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Origen: On First Principles
ANF historical edition · Translated text
Book III — Chapter I., Sections 1-23 translated from the Greek: On the Inspiration of Holy Scripture, and How the Same is to be Read and Understood, and What is the Reason of the Uncertainty in it; and of the Impossibility or Irrationality of Certain Things in it, Taken According to the Letter. (part 21)
judged deserving of different abodes—better or worse—throughout all this space of earth, and (of being descended) from parents of different kinds, Edition note 1 so that an Israelite may sometimes fall among Scythians, and an Egyptian descend into Judea. And yet the Saviour came to gather together the lost sheep of the house of Israel; but many of the Israelites not having yielded to His teaching, those from the Gentiles were called.…And these points, as we suppose, have been concealed in the histories. For
“the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field.” Edition note 2
Let us notice, then, whether the apparent and superficial and obvious meaning of Scripture does not resemble a field filled with plants of every kind, while the things lying in it, and not visible to all, but buried, as it were, under the plants that are seen, are the hidden treasures of wisdom and knowledge; which the Spirit through Isaiah Edition note 3 calls dark and invisible and concealed, God alone being able to break the brazen gates that conceal them, and to burst the iron bars that are upon the gates, in order that all the statements in the book of Genesis may be discovered which refer to the various genuine kinds, and seeds, as it were, of souls, which stand nearly related to Israel, or at a distance from it; and the descent into Egypt of the seventy souls, that they may there become as the “stars of heaven in multitude.” But since not all who are of them are the light of the world—“for not all who are of Israel are Israel” Edition note 4 —they become from seventy souls as the “sand that is beside the sea-shore innumerable.”
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