ABSTRACT
Origen, building on the exegetical work of his predecessors like Clement of Alexandria, deployed the commentary technique of the Alexandrian grammatikos to Christian pedagogical ends decisively and expansively in his commentaries on books of the Bible. The author begin by surveying the isagogical topics covered in the commentaries prologues, building on existing scholarship which has related Origen's and Jerome's biblical commentary prologues to the ancient tradition of didactic commentary prologues. It examines the relationship between the Latin project of Pauline commentary and the revision of the Old Latin translation of the Bible, focusing on the disagreement between Ambrosiaster and Jerome over the latter. Exploring these two areas will demonstrate how Latin commentators on Paul shared their didactic prologue topics with other Christian and secular hermeneutical circles, but also displayed widely varying attitudes to the practices of text criticism and re-translation which Origen had so assiduously applied to biblical scholarship.
