Origen of Alexandria

Origen was about seventeen when the persecution under Septimius Severus took his father. Leonides was arrested at Alexandria in 202 and beheaded, and his property was confiscated, leaving a widow and seven children with nothing. Origen was the eldest. Eusebius says he wanted to go and die with his father and wrote him a note in prison telling him not to change his mind on the family's account, and that his mother stopped him by hiding all his clothes.

He supported the family by teaching. Within a year, with the Christian teachers of Alexandria scattered or dead, converts were coming to him for instruction, and the bishop Demetrius put him in charge of the catechetical school. He was eighteen.

He lived like an ascetic, one coat, no shoes, little sleep, fasting, and Eusebius reports that as a young man he took Matthew 19:12 literally and castrated himself. Modern scholars are divided on whether the story is true or a later slander, and Origen's own commentary on that verse argues firmly against reading it literally.

His output was without parallel in the ancient world. A wealthy convert named Ambrose, whom Origen had won back from gnosticism, supplied him with seven shorthand writers working in shifts, copyists, and calligraphers. Jerome says he wrote more than any man could read.

The Hexapla was the labor of decades. Origen set the Old Testament out in six parallel columns: the Hebrew text; the Hebrew transliterated into Greek letters; and then four Greek translations, Aquila, Symmachus, the Septuagint, and Theodotion, with marks showing where the Greek had more or less than the Hebrew. It was the first critical edition of the Bible ever made, and the ancestor of every apparatus in a modern study Bible. The complete work was too large ever to be copied; it sat in the library at Caesarea until it was lost.

On First Principles was the first systematic theology. Against Celsus answered the most intelligent pagan attack on Christianity ever written, quoting Celsus so fully that the lost original can largely be reconstructed from it. His commentaries and homilies covered most of the Bible.

He was ordained a presbyter by bishops in Palestine without Demetrius's consent, and Demetrius deposed and exiled him for it. Origen moved to Caesarea in 232 and rebuilt his school there.

Under Decius, in 250, he was arrested and tortured deliberately and at length, stretched on the rack, iron collar, threat of fire, with orders that he not be killed. He did not recant. He was released when the emperor died, broken by it, and died at Tyre around 253 or 254, about sixty-nine years old.

Some of his speculations were condemned three centuries after his death. His scholarship has never stopped being used.

Sources: Eusebius, Church History VI; Jerome, On Illustrious Men 54; Origen, On First Principles and Against Celsus (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2.