Scripture, Prophecy, and Knowledge of Christ in Origen

Abstract

This chapter examines why Origen focuses closely on Christ and what it means for understanding prophecy. It argues that Origen’s focus on Christ can be understood as a response to the challenges of Marcionism. Earlier chapters examined somatic prophecy: that is to say, predictions of the future. Early Christian writers interpreted Old Testament prophecies as predictions of Christ, and doing so was an important anti-Marcionite strategy. However, christological prophecies were not only read in a somatic sense, that is, as predictions of Christ’s incarnate life. Many verses in the Bible were also read as pneumatic prophecies of Christ not as an incarnate human in time, but as the second person of the Trinity, outside time. As Origen claims, prophecies of this kind can ‘teach much theology’, functioning as pneumatic revelations of Christ as Logos and of God’s triune being. In answering the Marcionites’ claims that Old Testament prophecies were unreliable, Origen had to formulate positions on scripture’s epistemological status and also on how scripture relates to knowledge of God. This chapter therefore examines both Origen’s explicit response to the Marcionites, but also his notions of time, inspiration, and revelation, and examines a case study of John the Baptist as a prophet who unites the three senses of prophecy. It concludes that Christ is at the centre of Origen’s thought about prophecy, as the ultimate content of all somatic, psychic, and pneumatic prophecy.