In a recent post, I suggested Origen may have had a hand in formulating the notion of “canonical” scriptures. For him, they are books specifically marked out by their authority as the only sound literary class for the Church’s doctrine and teaching.
Although the question of canonicity was the foremost concern for Origen in those passages, one of the more striking features of early Christian literary classifications is that not all textual hierarchies had theological-liturgical authority as the front-and-center concern. In fact, for much of the second and third centuries, the question of authenticity-historicity more often set the terms of engagement. So from what evidence we have from the second century, even clerics do not regulate sacred (or would-be sacred) literature ex officio: “I’m a bishop speaking for the Church and I say so.” Instead, they have evaluate books like other well-educated men, arguing about a book’s historical credentials: “Do books A, B, and C go back to an apostle, prophet, etc.?”
Of course, authenticity still has pretty big implications for a book’s authority, and Origen had to engage with this problem as well. Up through his own day, probably no Christian had done more for textual criticism of the Bible than Origen. His extensive, painstaking work compiling different manuscripts and (for the OT) different translations had him well acquainted with the philological difficulty of establishing the historical biblical text.
But what’s one to do if one finds a text or even just a passage that appears inauthentic but it still has gained acceptance in the wider Church?
We see this issue come up in a famous letter exchange between Julius Africanus and Origen, which I’ll mostly paraphrase here for brevity.[1]
Julius Africanus was one of the other leading Christian intellectuals in the early third century, and he had been startled to find that Origen accepted the story of Susanna appended to Daniel in the Septuagint edition. Africanus (justifiably) points out numerous linguistic and historical difficulties with this story, suggesting it was not an authentic part of the Danielic textual tradition. Chief among these: one finds egregious rhetorical-linguistic indicators that the text was composed in Greek rather than Hebrew, and Jewish editions of the latter also left out Susanna.
In a long letter, Origen explained his own reasoning, part of which does contain an on-the-merits defense of Susanna’s authenticity. The more interesting element, however, comes in Origen’s observation that the “Authenticity Problem” is actually far deeper and wider than Africanus seems to appreciate. It’s not just Susanna, Origen observes: there are many textual chunks, passages, and verses that crop up in some OT editions and not in others. Sometimes the Hebrew has less material than the Greek translations, sometimes more, and Origen has gone to great lengths to mark these variations to better “train” a sense of what the original intended. But in any case, it won’t do to merely fall back on the Hebrew editions as the Urtext, since they have their own text critical problems.
And there’s a still more delicate problem. Most Greek-speaking churches—that is, the Christian majority—are going to use the Greek editions that contain material like that of Susanna. What happens, then, if Christian intellectuals such as Africanus and Origen march in and excise well-established parts of their Bible? Should we, asks Origen, “reject as spurious those manuscripts carried by the churches” (ἀθετεῖν τὰ ἐν ταῖς Ἐκκλησίαις φερόμενα ἀντίγραφα)?[2] If so, should Christians then—hat in hand—ask their Jewish interlocutors for copies of their Hebrew editions? The answer to the rhetorical question is “no” to a great extent because, as Origen has just explained, the Hebrew has its own puzzles and complications.
Origen continues by asking whether “Providence, having provided edification in the holy scriptures to all the churches of Christ, did not take care for ‘those bought with a price,’ on whose behalf ‘Christ died?’” At this juncture, Origen has made a complex but revealing allusion, combining bits of 1 Cor. 6, 7, and 8. Particularly in 8:11, Paul is warning against destroying the “weaker” brethren through superior knowledge.
I expect that Africanus would not have missed the allusion, and color me skeptical that Origen selected from this cluster of chapters as an otherwise random prooftext. What I suspect he is communicating is that the pursuit of textual criticism is a worthy, complicated philological problem, befitting the Christian elites like himself and Africanus. But for the average laity “in the pews” of churches (and perhaps for not a few clerics as well) scattered across the Greek-speaking Roman world, it could potentially explode their faith to have the contents of their Bibles questioned so sharply. I think Origen is telling Africanus that they must remain alert to this danger and tread carefully.
What then is the perfect balance between philology and established canon? Origen doesn’t offer one here, but it is interesting to see him grappling with the larger problem. It illustrates the difference between how even a devout scholar might think about the biblical books as texts (i.e., authenticity) and how the institutional Church must normally approach the same documents (i.e., authority). Even though he was a world-class intellectual, Origen still kept his eye on the practical issues facing the Church. As someone with a rather infamous reputation for the theologically recondite and avant garde, Origen’s conservatism is remarkable.
One final thought occurs to me. Are most contemporary Protestants—I’m not familiar enough with other traditions even to pose the question—less anxious about authenticity and textual criticism than their ancient counterparts?[3] We seem fairly comfortable with the provisional quality of our translations and even the idea of textual variations. If this impression is right, why is that so? Is there something about the humanistic roots of the Reformation that “stuck”? Or is it that we are all on the other side of the Enlightenment now, and that with mass literacy, we have to talk about these questions in the open?
For the full English of Origen’s response, see https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0414.htm. For a fuller treatment but a somewhat different reading of the exchange, see N. R. M. de Lange, “The Letter to Africanus: Origen’s Recantation?” in Studia Patristica XVI: Part II, ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1985), 242–47. ↑
For the Greek text of Epistula ad Africanum, see PG 11:48–85. Direct quotations are my own translation.
↑I think the “touchiest” case that comes to mind concerns the full extent of the Pauline corpus. ↑