Did you know? Interesting and unusual facts about the church's first Bible interpreters.

Great grandfather of medieval culture?

Clement of Alexandria (ca. 160-215) began the monumental project that would culminate in the Middle Ages--to place all of Western culture on a biblical foundation. Robert Wilken calculates there are between seven and eight biblical citations on every page of Clement's writings, which contain, in all, some 1,500 references to the Old Testament and 3,000 to the New Testament. His writings are "suffused with [the Bible's] language, its forms of expressions, its images and metaphors, its stories. Its heroes become his heroes, and its history his history." This is all the more remarkable, adds Wilken, given that for Clement the Bible was "an alien book, written in a plain and unadorned style, a product of Jewish culture, quite unlike the artful and polished works of Greek literature."

Origenal sins

Though Origen is hands down the most influential figure in the early history of Biblical interpretation (p. 18), he was condemned at Constantinople in 553 by an ecumenical council and was regularly viewed as a heretic throughout much of Christian history. Among the teachings that contributed to this judgment were his Christological formulations that led Arius to deny the eternal existence of the Son, his belief in the preexistence of human souls, and his affirmation of the genuine possibility of a universal salvation of all creatures. In addition, he was viewed as the source of numerous heresies that, while not directly connected to his thought, were affirmed by those who claimed to be his followers.

How could 72 translators be wrong?

Until the writings of the apostles were gathered into a canonical collection in about the third century A.D., the only Bible the early church knew was the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible made by Hellenistic Jews. Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-246 B.C.) is supposed to have commissioned the great undertaking to introduce a copy of Hebrew Law into his renowned library at Alexandria. According to Jewish tradition, 72 scholars gathered in 72 individual cells, each assigned to translate a full copy of the Bible. Emerging to compare their renderings, they discovered that each version was nearly identical. Until Jerome created his Vulgate translation between 383 and 405, the Septuagint continued as the church's authoritative Old Testament. The Vulgate united the entire Bible trader a common linguistic banner for the first time. The Septuagint remains the canonical Hebrew Bible text for the Eastern Orthodox Church.

On the cover: Stewards of truth