Early Christian preachers and authors in their contact with the Hellenistic world were faced with the problem how to render the Jewish mode of thinking revealed in the Bible intelligible to outsiders. In the work of preaching the Gospel this problem even from the first contact with paganism was urgent. In spite of the Greek translation of the Old Testament the Bible had a phraseology of its own, foreign to the Greek. What are the rules governing the interpretation of this Biblical tradition? The controversy between the exegetists of the Alexandrian and the Antiochian schools in the latter half of the third and in the fourth century is all concerned with this problem. The major point of controversy deals with the allegorical interpretation. The Alexandrians accept and apply it, whereas the Antiochian school sets out from the literal and historic