Aging & Wisdom Quote by Origen

Origen is doing what great early Christian thinkers did best: turning revelation into an argument about authority. In a single, tightly wound sentence, he collapses the distance between prophecy and apostolic preaching. If the Apostles received the once-hidden mystery through “prophetic writings,” and if prophets weren’t mere mouthpieces but “wise men” who grasped what they uttered, then the prophets effectively already possessed the same truth later “made manifest” in the Church. The logic is almost lawyerly, but the aim is pastoral and political.

The specific intent is to secure continuity: Christianity is not a new cult improvising meanings after Jesus, but the disclosed inner content of Israel’s scriptures. That matters in Origen’s third-century context, when rival Christian groups (especially those flirting with Marcionite disdain for the Hebrew Bible) tried to sever the Old Testament from the gospel. Origen’s line quietly says: you can’t. Cut the prophets out and you cut the method of the Apostles themselves.

The subtext is also a defense of interpretation. “Mystery” isn’t a riddle solved by cleverness; it’s a divine plan unveiled in stages. Yet Origen refuses a purely mechanical view of inspiration. By insisting that prophets “understood what proceeded from their own mouths,” he elevates human intellect inside revelation, legitimizing the work of exegesis (and, not incidentally, his own allegorical readings). The sentence flatters the prophets, fortifies apostolic teaching, and makes a case that the Church’s reading of scripture is not a retrofit but an awakening of what was already there.