The Text of the Synoptic Gospels in the Writings of Origen

The life and work of Origen (c186-c254 CE) have always been considered important in relation to the transmission of the New Testament text. This is not just because he was a prolific writer who referred constantly to biblical texts, but also because of his geographical location in two of the most important centres of early Christian education, Alexandria and Caesarea. The task of collecting his citations and mapping these against known manuscripts is an important task and this book contributes to this process by looking specifically at the citations from the synoptic gospels that occur in the works of Origen that have survived in Greek. The citations, lemmata, adaptations and allusions have been collected and citations and lemmata compared against a selection of known manuscripts representing major text types including the so-called Caesarean text type. Statistical analysis has been undertaken to establish the level of agreement between Origen's text and known manuscripts, with further analysis undertaken to establish levels of agreement between the different manuscripts. The evidence suggests that Origen did not use one type of text for any one gospel. Indeed his works reveal instead the range of available text traditions in Caesarea at his time of writing.