ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with precisely the aspects of the Christian story which modern exegetes tend to regard as 'mythological'. Its principal concern, however, is to enquire further about the grounds and motivation of the attack on allegory. It has been a mistake to suppose that the Antiochenes reacted against allegory on similar grounds to the rejection of allegory in the modern period. Allegory took words as discrete tokens, and by de-coding the text found a spiritual meaning which bore no relation to the construction of the wording or narrative. The Antiochene reaction against allegory occurs in the same century as the first Origenist controversy. The chapter suggests that methodological issues with respect to exegesis were addressed precisely to support a defense of the over-arching narrative of the Rule of Faith, or by then, the creeds, against the excessive spiritualising implicit in Origen's allegory.
