Il Commento a Giovanni di Origene: il testo e i suoi contesti (review)

In this substantial collection, the Gruppo Italiano, established in 1994 to study Origen and the Alexandrian tradition, presents twenty-two essays on a wide range of topics raised by Origen's Commentary on John and explored at the group's conference in Rome in September 2004. The essays are primarily the work of Italian scholars from a variety of universities although their essays reflect the influence of international Origen studies.

Prinzivalli, the volume's editor, provides an introduction to the work in which she points out unique characteristics of the commentary, including the lengthy period of its composition (which took place in both Alexandria and Caesarea), the preservation of much of the commentary's Greek text, and the fragments of Heracleon cited in Origen's text.

The collection is divided into three sections. The essays in the first section examine the commentary's structure in a variety of ways, looking both at the internal workings of the piece and the larger philosophical and literary context for Origen's work. Authors address the commentary's theological hermeneutics (Simonetti), its status as a literary work (Perrone), and the ways in which Origen's language interacts and accords with the text of John's gospel (Pazzini). Bendinelli and Somos turn to ancient scholastic traditions for a deeper understanding of Origen's work in the commentary. Bastit reads Origen's prologue alongside other patristic prologues to commentaries on the gospels. She identifies two parallel interpretative traditions in these prologues: one "Greek" tradition, exemplified by Origen, John Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria, and Augustine, which emphasizes the active nature of the gospels as they announce the good news; and a "Western" tradition, exemplified by Irenaeus, Ambrose, Chromatius, and Jerome, which focuses on the four-fold nature of the Word's images in the gospels.

The second section of the book, addressing general themes in the commentary, contains five essays. Lettieri discusses Origen's use of the Valentinian theological system. Norelli focuses on the theme of prophecy, Cocchini on church, and Prinzivalli on the eschatological anthropology of the commentary. Presenting a helpful overview of German scholarship on Origen's pneumatology, Markschies takes the position (against Hauschild, Ziebritzi, and others) that Origen's Commentary on John gives the Spirit a distinct position in salvation history and makes pneumatology a pivotal part of his theology.

The third section of the book presents essays on diverse topics: Origen's use of the book of Revelation (Mazzucco), his understanding of Christ as high priest (Noce) and as sacrifical lamb (Carpino), his insistence on God's freedom (Pietras), his reading of the Samaritan woman as the heterodox (Cattaneo), and his handling of the problem of discord among the four evangelists (Junod). Scholars turn to Philo (Spuntarelli) and to other texts of Origen to contextualize and clarify the Commentary on John. Perhaps most significant—and complex—is the relationship traced by many different authors between Origen's work in the commentary and the theology of his Gnostic contemporaries. Discussions of the symbolism of Capharnaum (Navascues) and the Jordan River (Pennacchio) are illustrative of Origen's dialogue with strands of Gnostic scriptural interpretation. Drecoll's examination of Judas in the commentary shows how seriously Origen considers and responds to Gnostic traditions about him. Likewise, Origen is willing to challenge traditional interpretations even if they were developed against the Gnostics, as Bumazhnov shows in his essay on the "simple people" in the Commentary on John.

Overall, the collection is a rich resource, particularly since the authors work closely with Origen's texts—those of his Commentary on John and of others in his corpus. Footnotes are replete with both ancient and contemporary references, and the authors raise questions of significance for the larger study of Origen. This volume is of particular interest to scholars of Origen...