‘The voice is the voice of Origen, but the hands are the hands of Rufinus’: Chadwick's epigram is as celebrated as Bammel's edition of Origen's Commentary on Romans, which is here reprinted with a long introduction. Brésard explains why scholars, despite the obvious importance of the biblical text on which Origen comments, have prized his commentary less than his other writings. Apart from a number of passages in Greek which have been questionably assigned to missing portions, the work survives only in the Latin of Rufinus, who confesses that all copies known to him have suffered interpolation. Although these words might lead us to suspect him of concealing heterodoxies under pretence of purging adulteration, Brésard shows that what he means by interpolation is only a breach or lacuna in the original text, and that his practice elsewhere gives us reason to surmise that he has left us an accurate paraphrase, if not a meticulous crib. The work of Nicola Pace on the practice of Rufinus as translator is strangely absent from Brésard's bibliography, and one might wish that in his choice of topics for comment he had paid more attention to those that stamp the work with the peculiar temper of Origen. Certainly the centrality of Christ, the dependence of justice on free will, the certainty of redemption for Israel, the fathomless mystery of God and the necessity of allegory for the vindication of Scripture are all pervasive themes of the commentary and thoroughly characteristic of its author; but equally characteristic is the doctrine that Christ assumed a different form to redeem the angels, the conjecture that angels assist our good resolutions while the demons fructify our evil counsels (i.21.6), and the disparagement of philosophies which pretend to discover truth without revelation (i.19.2). While Brésard rightly notes that the diversity of laws is a cardinal topic in the commentary, the intricate relation between circumcision of flesh and the literal sense of Mosaic legislation is barely explored. Origen's florid defence of circumcision (ii.9.33) and his masterly attempt to distinguish cases of obligatory circumcision from those which are not applied to the laity or to strangers receive no comment. We must not, however, complain too much of what has not been done, and it would be churlish to end this review without observing that this is the first edition of a patristic text in which I have found not a single typographical error.

Philological studies are among the most rewarding in the proceedings of the ninth and most recent colloquium on Origen. Supposed remnants of his Commentary on Job are shrewdly examined by Zamagni; Kovacs finds the Commentary on John a more trustworthy witness than the catenae to Origen's views on the Apocalypse; Marchini concludes that Latin translators amplified the text of Evagrius for the edification of fellow ascetics. The influence of Origen on Evagrius is also discussed by Toth and Suzuki; Basil of Caesarea's dependence on his Commentary on the Song of Songs is noted by Mira-Iborra, while Tampelini finds vestiges of his teaching in Hesychius of Jerusalem. Graumann shows that readers in the fifth century continued to exercise selective judgement in reading Origen; Tzvetkova suggests audaciously that the rabbis were indebted to his teaching on the supersession of sacrifice, while Baranov and Lourie maintain that the inability of statues to represent the soul of Christ supplied the iconoclasts with one of their capital arguments. Two contributions seem to me particularly ingenious: Markschies invokes comparative studies to show that Origen's putative self-castration would have been incongruous both with his social milieu and with his level of education; Bostock's ‘Origen, son of Horus’ is almost a reductio ad absurdum of attempts to gather all Origen's commonplaces into one cradle. His (rather quotidian) use of the exegetic and rhetorical techniques of his day is illustrated by Adamik, Alau-Milhaud and Demura; his careful and versatile parsing of biblical imagery furnishes matter for contributions by Bastit-Kalinowska, Bucchi, Dal Cavlo and Villani. Dehandschutter opines that opposition to voluntary martyrdom may explain his neglect of Stephen. Jacobsen reviews the Christology of the homilies, Argarate his doctrine of the Holy Spirit, Pasztori-Kupan his response to a heterodox conceit of the Holy Spirit as mother. Ledegang compares Origen, Clement and Philo on the Decalogue; Guinot criticises his efforts to differentiate pagan and biblical myth. Keough finds that divine names are not interchangeable for Origen; Kuyama discovers an ethic of the just war behind his pacifism. Cacciari writes perceptively on the protean figure of wisdom, Bugar on the distinction between autonomy and free will, Cocchini on the relation between conversion and moral amendment in the Commentary on Romans. Bright and Kannengiesser are instructive on the literature surrounding Antony, but Martin and Pesthy have more to say on Origen's importance as a precursor of the saint. Pazzini considers the mutual interleavening of faith and virtue, Bendineli the pastoral function of Origen's discussion of the prayers of Christ, Junod some angular passages in the treatise ‘On prayer’. Perrone, Somos, Rusch and Spangler agree that the goal of Origen's theology is praxis, which, because it outstrips the Greeks in ardour and fortitude, attests the superiority of the Gospel as a system of belief. Studer demonstrates the indefeasible connexion between the truth proclaimed by Origen and the person of Christ; Rizzi and Vianes differ as to whether he saw a perfect homology between martyrdom and ascetic practice. O'Leary proves that Origen was a philosopher, but my own position – that Origen was a philosopher, but no Platonist – is not refuted by evidence of the catalytic effect or ancillary use of Platonic tenets in his work. Nor am I moved by Beatrice's proof texts, which confuse the fall of souls with that of angels. The discriminating Pietras understands that souls are not angels, and that a world designed provisionally to redeem their falls is not the same thing as a world brought into being by our lability. Here the work of Panagiotis Tzamailkos would have enriched the bibliography of a volume justly dominated by French and Italian scholarship.