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Ronald E. Heine The Commentaries of Origen and Jerome on St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians Oxford Early Christian Studies New York: Oxford University Press, 2002 Pp. 297 + xii.
As Ronald Heine points out at the beginning of his book, "the loss of so much of Origen's exegetical work is one of the tragedies of ancient Church history" (vii). Jerome reports that Origen wrote commentaries on most of Paul's letters. Of these, only Rufinus' translation of the Commentary on Romans survives in a form close to that of Origen's original. The Commentary on Ephesians does not survive in a complete form, but significant fragments have been preserved. In addition, Jerome composed his own Commentary on Ephesians, and this commentary has survived. According to Heine, Jerome's commentary depends so heavily on Origen that is it possible to use Jerome, together with the extant fragments, to get a fairly good sense of the content of Origen's lost Commentary on Ephesians. This is the basic ambition of Heine's work. The author is careful to point out that he is not offering a reconstruction of Origen's commentary but a recovery such that "we can hear...