Joseph T. Lienhard, S.J.
Pro Ecclesia 9 (2000): 355-66. Reprinted by permission.

The Christian Bible is the last place most people would look for a crisis. There it is: Old and New Testaments, God's unchanging word--bound in black leather, edged in gold, covered with a layer of fine dust. But the very phrase "Old Testament" raises a great question. The Old Testament comprises about 80% of the Christian Bible. This 80% never mentions Jesus of Nazareth and is, in fact, the sacred scripture of another religion, Judaism. Yet the Christian Church claims these Scriptures as its own. This act has been called the biggest corporate takeover in history.

The process by which the Jewish Scriptures became the Christian Old Testament lasted about two hundred years and was marked by uncertainty, disagreement, and strife. I would like to describe this process and, at the end, suggest that it may still not be finished.

The "Old Testament" as the Church's Bible

From the first day of its existence, from that first Easter morning when "Mary Magdalene went and said to the disciples, "I have seen the Lord"" (Jn 20:18), the Christian Church had a Bible - namely, the Jewish Scriptures. St. Paul could write to the Christians in Corinth, "Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, . . . he was buried, . . . he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures" (1 Cor 15:3-4). But there was an all-important proviso: the Jewish Scriptures were to be interpreted in light of the Christians' experience of Jesus the Christ, for the first Christians - who were, of course, Jews - found their Scriptures fulfilled in Christ.

But the Christians had to establish their stance towards these Scriptures. The earliest Christians took one of three basic approaches to the Jewish Scriptures: they were law, they were prophecy, or they were irrelevant.

The first Christian to raise the question of Christ and the Scriptures was Paul. For him, the Scriptures were preeminently Law. Paul could not, and did not, reject the truth of the Scriptures. But he came to a new understanding of the Law. "Now," Paul writes, "the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it" (Rom 3:21). In this one sentence, Paul has taken two crucially important steps. The commands of the Mosaic law, as such, belong to the past. Yet the Scripture as a whole speaks of the same faith and the same salvation that Christ finally brought to all men. For Paul the Law was valid, but temporary. The Epistle to the Hebrews takes the same approach but applies it to the liturgy.

Other Christians saw the Old Testament principally as prophecy. This understanding appears as early as the gospels of St. Matthew and St. John, which find single events in Jesus' life foretold by the Scriptures. Matthew writes, for example: "All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: 'Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son'" (Mt 1:22-23), or "In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it is written by the prophet" (Mt 2:5-6). John writes: "This was to fulfill the scripture, 'They parted my garments among them'" (Jn 19:24), or "These things took place that the scripture might be fulfilled, 'Not a bone of him shall be broken'" (Jn 19:36). The heart of Justin Martyr's First Apology is a long proof from prophecy.

But another tendency, too, appears as early as some books of the New Testament: the tendency to dispense with the Jewish Scriptures altogether, to have no need for them. Several Pauline letters omit all mention of the Law, and of Scripture in general - for example, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Philemon. The three epistles of John, and the Apocalypse of John, never explicitly quote the Scriptures. The same tendency appears a little later in the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, the letter of Polycarp, and the Shepherd of Hermas.

The Crisis of the Old Testament in the Early Church

As the Christian Church became a church of Gentiles, the relation between Christ and the Scriptures changed. Jewish converts had first known the Scriptures and then confessed their faith in Christ. Gentile converts first accepted faith in Christ and then encountered the Scriptures. What was the Gentile Church to do with this book--this collection of historical narratives from creation to the Maccabees; this mass of moral, civil, and liturgical law; this collection of prophecies stretching over eight centuries; this accumulation of wisdom literature, some of which appeared to have no place for God; this series of short narratives, some charming, like Ruth, others less so, like Esther; this collection of hymn-texts from the second temple? It was not Law for the Christians. Was it enough to quote a few dozen verses as prophecies and to ignore the rest? Or, could the Christian Church make this book its own?

