowledges that the New Testament knows a more general meaning of the term “evangelist,” he suggests that the title belongs, principally, to those who narrated (διηγέομαι) the various events of Jesus’s life as their principal subject matter.Footnote ²⁰

In summary, a sort of hierarchy of lexical precision forms as Origen’s introduction of the term unfolds: the Old Testament writings may be called “Gospel” inasmuch as they share in the glad tidings that belong, in a more direct sense, to the New Testament writings as a whole.Footnote ²¹ Yet even the New Testament writings as a whole are called “Gospel” only insofar as they proclaim the coming of this Christ, which is detailed most completely in those writings entitled “Gospel,” as Origen says, in the strict sense – those, that is, whose constitutive material is the narrative(s) of the life of Jesus.Footnote ²²

Therefore, the designation “Gospel,” according to Origen’s most precise usage, does not simply adhere to any writing that bears these “glad tidings.” This broader definition can be said to belong to the whole of Christian scripture, relatively speaking, since Christ’s advent has “made all things, as it were, Gospel.”Footnote ²³ Nor is a Gospel just any form of “kerygmatic discourse” meant to produce and further establish certain beliefs about Jesus, for so do all the apostolic writings.Footnote ²⁴ Rather, in the case of the Christian Gospel, the term, properly speaking, designates a proclamation of something beneficial, something that would bring joy to any who receive it, precisely under the form of a narrative – and specifically, under the form of narratives of “Jesus’s deeds, sufferings, and words.”Footnote ²⁵

Though the preceding paragraphs may seem to make something of an obvious point, the lyrical power of Origen’s vision of a deliverer whose coming has made “all things Gospel” has charmed a number of contemporary readers into depreciating his intricately developed sense of the nature of the Gospel narratives. Take, for example, the following: “Origen wishes to see all of the New Testament books in fact as a single genre, that of Gospel.”Footnote ²⁶ It is difficult to overstate how misleading statements like this can be. Left unquestioned, they flatten the true dimensions of Origen’s historical- and literary-critical engagement with the Evangelists’ narratives and dispose future readers to overlook how his critical insights form the very fountainhead of his theological vision.

Such imprecisions have motivated my recovery of Origen’s causal categories to impose a little more order on the subject.Footnote ²⁷ It is true, as we have already seen, that all the New Testament writings share in a single evangelical purpose (i.e., final cause): to proclaim the coming of the Christ and all that his advent means. But it should be obvious that Origen does not mean all of these texts can therefore be reduced to a single genre. Origen is well aware that to say, for instance, the Pauline epistles and John’s Gospel belong to the same genre is to empty the word of virtually any meaning. Similarly, one can say that the New Testament as a whole shares a universal subject (i.e., material cause), for in the end the apostles all “proclaim Jesus.”Footnote ²⁸ But any account of Origen’s sense of the ultimate unity of the New Testament writings must avoid subjecting his equally clear sense of their differences to erasure. Depreciating the supreme capital Origen invests in a critical approach to the Gospel narratives – as narratives – risks misconstruing his entire profile as an interpreter of the Gospels.

1.3 This Study: Subject and Purpose

Taking “narratives of Jesus’s life” as shorthand for what Origen specifies as “Gospel” in the strict sense also serves to specify the boundaries of this study. Without attempting to unravel Origen’s enigmatic statement that Christ’s coming “has made all things Gospel” here, I can for now at least happily confirm that this book is not about “all things.” The delicacy of the primary task before us similarly disallows lengthy diversions into how he comes to consider the whole of the Old Testament writings as “Gospel” too. Even Origen’s understanding of the Christian Gospel in general, proclaimed variously by Peter, Paul, and other apostles (“evangelists” in the broader sense) throughout the New Testament writings, falls outside the strict scope of this inquiry.Footnote ²⁹ Rather, I will maintain a sharp focus on the prime matter, so to speak, of the four canonical Gospels, to which Origen himself believes the title “Gospel” most properly belongs: narratives of the life of Jesus.Footnote ³⁰

Should the material borders of my own inquiry appear overly restrictive, I have only done so in view of this project’s far weightier formal concerns. Every difficulty – and thus every reward – attendant to this study lies for the most part in the way of coming to terms with Origen’s understanding of the literary form of the Gospels. What sort of thing are the narratives of the life of Jesus, literarily speaking? (History? Biography? Fiction? Myth?) And what bearing does their narrative form have on the form of interpretation proper to them? Whatever “scandals” critical examination of the Gospels – individually and as a fourfold – may occasion for any reader (ancient or modern), they tend to arise in the course of addressing these questions. The scandals associated with Origen’s approach to the Gospels certainly do.

