This volume reprints the translation of the First principles which accompanied Behr's Oxford text of 2017, together with the introduction in which he offers a new account of his structure and a statement of his own position in the current debate regarding Origen's Platonism. In the first part he argues that the structure of the treatise has been concealed from scholars before the present century by three factors: the acceptance of editorial headings as though they were Origen's own divisions, failure to note that repetition and amplification are regular devices of classical literature and failure to distinguish, with Origen's proem, between apostolic and ecclesiastical preaching. Once these veils are lifted, the work can be seen to consist of two cycles. The first treats God, the Son, the Holy Spirit and rational beings as topics of theology, while the second treats the same topics in relation to the divine economy. The precepts for biblical exegesis in the fourth book stand outside both cycles, not as an appendix but as the crown and goal of the work, to which the first three books are preliminary studies. There remain, no doubt, many passages of which one can say that they might as well have been placed in one chapter as in another, but that is true of many an ancient text, including those in which the author has made no secret of his plan.

The philosophy of Origen – without which, as he urges, there could be no exegesis – occupies the second half of Behr's introduction. It is heartening to learn that no recent edition of the First principles reproduces Koetschau's Fragment xv, an amalgam of ancient calumnies which is the principal source for the oft-repeated statement that Origen held the fall of souls to be a consequence of koros or satiety (p. xxvi). Of course this canard will not be laid to rest until Behr's translation supersedes that of Butterworth, in which Koetschau's interpolations are printed as though they were the ‘Greek’ underlying the Latin of Rufinus. Another advance in scholarship, real enough but not so universal as Behr contends, is the obsolescence of the old caricature of Origen as a Platonist who forces his prefabricated philosophy on the Scriptures by the arbitrary use of allegory (p. xxvi again). It is true that most scholars now acknowledge the primacy of Scripture in his teaching, that allegory is no longer assumed to be always at odds with the ‘true’ sense of the text, and that such cardinal tenets of Plato as the transmigration of souls are no longer attributed to Origen in the teeth of his own protestations. For all that, the suggestion that the Church had its own philosophy, no less distinct from and no more indebted to Plato than that of any pagan school, is still received in many quarters as though it were an ‘attack on Hellenism’ or an atavistic attempt to keep Christianity innocent of all philosophy. Most modern commentators, for example, believe that Origen held the Platonic ideas to be thoughts of God, not because he says so, but because the passage in which he repudiates the term ‘idea’ does not mirror any known Platonic usage. Behr's inference that he rejects the Platonic theory of ideas altogether is contestable, but hardly so contestable as those that put into Origen's mouth a doctrine for which no warrant is found in his own vocabulary.

Platonism is often equated now with the theory (which some would deny to be Plato's) that embodiment is the consequence of the soul's fall from an incorporeal state. In recent years both Panagiotis Tzamalikos and I have argued that Origen's own works never advance a theory of the pre-existence of souls that corresponds to the traditional definition of Platonism (see M. J. Edwards, Origen against Plato, Farnham 2002, ch. iii; ‘Origen's Platonism: questions and caveats’, Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum xii [2008], 20–38; Adamantius 2012). I have seen no refutation of Tzamalikos; my own arguments are commonly supposed to have been exploded by Peter Martens, who plucks four pages from Origen against Plato, asserts that any passage which I defer to in the following pages has not been mentioned, and intimates, with a false show of omniscience, that the pages which he has deigned to read say nothing that any scholar has denied (‘Embodiment, heresy, and the hellenization of Christianity: the descent of the soul in Plato and Origen’, Harvard Theological Review cviii [2015], 613 n. 73). Behr, it seems, is resolved that this last charge at least will not be laid against him. On the one hand, he holds with Tzamalikos that human souls exist before their embodiment only in the foreknowledge of God (pp. lxxxi–lxxxii); on the other, he holds, with Martens and me but against the consensus of scholarship, that First principles 1.3.8–1.4.1 is an integral text which describes the fall of the soul from innocence in the embodied state (pp. xxxv–xxxvi). I know of no scholarly precedent for his contention that when Origen speaks at First principles 2.6.4 of the incandescent love of the soul of Christ for the Father ‘from creation’, he is not so much asserting the pre-existence of this soul as drawing a contrast with the souls of the disciples who fell away at the crucifixion (pp. lxvi–lxviii). All talk of Christ's pre-existence, according to Behr, is an inept superimposition of temporality on the eternal (pp. lxxvi–lxxix); it is equally injudicious to imagine the pre-existence of the soul, in Origen's scheme, as anything other than the achievement of the eternal sonship laid up for every soul in its beginning (p. lxxiv). This novel reading of Origen rests heavily on texts drawn from Commentary on John, and those who have also read Behr's recent monograph on the Fourth Gospel will observe much common matter. It is probable, though not logically necessary, that those who are persuaded by one of Behr's books will be more willing to be persuaded by the other; it is highly improbable that a reader of either book will fail to find it stirring and profound.