The crisis of the Old Testament in the early Church peaked around the middle of the second century. At that time, two positions emerged that embodied the most extreme attitudes to the Old Testament possible in the Church. They are represented, on one end, by a man, Marcion of Sinope, and on the other end by a document, the Epistle of Barnabas. In brief: Marcion interpreted the Old Testament literally, and only literally, and threw it out of the Church. The author of the Epistle of Barnabas interpreted the Old Testament figuratively, and only figuratively, and took it away from the Synagogue.

Marcion of Sinope is one of the more intriguing, if peculiar, figures of the second century. He was a native of Asia Minor, where his father may have been a bishop. He made a fortune in the shipping business and then got serious about religion. Around 140 he moved to Rome and contributed a great sum of money to the church there. A few years later, around 144, the church at Rome expelled him for his wrong teachings and -interestingly - gave him his money back.

Marcion read the Old Testament very carefully, and what he read appalled him. He read, for example, that the god of the Old Testament created Adam, and was thus was responsible for the entry of evil into the world. This god was ignorant; when he walked in the Garden he had to ask Adam, "Where are you?" This god was fickle, too; he first forbade Moses to make graven images but later commanded him to make an image of a saraph serpent. This god could be vicious; he ordered the most awful slaughters of women and children. Jesus would contradict this god, for this god commanded "eye for eye, tooth for tooth," whereas Jesus bade us to love our enemies.

Marcion also read Christian writings, especially St. Paul's letters, and found there a wholly new religion. He concluded that there are two gods: the inferior god of justice of the Old Testament, and the higher God of love of the New Testament.

Marcion, in other words, was convinced that every single word of the Old Testament was literally true, and only literally true. And as such, the Old Testament was unworthy of the God of Love and of the Christian Church and hence had to be rejected.

The other extreme is represented by the Epistle of Barnabas. This curious document is classed among the writings known as the Apostolic Fathers, those eight or nine Christian writings that survive from the first half of the second century.

Like Marcion, the author of this strange document also read the Old Testament intensely but proposed a diametrically opposed theory: the whole Old Testament, he held, is a great allegory, and concealed within it are the truths of the Christian faith. In the process, "Barnabas" put forward some of the most bizarre interpretations of the Old Testament ever proposed by Christians.

On God's covenant with his people, Barnabas set up a simple dichotomy: is the covenant for us or for them? His answer is clear: the covenant was meant for Christians only. More precisely, Moses received the tablets on Sinai, but because of the people's sin in worshipping the golden calf he hurled the tablets to the ground, and the covenant was invalidated. A wicked angel then caused the Jews to take the Scriptures literally. In a spectacular section, Barnabas contrasts the erroneous, literal interpretation of Scripture with its true, spiritual sense. A few examples will make his method clear.

He deals at length with dietary laws. The Jews had erred by taking the texts literally, as if they really were about food. Barnabas knew better. The prohibition against eating pork, he writes, really forbids us to associate with men who think of the Lord only when they are in need, for swine bellow when they are hungry but otherwise ignore their keepers. The prohibition against eating eagle, hawk, kite, and crow really forbids us to associate with men who refuse to work for a living, since these birds feed on what others have killed. The prohibition against eating eel or octopus really forbids us to associate with the impious, since these creatures are bottom-feeders. To avoid eating rabbits, hyenas, and weasels really means avoiding deviant sexual sins. And so it goes on.

But Barnabas' real triumph - one of which he was immensely proud - was his interpretation of Gen 17:23, which says that Abraham circumcised 318 men in his household. Abraham himself, Barnabas writes, foresaw Jesus in the spirit and received the precious teaching on this number. When the number 318 is written in Greek (which used letters for numbers), 10 and 8 are I and E, the first letters of the name of Jesus, and 300 is T, the cross. This is the higher knowledge, and Barnabas exults, "No one has learned from me a more trustworthy lesson!" The fact that Genesis was written in Hebrew, not Greek, did not slow him down for a moment. This, of course, is the stuff of madness.