Thus the overarching question of this book: how does Origen account for the literary form of the Gospels? As the ensuing chapters of Part I detail what kind of thing the Gospels are for Origen, they will lay the groundwork for discriminating what kind of reader of the Gospels Origen is. The order of argument, bound to Origen’s own, cannot be reversed. The immediate task, then, is to attend to his first principles for approaching the historical and literary challenges occasioned by critical examination of the narratives of Jesus’s life (Chapter 2). Yet even more than his view of the Gospel narratives’ literary form, Origen’s sense of their literary formation directly inspires how he comes to read and understand them (Chapter 3). So coming to terms with how Origen accounts for the Gospel writers’ literary activity is essential for any account of Origen’s own reading practices and, finally, the interpretations themselves (see Chapters 4–7 in Part II).

Educated readers of every age know that identifying literary form or genre is requisite for setting about interpreting any piece of writing. Origen is no exception. And if his interpretive judgments have occasionally struck modern ears as rather strange, they at least reflect the rather strange difficulty of the task – a difficulty underscored by the fact that fundamental questions regarding the Gospels’ genre, historicity, literary form, literary formation, etc., remain rather astonishingly unsettled to the present day.Footnote ³¹ Be that as it may, Origen knew well that what one believes the Gospel is follows closely upon what one believes a Gospel is. The present inquiry therefore elevates itself beyond critical concerns alone. For folded into the very heart of the question of literary form lies the question that directs this study as a whole: what, for Origen, does the life of Jesus, as narrated in the Gospels, mean?

1.4 Clarifying Origen by Origen

As a matter of emphasis, this book will proceed primarily by way of writing a history of interpretation; that is, my object is to present Origen’s reading of the Gospels on his own terms, following his own arguments, and according to his own purposes. Such an enterprise simultaneously involves (invoking R. G. Collingwood) a reenactment of Origen’s own thought processes and judgments, a “re-thinking for ourselves the thought of our author.”Footnote ³² Toward this end, I will set about the present endeavor for the most part by way of “clarifying Origen by Origen”Footnote ³³: first establishing his first principles of Gospel reading (Part I) and then employing them to illuminate particular interpretations (Part II), while conversely, looking back from particular interpretations in order to illustrate the coherence of his judgments about the nature of the Gospels.Footnote ³⁴

This means, on the one hand, that evaluations of Origen’s oeuvre by contemporary standards of Gospel interpretation must suffer some subordination. By using the language of “criticism,” I imply no a priori definition of what constitutes “critical reading”; I mean only to approximate the network of interpretive questions involved in Origen’s own unrelenting call for critical examination (ἐξέτασις) of the Gospels.Footnote ³⁵ Nor, on the other hand, do I intend to instrumentalize these commentaries as sources for reconstructing early Christian beliefs about the nature and person of Christ. Christological definition and speculation, though by no means absent from Origen’s commentaries, remain ancillary to his principal project: critical, interpretive, and finally contemplative engagement with the Gospel narratives themselves. I arrange the aims of this book accordingly.

Nevertheless, all of this is a point of order, not exclusion. When properly bridled to the primary object, measured comparisons with later standards of coherence – whether critical or theological – become indispensable for clarifying Origen’s own perspicacity. In fact, this study would be ill-served not to draw from the modern disciplines of New Testament studies and early Christian theology precisely as auxiliary voices, however, habituated their contemporary divergence into autonomous and often mutually exclusionary discourses. Origen, at least, knew no such discord; so a proper portrait of his approach to the Gospels must undertake, in some form, a reintegration of these disciplines in order to reproduce its subject faithfully.

1.5 Spoken in Figures

I believe Origen’s work on the Gospels rises to such heights of critical clarity that he ought (at the very least) to be mentioned in the same breath as Hermann Reimarus or David Strauss in landmark histories of life of Jesus research. Yet accounts of Origen’s interpretive sensibilities have varied so wildly since late antiquity that contemporary readers may find it difficult to think of his figurative construal of the Gospels as anything other than an exotic import from Northern Egypt – for some a charming novelty and even lustrous development in early Christianity’s “historically-effected consciousness”Footnote ³⁶; for others an ill-advised “Hellenization” and even insidiously “gnostic” subversion of the Evangelists’ true voice(s); but for most, in the end, a thing unquestionably alien to the Eastern Mediterranean soil of the New Testament.Footnote ³⁷ Whatever the verdict, Origen is the innovator.

Throughout this book, however, I will endeavor to demonstrate that the most serious impediments to rendering Origen’s understanding of the Gospels intelligible arise not because his thought is alien to the clear-eyed study of the New Testament, but because his language has become alien to us. With specific regard to the Gospels, I will argue that Origen understands his position – viz., that the narratives of Jesus’s life were composed, principally, in order to signify something – to amount to a rather straightforward critical judgment. In brief, my overarching intent is to demystify what Origen means by a “figurative” or even “allegorical” approach to the Gospels and to show that, fundamentally, his language means nothing more (and nothing less) than to say that the life of Jesus narrated in the Gospels is not passed down to its readers as a matter of unambiguous facticity. The Evangelists, just as the one whose life they share, have spoken these things to us in figures.Footnote ³⁸