Most would agree that Origen was the greatest Christian theologian before Augustine, whatever position they might take on the character of his views. Ronald E. Heine, an acknowledged expert on Origen's commentaries on New Testament books, has penned a helpful volume on this hugely productive figure in Oxford University Press's Theology in Context series.

After a survey of the history and cultural setting of Alexandria, Heine examines the minimal evidence for the origins of Christianity there, noting that, insofar as we can tell, the earliest Christians were Jews and that a Jewish Christian atmosphere pervaded their thought. He is cautious about the precise nature of the School of Pantaenus, to which Eusebius attributes so much importance in his account of the history of Christianity in that city, though he is clear that the city generated a number of Christian theologians including ones belonging to those who were later to be called heretics, such as Basilides. Heine takes us through Origen's early career in Alexandria as a grammatikos, showing how he himself was called upon by some Christians to teach them, and eventually became the leader of a school himself, though one of his own rather than an already established one, such as that of Pantaenus. In seeing his main business as the exposition of Scripture, both Old and New Testaments (the latter was not yet fully formed), he reflected the schools atmosphere of the city. Heine sees many of his early works as controversialist in tone, as he seeks to create different readings of the Bible from those associated with Basilides, Heracleon and others, and he is moved to write De principiis as a rebuttal of certain positions with which he had come to disagree. Heine discusses the Hexapla, contending that it has its origins in Alexandria, was never meant for publication, and is principally a text used to establish the original reading of the LXX to which Origen maintained a strong bond, forged by the view that it was the text handed down by the Apostles.

Heine's main thesis is that Origen's move to Caesarea in 232, the result of disagreements with the bishop of Alexandria, Demetrius, brought about different emphases in Origen's work. Most important, in a city with a large Jewish population and marked by the presence of some significant Jewish teachers, with whom Origen was in contact (his main contact with Jews in Alexandria had been with converts to Christianity) Origen was forced in a way that had not been the case in Alexandria to address the question of the relationship between Jews and Christians, old covenant and new. Making use of much previous work on this subject Heine shows in great detail how this was the case, pointing up how the concern becomes important both in the later Caesarean books of his Commentary on John and the Commentary on Romans (amongst other things Heine thinks that Origen's interest in Matthew's Gospel emerges from such a concern with the Jewish-Christian issue, and that his decision to write the Contra Celsum resulted from the presence in the first two books of a Jewish interlocutor). Heine also shows Origen becoming more involved in preaching (not least because the bishop of Caesarea, Theoctisius, was a supporter of Origen's), taking a greater interest in issues of soteriology, the literal meaning of the text, and beginning to change his mind on the issue of universal salvation.

This review skims the surface of a clearly written and learned book. Some will find that it is stronger on Origen's exegetical activities than his thinking as such, if such a distinction can be made. So Heine, though dealing with Origen's concern with monarchianism, is not as detailed as he might have been on Origen's theory of eternal generation; and he barely contends with some recent work on Origen's philosophical background and concerns as found, for instance, in Mark Edwards's work on Origen against the Platonists. Some might also claim that Heine is too assured in his understanding of the purpose of the Hexapla, and that he would have done better to have presented Origen as a man whose scholarly inclinations led him in different directions to his pious ones. So there are places where Origen appears to support the priority of the Hebrew (precisely the implications of Africanus' objection to his use of the Book of Susannah) and other places where ecclesiastical concerns lead him to defend the LXX. His failure, at least in extant works, to repeat the story of the Letter of Aristeas, might be significant in this regard. Some might also wonder whether Heine has created too sharp a division between the Alexandrian and Caesarean Origen (has he been too influenced by the fact that he is writing a book in a series called Theology in Context?), thinking that the latter becomes too obviously a churchman when compared with the former, though many will find Heine's comments about the Jewish concerns of Origen's Caesarean works intriguing (as well as Heine's arguments about a transitional period in Origen's thought). It is odd perhaps that Heine chooses to end his book with a discussion of Origen's supposedly changing views on universalism. In such a carefully argued book we might have expected some more discursive, general observations, and even some thoughts on why it was that Origen came to be identified later as a heretic. The last of these issues is, of course, a part of the great man's Nachleben, but in a work which has seen Origen becoming more obviously a churchman, such a discussion might have been helpful.

All in all, however, this is a thoughtful and well-informed book, which admirably, if possibly controversially, gives a helpfully contextual account of Origen's life and thought.