In summary: what was the situation around the year 150? In the technical sense, the Church did not have an Old Testament, because it did not yet have a New Testament. As so often, the Church first defined its doctrine negatively, by rejecting what it perceived as wrong, and tried thereby to steer a middle way between Marcion and Barnabas. The norm by which the Church judged was soon to be called the "rule of faith," that sense of the essence and heart of Christian belief and doctrine. When the Church rejected Marcion, it affirmed its belief in one God, and one God only. Further, it affirmed that this one God had revealed himself in the Old Testament to Abraham, Moses, and the prophets, just as he revealed himself definitively in Jesus the Christ. The Church also affirmed that the Jewish Scriptures it inherited were indeed the Word of God and would never cease to be that, a conviction later enshrined in the third article of the creed, which states that the Holy Spirit "spoke through the prophets." And finally and most significantly, the Church affirmed that there was no dichotomy between Creation and Redemption. Matter was not the work of one god and grace the work of another; redemption was not an escape from the corporeal world; and the work of the one God, Creator and Redeemer, was manifested in all of history.

The teaching of the Epistle of Barnabas was never explicitly rejected or condemned; it was simply ignored, and Barnabas never found a disciple among later Christians. The Church thereby affirmed that the Old Testament did indeed have a literal sense, and that the literal sense was revelatory. The Jews had indeed seen the face of God, and the Church, the new Israel, had to be understood in continuity with the old Israel.

Origen of Alexandria and the Solution of the Crisis

The Church did not follow either Marcion or Barnabas. But a question remained: what was the Church to do with this Old Testament? How was it to make this collection of books its own? The question was answered on two levels, one theoretical, the other practical.

The theoretical solution first appeared in the theology of Irenaeus of Lyons. Irenaeus was born in the Greek-speaking East but spent his later years in Lyons, in what is now France, and died around the year 200. He set out to refute the teachings of the Gnostics and, in the process, developed the first Christian theology. He integrated the Old Covenant and the New into one great sweeping historical vision, from creation to consummation. He envisioned an ellipse whose two foci are Adam and Christ. There was no disjunction between creation and redemption but rather a great continuity: what God had begun in Adam he restored and elevated in Christ. In the past few decades Irenaeus'  theology has attracted great interest, and the documents of Vatican II cite Irenaeus at least a dozen times.

The theory was established, but it still needed to be put into practice.

Before the third century, few Christians had attempted to write commentaries on books of the Old Testament. Jerome reports that he saw a commentary on Proverbs attributed to Theophilus, the bishop of Antioch (died ca. 182/83), but doubted that it was authentic. Clement of Alexandria (died ca. 215) wrote a work entitled Hypotyposes, which is said to have dealt with the Old and New Testaments; but the few bits of it that remain treat only the New Testament. The one Christian writer before Origen - and he was only slightly before Origen - who wrote commentaries on parts of the Old Testament was Hippolytus, a cleric at Rome in the early third century. From Hippolytus we have the first surviving Christian commentary on any book of the Old Testament, on the book of Daniel. The occasion may have been the Montanist movement: some Christians thought that Montanism signaled the imminent end of the world, and Hippolytus studied Daniel for its teaching on the end time. Part of Hippolytus' commentary on the Song of Songs also survives. Ancient authors report that Hippolytus also wrote commentaries on the psalms, the Six Days of Creation, Genesis, the blessings of Jacob and of Moses, Exodus, Ecclesiastes, the beginning of Isaiah, and selected passages from Ezekiel and Zechariah. But these works are all lost. One reason may be that they were not very good.

It was Origen of Alexandria who fixed the place of the Old Testament in the Church. Origen, nicknamed the "Man of Steel," was one of the greatest and most prolific writers of the early Church. One trustworthy scholar estimates that Origen wrote more than any other ancient Greek, pagan or Christian.

Origen was born in Alexandria in Egypt, around 185. When he was seventeen his father, Leonides, who was probably a catechist in the Christian Church, was arrested, condemned, and executed. An ancient legend has it that Origen was eager to rush out and be martyred along with his father, and his mother prevented it only by hiding all his clothes. In any case, after his father's death, Origen supported his mother and his six younger brothers and sisters by teaching grammar. Five or six years later, through the generosity of a man named Ambrosius, he was able to devote himself entirely to the study of the Scriptures and to theology.

