This monograph presents a perceptive, scholarly and comprehensive analysis of Origen's understanding of basileia (‘kingship’ or ‘kingdom’) in his commentary on a text that is peculiarly rich in examples both of the noun itself and of the associate concept. As Dingen remarks in her introduction, Origen was indebted to the pagan schools for his technical vocabulary and his tools of exegesis. At the same time she is aware that, however persuasively a modern scholar may argue that there was no such thing as an essence of Christianity, Judaism or Platonism, Origen himself was not content that his Christianity should be a hybrid, a ‘shifting cluster of attributes’ (p. 12) or anything less than a complete and coherent system which, being grounded from first to last in revelation, shared nothing with the heresies and philosophies of the ambient culture except such truths as they too had received by divine largesse. In a section on modern views of allegory, she shows that scholars are now less likely to treat it as an involuntary symptom of exposure to pagan models than as a calculated device for the edification of the reader and the deepening of communion with Christ (pp. 27–33). This is not say that a Christian can learn nothing from the Greeks, and Origen's claim that the kingdom is the consummation of earthly wisdom and virtue is anticipated in Dinger's remarks on the use of the term basileia in Plato, Philo, the Stoics and Plotinus (pp. 46–9, 54–7). In contrast to those who say that Origen had no grasp of philological method, she argues that his assiduous collation and comparison of occurrences of this term in Matthew's Gospel – illustrated, where possible, from the Greek text of his Commentary, since Rufinus shows a tendency to simplify the original in his Latin (p. 37) – is based on principles not unlike those which would guide an exponent of the historico-critical method in the same enterprise (p. 21).

Dinger arranges her material under five heads: the kingdom and the Scriptures, participation in the kingdom, the kingdom and the disciples, the kingdom and the last times, the kingdom and the Jews. The fourth of these does not receive its own chapter, since it is present in all the others (p. 64), it being as clear to Origen as to every sincere practitioner of the historico-critical method that the kingdom of heaven in Matthew belongs at once to this world and to the world to come. According to Dinger, Origen does not deduce from Matt. xii.28 that the kingdom of God is the earthly anticipation of the kingdom of heaven, and does not take Matt. xiii.41 to imply that the kingdom of the Father will supersede that of the Son. No doubt it is easier to harmonise the four Gospels if we take Matt. xix.24–5 as the benchmark for this evangelist's usage of the term basileia; Origen is mindful none the less, when he equates the present enjoyment of the kingdom with the knowledge of the Scriptures and the concomitant practice of virtue, that no-one can be proficient in either without the aid of Christ, or perfect in either before his return. Under the first head, therefore, we find Origen subduing both the moral ideals of the Greeks and the Jewish notion of obedience as putting on the yoke of the kingdom. Under the second head, Origen tells us that virtue is understood, as it is practised, only in Christ, and that the prerequisite of finding him in Scripture is to recognise the presence of allegory: Dinger could have united these propositions by observing that the Incarnation of Christ the Word in body, soul and spirit is the justification for Origen's threefold hermeneutic, the metaphysical premiss of that shift from the outer to the inner man which, in his own nomenclature, is not allegory but homonymy.

Under the third head, Dinger suspects that Origen is wooing a pagan audience when he represents Christ as a teacher and the disciples as his students, making no distinction between the anonymous seventy and the apostolic twelve. Under the fifth head she is at pains to demonstrate that, although he seldom mentions the Jews without acerbity, Origen excludes them from the kingdom not ‘because they are Jews but because they are not Christians’ (p. 224); it is not clear, however, what it would mean to exclude them because they are Jews except that (as Origen says) they cling to the literal meaning of the Old Testament and therefore fail to perceive both the divinity of Christ and the cause of his mission. In a further chapter, Dinger addresses passages in the Commentary which speak of the kingdom without explicit warrant in Matthew's text. In one of these, an overture to the parable of the labourers in the vineyard, she takes him to be foretelling the salvation of the devil (pp. 246–7, on Matthäuskommentar, p. 428 Klostermann/Benz). For my part, I cannot elicit clear reference to Satan from this paraphrase of Isaiah xiv, which seems in this case to treat the fallen monarch as one of a type. The whole passage (Commentary xv.27ff) is obscure, as it interprets the aphorism ‘the first will be last’ to mean that humans will be ‘first’ of, that is superiors and judges of, the angels who have fallen (giving prôtos the sense that it bears at John i.15), and goes on to surmise that the workers who have been idle for most of the day in Matthew's parable of the vineyard represent souls who had not descended to earth until the most recent times. A more quotidian reading is also offered, and no clear choice is made between them; the Latin and the Greek are strongly discrepant, and we must therefore not be too quick to see a clear enunciation, even in this late work (p. 25), of mysteries which Origen always addresses with reserve.