Origen’s References to Heracleon: A Quotation-Analytical Study of the Earliest Known Commentary on the Gospel of John. By Carl Johan Berglund

Abstract

Heracleon, best known as Origen’s ‘heterodox’ interlocutor in certain books of his Commentary on John, was always regarded in antiquity as a legatee of Valentinus and hence, in modern parlance, as a Gnostic. The object of this monograph is to identify those passages in the commentary which expressly purport to convey his very words, and to decide how far these justify the construction that Origen puts upon his teaching. The enterprise is not new, but Berglund hopes to improve on his predecessors by eliminating every text that takes the form of reported speech, together with every inference or assertion on Origen’s part which he fails to verify by quotation. With unusual rigidity, he treats every instance of φησὶν ὅτι (‘he says that’) as a periphrasis rather than an exact transcription (pp. 97–100). Berglund rightly points out that the same variety of practice is observed in other Greek texts,...