In Origen's day, boys were given their general education through the painstaking explication of a classic text, generally Homer, word by word. Origen, trained in the literary methods of his day, would apply the same method to the Bible. He eventually had the Greek Bible more or less memorized.

Around the year 230, Origen had a serious falling out with the bishop of Alexandria, Demetrius. He packed up his library and moved to Caesarea in Palestine, where he spent the rest of his days. He died in 254, his death perhaps hastened by torture he suffered in the persecution of the Emperor Decius.

Origen's writings on the Bible will be the topic of the last part of this lecture. But before I go on to his writings, I'd like to say something about the fate of Origen after his death.

In his own lifetime and in the century and a half that followed, Origen enjoyed a great reputation. Basil of Caesarea and Gregory Nazianzus prepared an anthology of his works, called the Philocalia. Rufinus of Aquileia translated book after book of his into Latin. Jerome and Ambrose, two very different men, based their biblical commentaries on Origen's writings, to the extent that they are sometimes little more than translations. The study that traces the full extent of Origen's influence on the Church's exegetical tradition is still to be written.

At the end of the fourth century, however, a controversy arose about Origen. Some Christians called him a heretic, and his reputation never recovered. In the sixth century, the situation grew more serious, and the fifth ecumenical council, the Second Council of Constantinople, condemned Origenists - but not Origen - as heretics.

Glossing over many exceptions and nuances, Origen was generally considered a heretic well into the twentieth century, perhaps more in the eastern church than in the western. Constantinople II had condemned some teachings - or rather speculations - of the Origenists, mostly about the beginning and the end of things: that created souls existed eternally, that a second Fall and a second Incarnation are possible, that the Devil would in the end be saved, and - most shocking of all - that the resurrected body would be spherical. Most of these doctrines derived from one work of Origen's, entitled On First Principles. This book, many thought, represented the real Origen: the Origen of the biblical commentaries was a pious deceiver.

A turn came in the mid-twentieth century, with the great Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac. If we can point to a single moment that changed the study of Origen in this century, it is a sentence that de Lubac wrote in 1950: "Observe Origen at work." De Lubac encouraged the scholarly world to look at Origen's writings on the Bible, his commentaries and his homilies, and they did. They found an Origen concerned primarily, not with the beginning and the end of things, but with the significance of Jesus Christ and his Church, and with the soul's progress in the Christian life.

My thesis is this: Origen assured the Old Testament a permanent place in the Christian Church not by an abstract theory but by working his way through the entire Old Testament, book by book, sentence by sentence, and word by word. Origen provided the Church with the first Christian commentary on virtually the entire Old Testament. Seldom, if ever, again would there be any doubt that this book had its proper and rightful place in the Christian Church. Someone might say that Lewis and Clark should have followed a better way across this continent; but the fact remains that they were the first to chart a way; and so it is with Origen.

Origen was the first great textual critic of the Old Testament. He prepared the enormous Hexapla, a set of books in which six versions of the Old Testament were written out in parallel columns. Among Origen's goals was to know how the Hebrew and Greek texts differed and thus to facilitate conversations with the Jews.

In his study of the Old Testament, Origen wrote three sorts of works: scholia, commentaries, and homilies. Scholia are learned footnotes. Commentaries are running explanations of a biblical book. Homilies originate in the liturgy: a passage from the Bible is read aloud, and the preacher explains its meaning and applies it to the lives of his hearers.

A catalogue of Origen's works on the Old Testament will convey some sense of his accomplishment. He wrote scholia, or exegetical notes, on Exodus, Leviticus, Isaiah, psalms 1 to 25, and Ecclesiastes. He wrote commentaries on the following biblical books (in which "book" means about what a long chapter means today): 13 books of commentary on Genesis, 36 on Isaiah, 25 on Ezekiel, 25 on the twelve Minor Prophets, 35 on the psalms, 3 on Proverbs, 10 on the Song of Songs, and 5 on Lamentations--152 books of commentary in all. We also know of the following homilies: 16 on Genesis, 13 on Exodus, 16 on Leviticus, 28 on Numbers, 13 on Deuteronomy, 26 on Joshua, 9 on Judges, 4 on 1 Kings, 32 on Isaiah, 45 on Jeremiah, 14 on Ezekiel, 120 on the psalms, 22 on Job, 7 on Proverbs, 8 on Ecclesiastes, and 2 on the Song of Songs--375 homilies in all.

