The Modern Editions of Peri Archon

Abstract

Origen, when he was around forty-five years of age, interrupted his burgeoning program of scriptural exegesis to write Peri Archon (CPG 1482).1 In this work he provided a unified discussion of Christian teachings so that his readers could probe more deeply into the church’s rule of faith and discriminate among conflicting scriptural interpretations that were swirling through Alexandria in the late 220s (Princ. praef.10; 4.4.5). [...]what remains is a cache of witnesses to the text of Peri Archon from the indirect manuscript tradition: a hodgepodge of translations, excerpts, paraphrases, and reports about its contents that were mediated through other late antique authors who often had axes to grind. [...]Rufinus noted that Origen “occasionally expressed himself obscurely in the effort to be brief,” and so, to make these passages clearer, he “added such remarks on the same subject as I have read in a fuller form in his other books.” Nor did he present readers with the Greek wording that he regarded as spurious or unclear and that had prompted his re-writes. [...]short of competing evidence from other witnesses, we usually find ourselves in a fog about the original shape and wording of Peri Archon.