Marginalia Interview with Peter Martens
Marginalia Review of Books recently conducted a fascinating interview with Peter Martens, Assistant Professor of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University, concerning his new book Origen and Scripture: The Contours of the Exegetical Life. The discussion includes topics such as theological interpretation of scripture and how we as scholars today should view exegesis.
You can go to the interview here or watch below. Thanks to Marginalia for hosting this interview!
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From the back cover of Origen and Scripture:
Scriptural interpretation was an important form of scholarship for Christians in late antiquity. For no one does this claim ring more true than Origen of Alexandria (185–254), one of the most prolific scholars of Scripture in early Christianity. This book examines his approach to the Bible through a biographical lens: the focus is on his account of the scriptural interpreter, the animating centre of the exegetical enterprise. In pursuing this largely neglected line of inquiry, Peter W. Martens discloses the contours of Origen’s sweeping vision of scriptural exegesis as a way of life. For Origen, ideal interpreters were far more than philologists steeped in the skills conveyed by Greco-Roman education. Their profile also included a commitment to Christianity from which they gathered a spectrum of loyalties, guidelines, dispositions, relationships and doctrines that tangibly shaped how they practiced and thought about their biblical scholarship. The study explores the many ways in which Origen thought ideal scriptural interpreters (himself included) embarked upon a way of life, indeed a way of salvation, culminating in the everlasting contemplation of God. This new and integrative thesis takes seriously how the discipline of scriptural interpretation was envisioned by one of its pioneering and most influential practitioners.