Note 9 — DEVELOPMENT OF THE MYTHICAL POINT OF VIEW IN RELATION TO THE GOSPEL HISTORIES.

To the early Christians who, antecedent to the fixing of the christian canon, made especial use of the Old Testament as their principal sacred record, an allegorical interpretation was the more indispensable, inasmuch as they had made greater advances beyond the views of the Old Testament writers than even the most enlightened of the Jews. It was no wonder therefore that this mode of explanation, already in vogue among the Jews, was almost universally adopted by the primitive christian churches. It was however again in Alexandria that it found the fullest application amongst the Christians, and that in connexion with the name of Origen. Origen attributes a threefold meaning to the Scriptures, corresponding with his distribution of the human being into three parts: the literal sense answering to the body; the moral, to the soul; and the mystical, to the spirit.9 The rule with him was to retain all three meanings, though differing in worth; in some particular cases, however, he was of opinion that the literal interpretation either gave no sense at all, or else a perverted sense, in order the more directly to impel the reader to the discovery of its mystical signification. Origen’s repeated observation that it is not the purpose of the biblical narratives to transmit old tales, but to instruct in the rules of life;10 his assertion that the merely literal acceptation of many of the narratives would prove destructive of the christian religion;11 and his application of the passage “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life,”12 to the relative worth of the allegorical and the literal modes of biblical interpretation, may be understood as indicating only the inferiority of the literal to the deeper signification. But the literal sense is decidedly given up when it is said, “Every passage of Scripture has a spiritual element, but not every one has a corporeal element;”13 “A spiritual truth often exists embodied in a corporeal falsehood”;14 “The Scriptures contain many things which never came to pass, interwoven with the history, and he must be dull indeed who does not of his own accord observe that much which the Scriptures represent as having happened never actually occurred.”15 Among the passages which Origen regarded as admitting no other than an allegorical interpretation, besides those which too sensibly humanised the Deity,16 he included those which attributed unworthy action to individuals who had held intimate communion with God.17