In Germany, as in parts of Yorkshire, laughing — at least among people with pretensions to rank — was regarded as a form of weakness. Goethe, whose o… - Paul Johnson

If Paul brought the first generation of Christians the useful skills of a trained theologian, Origen was the first great philosopher to rethink the new religion from first principles. As his philosophical enemy, the anti-Christian Porphyry, summed it up, he 'introduced Greek ideas to foreign fables' — that is, gave a barbarous eastern religion the intellectual respectability of a philosophical defense. Origen was also a phenomenon. As Eusebius put it admiringly, 'even the facts from his cradle are worth mentioning'. Origen came from Alexandria, the second city of the empire and then it's intellectual centre; his father's martyrdom left him an orphan at seventeen with six younger brothers. He was a hard working prodigy, at eighteen head of the Catechetical School, and already trained as a literary scholar and teacher. But at this point, probably in 203, he became a religious fanatic and remained one for the next fifty years. He gave up his job and sold his books to concentrate on religion. he slept on the floor, ate no meat, drank no wine, had only one coat and no shoes. He almost certainly castrated himself, in obedience to the notorious text, Matthew 19:12, 'there are some who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake.' Origen's learning was massive and it was of a highly original kind: he always went back to the sources and thought through the whole process himself. This he learned Hebrew and, according to Eusebius, 'got into his possession the original writings extant among the Jews in the actual Hebrew character'. These included the discovery of lost texts; in the case of the psalms, Origen collected not only the four known texts but three others unearthed, including 'one he found at Jericho in a jar'. The result was an enormous tome, the Hexapla, which probably existed in only one manuscript now lost, setting out the seven alternative texts in parallel columns. He applied the same principles of original research to every aspect of Chr

Los judíos sencillamente suponen la preexistencia de un Dios omnipotente, que actúa pero al que nunca se describe ni caracteriza, y por lo tanto tiene la fuerza y la invisibilidad de la naturaleza misma: es significativo que el primer capítulo del Génesis, a diferencia de las restantes cosmogonías antiguas, armonice perfectamente, en esencia, con las explicaciones científicas modernas del origen del universo, y entre ellas con la teoría de la Gran Explosión.

Job is a formidable work of Hebrew literature. With the only exception of Isaiah, no work in the Bible is written at such a sustained level of powerful eloquence.