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Abstract
In the early centuries of the common era, the heart of Christian theology was the interpretation of the Bible. This dissertation is a study of the development in the first six centuries of the common era of Christian interpretation of Ezekiel 1, the prophet's vision of God's throne and chariot. This text's Christian exegetical tradition is interesting both because Ezekiel 1 is part of the Jewish scriptures, and because of the text's enigmatic quality. The use of the text in the New Testament, in the Revelation to John, ensured that patristic exegetes would find the vision particularly interesting, but also gave little explicit guidance as to how the vision should be interpreted. In this study, the development of patristic exegesis of the prophet's vision is traced from its roots in the New Testament to the foundations laid by Irenaeus of Lyons and Origen, through the expansion of exegetical themes in the fourth century, to the commentaries of Jerome and Theodoret of Cyrus and the homilies preached by Gregory the Great. These exegetes expounded the vision not as an isolated text, but read it in light of the rest of the Bible and the established exegetical tradition. Moreover, several exegetical themes emerge as dominant: a Christian typology of Ezekiel and Christ; the vision as a symbol of the moral life, that is, the virtuous life and the soul's ascent to God; the vision as a key to understanding other biblical visions and theophanies, especially in relation to questions about human knowledge of God; and the vision as a sign of the unity of Old and New Testaments.