Blake Adams

I begin with a personal interlude. When I wanted to learn more about early Christian doctrine several years ago, I thought Jaroslav Pelikan’s celebrated The Christian Tradition was as good a place to start as any. Two-hundred pages in, I began to notice this oddly named fellow, Origen of Alexandria, seemed most frequently quoted and […]

Ever eager to increase interest in early Christianity, I keep a running list of what I consider the best introductions on various subjects. (These may and have changed as new publications appear.) For early Christian philosophy, Karamanolis’s The Philosophy of Early Christianity; for liturgy, McGowan’s Ancient Christian Worship; for spirituality, Wilken’s The Spirit of Early […]

Gospel Reading and Reception in Early Christian Literature, edited by Madison N. Pierce, Andrew J. Byers, and Simon Gathercole, is an anthology of articles dedicated to Francis Watson with an eye to further and refine his life’s work on the theological interpretation of Scripture. Watson’s scholarship was pivotal in wresting biblical studies from its “Berliner […]

In 1934, a family played ping pong in their Georgian home near Chesterfield, England. One of the players accidentally stepped on the ball, crushing it, so the father went to the cupboard to find a replacement. There he met an ordeal, since the cupboard was filled with “an entirely undisciplined clutter of smallish leather bound […]

On September 18, 2012, Karen King, a Harvard historian, presented to the attendees of an academic conference in Rome a newly discovered manuscript: a papyrus fragment the size of a business card featuring eight lines of text in Coptic. Each line was broken on both ends, as though the fragment had been incised from the […]

In the mid-third century, King Ptolemy II, a known bibliophile, requested from Eleazar, the high priest of Jerusalem, a copy of “the Law of the Jews” for the library of Alexandria. According to the Letter of Aristeas, six translators were commissioned from each tribe for a grand total of seventy-two translators. They labored seventy-two days, […]

In the former parts of this series (pt. 1, pt. 2, pt. 3), I laid out some basic features of Origen’s Christological exemplarism. More could be said, but Christological exemplarism is clearly an aspect of atonement in Origen’s thought; I say “aspect,” because it is not a “theory” to be marshalled against other theories. As […]

The Crucified One In this third installment on the life and thought of Origen of Alexandria, I would like to take up a topic some may find troubling. So far, I have insisted on the significance of the “imitation of Christ” for Origen, but I have been imprecise. When Origen talks about imitating Christ or […]

In the first article in this series, I introduced Origen of Alexandria, a third-century Christian teacher, and led with the question: Why would a third-century pagan convert to Christianity? Naturally, this is a large topic, since the incentives to convert in any era can be complex and often obscure, but Origen and other Church Fathers […]

In April 2012, an archivist at the Bavarian State Library discovered inside a twelfth-century manuscript a collection of twenty-nine homilies on the Psalms. Originally catalogued as “anonymous,” these homilies were later confirmed to be the work of the fourth-century Christian teacher, Origen of Alexandria.[1] In addition to expanding Origen’s corpus, this discovery is significant for […]