Fatherhood Quote by Origen

Origen is doing a piece of high-wire early-Christian politics: insisting that Christianity doesn’t junk the Jewish past, it claims it. “If all things were made through Him” echoes John’s Gospel (the Logos through whom creation happens). Origen then extends that cosmic premise into a hermeneutic takeover. If Christ is the agent of creation, he argues, then the “splendid revelations” given to the patriarchs and prophets must also be “through Him.” The Old Testament doesn’t merely prefigure Christ by accident or hindsight; it was always already Christ-shaped.

The subtext is a battle on two fronts. Against Marcionites and other anti-Jewish currents who wanted to sever Christianity from Israel’s scriptures, Origen defends continuity: the fathers and prophets really did receive revelation. Against Jewish readings that keep those texts self-contained, he asserts that their deepest meaning is Christian. That’s why he pivots to “symbols” and “sacred mysteries.” He’s not praising straightforward prophecy as much as authorizing allegory: scripture as a coded archive, where narratives, laws, even rituals are signs pointing beyond themselves.

“Splendid” is strategic, too. It flatters the Hebrew tradition while reassigning its ownership. The prophets become carriers of a truth they only partially grasp, their words elevated into a typological system that culminates in Christ and, by extension, in the Church’s interpretive authority. In an era when Christianity is still defining its canon and intellectual credibility, Origen offers a unifying thesis: one divine author, one storyline, many veils.