Origen

English

'In the beginning God made heaven and earth.' What is the beginning of all things but our Lord and 'Saviour of all' Jesus Christ, 'the firstborn of every creature'? In this Beginning, then, that is, in his Word, 'God made heaven and earth', as the Evangelist John also says at the opening of his Gospel: 'in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was made nothing.' He does not, then, say here any temporal beginning, but says that heaven and earth and all things that were made were made 'in the beginning', that is, in the Saviour. 'And the earth was invisible and unordered, and darkness was over the abyss, and the Spirit of God was borne over the waters.' 'The earth was invisible and unordered' before God said, 'let there be light', and before he 'divided between the light and the darkness', according to what the order of the discourse declares.

Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson · cc-by

Latin

Hom. in Gen. I.1 (GCS 29, ed. W. A. Baehrens, Leipzig 1920, p. 1, lines 1–14) · gcs-baehrens

Notes

The head of the stream. Every Latin who reads in principio as the Son is downstream of this paragraph, and it states the reading in its strongest form: the beginning of all things is Christ, in principio means in the Word, and — the sentence the tradition kept — non ergo hic temporale aliquod principium dicit. John 1:1–3 is the proof, exactly as it will be in Ambrose and Augustine and the Glossa. Two things are worth noticing against what the later bench does with it. First, Origen reaches the Son without Ps 104:24 and without the word wisdom: the argument is from Col 1:15 and John, not from Solomon. Second, he runs straight on into Gen 1:2 and reads invisibilis et incomposita as a statement about what was so BEFORE the light and the division — a chronology, not a metaphysics — which is not what the Latin bench will make of the phrase. ✅ Verified at Phase 6 and now in the crux finding: Baehrens's apparatus to this page cites Chalcidius, Comm. in Tim. 276, and the passage was checked against the 1617 Meursius edition independently of Baehrens. Chalcidius reports that Origen had the non-temporal initium ab Hebraeis and grounds it on Prov 8:22 at length, reaching divine Wisdom as the primordium — the rabbinic bench's verse and the rabbinic bench's word, in a Latin commentary of Jerome's century, going nowhere. Chalcidius is now built, in three witnesses on this crux and two more on K5 and K6 — see `chalcidius-sapientia-primordium`. The blocker recorded here at Phase 6 was real but was about the wrong book: the only free text was uncorrected OCR of a 1617 print whose page images carry a ProQuest notice, and Waszink's Plato Latinus was thought to be needed. A clean public-domain print of 1520 exists and the passages were read on its page images. The Catena notice in the same apparatus (Origen reads ἐν ἀρχῇ as ἐν σοφίᾳ, τουτέστι τῷ υἱῷ) is still unverified and is deliberately not used in the finding.

Threads

• ← contests · Jerome
  Phase 6. Jerome refutes the reading this homily states, and names his opponents: the Altercation of Jason and Papiscus, Tertullian against Praxeas, Hilary on a Psalm. Origen is not among them — and could not have been, since Rufinus's Latin is a decade later than the Quaestiones. But notice what Jerome actually refutes and what he concedes. He refutes the claim that the HEBREW has 'in the Son', with the philology: the Seventy, Symmachus and Theodotion all render 'in the beginning', the Hebrew is BRESITH and not BABEN. Origen never made that claim; his is an exegetical claim about what in principio means. And Jerome's own last sentence grants it — 'it can therefore be taken of Christ rather according to the sense than according to the translation of the word'. The distinction the Latin bench will need for nine hundred years is Jerome's, made in the act of refusing the reading he then allows.
• ← parallel · Ambrose
  Phase 6. The same conclusion from different verses, and the difference is the whole later history. Origen gets the Son out of in principio by John 1:1–3 and Col 1:15 — the Word through whom all things were made, the firstborn of every creature — and never says wisdom. Ambrose gets him out of John 8:25, 'The Beginning, who also speak to you', which makes Principium a name rather than an instrument. Ambrose's route is the one the Latin bench takes; and it is Ambrose, three columns later, who adds Ps 104:24 and so brings in the wisdom the rabbinic bench is arguing about at the same moment, meaning something else by it.
• ← cites · Chalcidius
  Chalcidius is reporting Origen and says so on the same page: Origenes asseuerat ita sibi ab Hebraeis esse persuasum. Origen's homily says the beginning here is not temporal but is Christ; Chalcidius keeps the first half exactly — initium minime temporarium dici, and no time before the furnishing of the world, since day and night are what measure it — and does not take the second. He is the earliest Latin trace of the homily that is the source of everything the Latin bench says on this verse, and he is a trace with the Christology missing.
• ← parallel · Philo of Alexandria
  The two oldest witnesses on this daf say the same thing about the same word, and the one who is Greek, Jewish and Alexandrian says it first. Philo: the beginning is taken not, as some think, according to time. Origen, in Rufinus's Latin: he does not say here any temporal beginning. Both are in Alexandria; Origen's library held Philo; and yet nothing in the homily names him, and Origen's positive answer, that the beginning is the Saviour, is one Philo could not have given. The negative half is shared and the positive half is not.