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Translated by Allan Menzies.
Origen Resources OnLine & in Print
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This Part: 132 Pages
Page 120
23. The Temple Spoken of by Christ is the Church. Application to the Church of the Statements Regarding the Building of Solomon's Temple, and the Numbers Stated in that Narrative.
"But He spake of the temple of His body. [5116] When, therefore, He was raised from the dead, His disciples remembered that He said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word which Jesus had said." This refers to the statement that the body of the Son is His temple. It may be asked whether this is to be taken in its plain sense, or whether we should try to connect each statement that is recorded about the temple, with the view we take about the body of Jesus, whether the body which He received from the Virgin, or that body of Christ which the Church is said to be, as we are said by the Apostle [5117] to be all members of His body. One may, on the one hand, suppose it to be hopeless to get everything that is said about the temple properly connected with the body, in whatever sense the body be taken, and one may have recourse to a simpler explanation, and say that the body (in either of these senses) is called the temple, because as the temple had the glory of God dwelling in it, so He who was the image and glory of God, the first-born of every creature, could rightly be called, in respect of His body or the Church, the temple containing the image. We, for our part, see it to be a hard task to expound every particular of what is said about the temple in the third Book of Kings, and far beyond our powers of language, and we defer it in the meantime, as a thing beyond the scale of the present work. We also have a strong conviction that in such matters, which transcend human nature, it must be the work of divine wisdom to make plain the meaning of inspired Scripture, of that wisdom which is hidden in a mystery, which none of the rulers of this world knew. We are well aware, too, that we need the assistance of that excellent Spirit of wisdom, in order to understand such matters, as they should be understood by ministers of sacred things; and in this connection we will attempt to describe, as shortly as we may, our view of what belongs to this subject. The body is the Church, and we learn from Peter [5118] that it is a house of God, built of living stones, a spiritual house for a holy priesthood.
[5116] John ii. 21.
[5117] 1 Cor. xii. 27.
[5118] 1 Pet. ii. 5.
Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/Elpenor/greek-texts/fathers/origen/john-commentary-2.asp?pg=120