What Old Testament books did Origen not write about? With the exception of a few homilies, the double books of Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, and Ezra-Nehemiah, along with Esther and Daniel. Pierre Nautin thinks that Origen was hired as the catechetical preacher at Caesarea for a three-year term (perhaps 239-242), to preach a course of sermons on the whole Bible, but got sacked before his contract was up, and this is the reason why he never completed his homilies on the later historical books.

Was Origen's work any good? There is no doubt that some of Origen's exegesis can be ridiculed. But ridicule avoids a question, it doesn't answer it. A Lutheran scholar summed up the believer's approach to the Bible in three short sentences: the Holy Ghost is one, the Holy Ghost is no fool, and the Holy Ghost speaks to me. The Holy Spirit is one; hence the Bible, which he inspired, contains one truth. The Holy Spirit is no fool; hence the Bible contains nothing that is useless. And the Holy Spirit speaks to me; hence the Bible will always profit me. The condition is that the Bible is read in faith and rightly understood. Origen would have agreed with that man.

The accusation most often brought against Origen is that he allegorized the whole Bible and thus made it mean whatever he wanted it to. But to say this is to distort Origen's intention. One who observes Origen at work notices two things: he pays painfully careful attention to the literal sense, but he always strives to read the Old Testament as a Christian. Both statements are worth examining further.

Origen begins with the literal sense. But he does not mean by that what modern scholars mean. In Henri Crouzel's perceptive phrase, the literal sense for Origen is "the brute materiality of the words," before any figure of speech is invoked. He traveled across Palestine to find out if there was indeed a "Bethany beyond the Jordan" as John's gospel has it. He wonders why there is a "Sidon the Great" when he cannot find a "Sidon the Little." He tries to work out the practical details of Noah's disposition of the ark, down to speculating that the fifth and lowest deck may have been used to store manure. Origen drew on the best learning of his day, in history, geography, philosophy, medicine, grammar, even zoology, to explain the Scriptures. He learned Hebrew and asked rabbis about Jewish interpretation and traditions. In other words, he refused to treat the Bible, or any part of it, like a Platonic myth. One of Origen's great accomplishments, in fact, was to defend historical Christianity against the attacks of Gnosticism without falling into the anti-intellectualism or fundamentalism that many Christians of his day had retreated to.

But the literal sense itself did not make the Old Testament a Christian book. For this Origen invoked another sense, a spiritual sense. The terms "spiritual sense" or "spiritual exegesis" describe any interpretation that Origen does not call literal or historical or corporeal. "Spiritual exegesis," Henri Crouzel writes so well, "is in a kind of way the reverse process of prophecy: the latter looks to the future, but the former looks back from the future to the past. Prophecy follows the course of time forwards and in a historical or contemporary event sees darkly the messianic or eschatological fact that is prefigured. Spiritual exegesis follows the course of time backwards and, starting from the Messiah already given to the People of God, recognizes in the old Scriptures the preparations and the seeds of what is now accomplished."

There is no time, nor is this the place, to study Origen's spiritual exegesis in detail. But one sentence from the Homilies on Genesis exemplifies his approach. Gen 18:8 reads, "[Abraham] stood . . . under the tree." Origen comments, "What does it help me who have come to hear what the Holy Spirit teaches the human race, if I hear that 'Abraham was standing under a tree'"? In other words, the Scripture must speak the saving truth to me now. No detail is insignificant. Numbers delight Origen. Two suggests matter, three suggests the Trinity, four suggests the Gospel, five suggests the senses, six suggests creation. Etymologies - some of them correct, others wrong or even fantastic - also delight Origen. In a tour de force, he interprets the Hebrew names of the Israelites' forty-two stopping places in the desert as the stages of spiritual growth. Material things also light up with inner significance: water suggests baptism, wood suggests the cross, manna suggests the Eucharist. But all of these details are subordinate to a controlling conviction: Origen is convinced, in faith, that the whole Old Testament is a prophecy of Christ and of all that Christ signifies, and that Christ is the key to understanding the Old Testament. The world of spiritual exegesis is the world of prayer and contemplation, but also a world in which the Holy Scriptures were a source of endless delight. And Origen's delight in studying the Scriptures is, perhaps, the element most often missed by his critics.

