Origen's activity as an exegete of Scripture has elicited a plethora of comment. In this book, Peter W. Martens seeks to address a question that he believes has been overlooked in the abundant discussion of this subject, namely the way in which Origen portrays the ideal interpreter of Scripture. As he writes, ‘Precisely because the interpreter enlivened and gave shape to the entire discipline of biblical scholarship, attending to Origen's portrait of this figure positions us better than the other traditional scholarly trajectories for discerning his sweeping and integrative vision of scriptural exegesis as a way of life’ (p. 6).

The book divides itself into two parts. The first part, building upon the work of Bernhard Neuschäfer, analyses what, for want of a better term, we might term the technical attributes of the ideal interpreter: the ability to become an able philologist, a student of Greek language and literature and master of other skills pertinent to the interpretation of Scripture. In the second part Martens shows how Origen sought to position the exegete within a particular Christian setting, which he terms ‘the all-encompassing Christian drama of salvation’ (p. 67). Philology, far from being a foreign and regrettable addition to the exposition of Christian truth, was in fact contingent upon God's creative and providential action in the universe, and ‘ultimately a gift from God’. Scriptural interpretation was not academic in some narrow sense, but arose from a commitment to God. Gnostics and Jews failed, for different reasons, to exemplify this quality – Gnostics because they embraced views about God and the soul which were wrong and because they applied Greco-Roman rules of interpretation uncritically with no reference to a rule of faith; the Jews because they interpreted Scripture literally at points when they should not have done so, and made interpretative errors which arose from their failure to turn to Christ (Jews, according to Martens's interpretation of Origen, were not always literalists, but tended to be at vital points). This discussion is then followed by a detailed investigation of what Martens terms the moral conduct of the interpreter, describing the many places in Origen where scriptural exegesis and the moral life intersect. ‘The “pure” life, exegetical virtues, and the exercise of faith all facilitated independent scriptural study. But they also rendered the interpreter worthy of divine aid when Scripture proved impenetrable’ (p. 191). And yet, as Martens goes on to show in the next chapter, ‘Saving knowledge’, scriptural interpretation was not only an opportunity for Christian interpreters to express their commitment to the Christian faith, but one which enabled them ‘to gather resources along their journey in this faith’ (p. 226). In a final major chapter Martens argues that Origen's scriptural interpreter was engaged in a kind of primordial activity, which had once been abandoned when souls rebelled from God, not least because interpretation of Scripture was a form of divine contemplation, whose final vision, of course, would never be arrived at in the here and now. In this context exegesis becomes the middle point of a journey, which will lead to an ultimate encounter with the word of God in another life.

This is a careful and thoughtful piece of work, which makes ample use of scholarship on Origen's exegesis, while seeking to add to this in a critical and creative vein, and does so from the foundation of a deep knowledge of the primary source. Anyone who has studied Origen will find themselves concurring with Martens on many occasions, and even thinking that what he has brought to light is what they had always thought. It is, I would contend, self-evident that for Origen the interpretation of Scripture needs to be contextualised within a wider Christian narrative, of which the interpreter is a part, and that secular knowledge is appropriated on the assumption of its divine provenance and its controlled and ‘bound’ usage. And it would seem that the author, reflecting de Lubac more than R. P. C. Hanson, is sympathetic to this assumption: the challenge of Origen, as he puts it, is to establish whether current biblical scholars should contextualise their work more clearly within a Christian drama of salvation. But to have all of this argued so clearly, and from the perspective of Origen's developing and complex understanding of the Christian interpreter, ideal and less than ideal, is helpful and illuminating.