Origen’s Hexapla and What It Was For

But Origen too, you will tell us, in composing his work called the Hexapla, adopted the asterisks, taking them from the translation of Theodotion. How is this? You bring in Origen sometimes to be condemned and sometimes to be imitated, just as the whim takes you. But can it be right for you to call in as your advocate the same man you were accusing a moment ago? Can you take as your authority for what you do a man you yourself have already condemned, and against whom you stirred up the Roman senate? You ought to have provided for this beforehand. No one begins by cutting through the trunk of a tree when he means to lean against it, and no one first attacks another man’s faith and then calls on his faith in his own defense. Whether Origen did as you say or not makes no difference to you. If you want his case to be a precedent for yours, read over the judgment you passed on him, and see what you said. You used the words: “This is not clearing yourself, but only looking for accomplices in your crime.” Apply this to yourself. Your business is not to look for accomplices in your crime, but to find a way to justify your conduct. [a]

However, let us see whether Origen, whom you make both plaintiff and defendant, did anything of the kind. I do not find a single passage that he translated from the Hebrew. How then can your action and his be called alike? What he did was this. He showed that apostates and Jews had translated the writings the Jews especially read. And since it often happened in the course of debate that they falsely claimed that some things had been taken out of our copies of the Scriptures and others put in, Origen wanted to show our people what reading was current among the Jews. So he wrote out each of their versions on separate pages, or columns, and by certain fixed marks at the head of each line he pointed out what they had added or taken away. He put these marks of his only in the work of others, not in his own, so that we might understand what the Jews, not what we ourselves, believed had been either removed or inserted.

This was no more than what is done in the army when a roll is drawn up with the names of the soldiers. If the captain wants to see how many of them have survived a battle, he sends a man to inquire. The man makes his own mark, the Greek letter theta, for instance, as is commonly done, against the name of each soldier who has fallen, and puts some other mark of his own to show the survivors. Do you suppose that he who puts one mark against a dead man’s name and another of his own against a survivor’s will be thought to have done something that makes the one dead and the other alive? As everyone understands, he has only marked the names of those killed by others, so as to draw attention to the fact. In just the same way, Origen used marks of his own, namely asterisks and obeli, to point out which words had been, so to speak, killed by the other translators, and which had been brought in without need. But he put in no single word of his own, nor did he make it seem that the certainty of our copies was shaken at any point. Rather, those passages which, as the words actually run, seemed to lack plainness and clearness, he showed to be full of the mysteries of a spiritual meaning. What comfort, then, can Origen’s conduct give you in this matter, when your work is shown to be quite unlike his? All your labor is spent on making one letter kill the next, while his effort, on the contrary, is to uphold the Spirit that gives life.