Henri de Lubac beautifully summarizes Origen's accomplishment. Judaizers and Gnostics were both dangerous enemies of the Church. Happily, both could be defeated with the same weapon. Thanks to spiritual interpretation, the Church freed itself from Judaism without having to reject the Old Testament, like those who did not find the Father of Jesus Christ there. The whole of the Scripture is worthy of God, and the freedom of the Christian did not have to be sacrificed to affirm that. All the books of the Bible together, from the first to the last, form a harmonious whole. Christianity is both old and new at once: as old as the world, and as new as the light of dawn; as old and as new as Christ himself. Christianity is no longer a sudden and unexpected innovation; nor is it indentured through the letter to the past. The Bible is preserved, not merely as a founding document, as archival material that contains some noble titles for Christ and some wonderful prophecies; it is truly, and in its entirety, Holy Scripture, the living word of the living God, without remaining a legal codex. Everything in it is still addressed to us, still valid for us. Etiam nunc, Origen repeats again and again, etiam nunc, "even now"; for everything in the Scriptures is understood in accord with the one plan that was revealed from the beginning, as the Apostle Paul teaches Timothy: "The aim of the Law is love that issues from a pure heart and unfeigned faith" (1 Tim 1:5). The Scriptures are the book of today and of yesterday. Each day the Scripture feeds Christ's faithful with its eternal nourishment.

Thus Origen began a quest - and this is the best way to put it. His work made it certain that the Church would retain the Old Testament as part of its Bible. He also provided the first real Christian interpretation of that Old Testament. His interpretation influenced other interpretations for centuries. Nevertheless, what Origen began is only a quest, and the quest must go on.

Conclusion

I suggested at the beginning my lecture that the problem raised is not completely solved, and perhaps never will be. To give one concrete example: for the past thirty years, since the First Sunday of Advent in 1969, Catholics have heard three readings from the Bible at Sunday Mass. Other Christian churches have similar lectionaries. And, apart from the fifty days of Easter, the first reading on Sunday is from the Old Testament. But the Old Testament reading is chosen for its relation to the reading from the gospels. This usage implies that on the one hand, the Old Testament is just as much the word of the Lord as the New Testament is, but on the other hand it is somehow subordinated to the Gospel, at least in its interpretation. This fact raises anew the question of the place and interpretation of the Old Testament in the Christian Church.

Some general principles are clear. The primary locus or home of Scripture in Christianity is the liturgy. Theologians write books about the Bible because it is proclaimed in the liturgy; the Bible is not proclaimed in the liturgy because theologians write books about it. Further, for Christians, the fullness of God's self-revelation is a person, not a book. Hence the book is read in the light of the person, Jesus the Christ. It is believers who celebrate the liturgy, and theology is faith seeking understanding. If this is the case, then in some way - and I would be the last to say that it is easy - the Church must maintain the double interpretation of the Old Testament, literal and spiritual.

Finally, we are dealing with a mystery. In a beautiful passage, St. Augustine reminds us that the Scriptures accompany us on our way; they are not the goal. Writing of the end time, he says: "When, therefore, our Lord Jesus Christ shall come and, as the apostle Paul says, 'bring to light things hidden in darkness and make plain the secrets of the heart, so that everyone may receive his commendation from God,' then lamps will no longer be needed. When that day is at hand, the prophet will not be read to us, the book of the Apostle will not be opened, we shall not require the testimony of John, we shall have no need of the Gospel itself. Therefore all Scriptures will be taken away from us, which in the night of this world burned like lamps so that we might not remain in darkness."