This is argued by Richard Carrier. Even when we look at the early third century writings of Origen, the most fond of allegorical readings of the Gospels of any extant author from the first two centuries of the faith, we find that even he insists upon a significant degree of literalism. Origen extensively relates allegorical meanings for the Gospel stories and content, and is often vague as to whether he thinks they are also true. But we have many examples demonstrating he did think that the Gospels were, indeed, substantively historical, which means he believed they were so in addition to conveying allegorical lessons.
In his Commentary on John Origen does indeed argue that many things in the Gospels have only symbolical meaning, although he does so apologetically—he needs to argue his audience into agreeing with that, which entails they did not already so agree. Moreover, in the course of even that argument he struggles greatly to affirm that the Gospels are nevertheless mostly historically true records, most definitely of things that really happened and were really witnessed. He repeatedly conveys disappointment when he can’t get some detail in the Gospels to be historically true; resorting to an allegorical explanation is, for him, only a consolation, an escape from evident cognitive dissonance. In fact, one can only resort to a purely allegorical reading, Origen says, when a literal harmonization of what the Gospels say can’t be contrived (this would be essentially the position of Augustine two centuries later).
As Origen puts it there:
I do not condemn [the authors of the Gospels] if they sometimes dealt freely with things which to the eye of history happened differently, and changed them so as to subserve the mystical aims they had in view; so as to speak of a thing which happened in a certain place, as if it had happened in another, or of what took place at a certain time, as if it had taken place at another time, and to introduce into what was spoken in a certain way some changes of their own. They proposed to speak the truth where it was possible both materially and spiritually, and where this was not possible it was their intention to prefer the spiritual to the material. The spiritual truth was often preserved, as one might say, in the material falsehood
This entails Origen believed most of the Gospels was historical, and only ever additionally allegorical, or very occasionally solely so, but even then, only by slightly deviating from historical facts (like “where” an event occurred; not that it occurred at all, which Origen never doubts). Indeed, again and again Origen reveals he is more vehemently a literalist. As even in that commentary he proceeds to defend historical harmonizations and rationalizations of their discrepancies. At no point does he say the Gospels are simply nowhere really talking about history, that they are entirely pedagogical, allegorical myth. To the contrary, in all his Gospel commentaries Origen refers to the Gospels as “histories” (in various places as κατὰ τὸ εὐαγγέλιον ἱστορίᾳ or τῆς εὐαγγελικῆς ἱστορίας or the like) and throughout his writings he repeatedly defends them as literally true.
Here is a mere sample:
In his Commentary on Matthew Origen says of the Transfiguration (the very scene from the Gospels that 2 Peter was forged to insist was a historical fact and not a myth) “let it be granted,” before he also gives an allegorical meaning, “that this took place long ago, and according to the letter.” In other words, it has allegorical significations. But it also literally, historically happened.
In Against Celsus 1.38, Origen says “taking the history, contained in the Gospel according to Matthew, of our Lord’s descent into Egypt, Celsus refuses to believe the miraculous circumstances attending it,” neither “that the angel gave the divine intimation” nor “that our Lord’s quitting Judea and residing in Egypt was an event of any significance.” This entire response entails Origen believed these were historical facts. He does not correct Celsus by explaining these are allegories, but defends them as having actually happened and scoffs at how Celsus could deny it.
In fact Origen goes on to insist the nativity narratives are historically true in almost every particular; there really were magi, they really did visit Jesus, and following what “we consider to have been a new star,” and Herod really did try to kill him, and his family really did flee to Egypt, and so on (Ibid. 1.58-60). Likewise, that the betrayal and suicide of Judas must be true (2.11). At every occasion Origen scoffs at and mocks Celsus’s assertions that these are fables and falsehoods, mere “myths.” He only ever introduces allegory when he needs to “correct” Celsus’s misreporting which facts were claimed to be historical in the Gospels.
Likewise when Celsus attacks the story of the divine dove descending on Jesus at his baptism by “alleging that the narrative is a fiction,” as Origen says in Against Celsus 1.39, he does not defend his faith by explaining this was indeed only a symbolic fiction with ulterior meaning (a possibility he is well aware of, even describing this kind of interpretation as something a reader “will accept figuratively,” and admitting the Gospels do contain such things). Nope. Origen instead responds in 1.42-44 by defending this event’s historical factuality! “We have to remark.” Origen says, “that the endeavor to show, with regard to almost any history, however true, that it actually occurred” is almost impossible, but he endeavors to argue that this was a real vision Jesus had and that the Disciples thus learned about it from him—or that the authors of the Gospels might even have learned it from the Holy Spirit—and that, either way, it’s truth has even more factual probability than the Trojan War. Origen even presents a historical argument for it really having happened: “I think the wonders wrought by Jesus are a proof of the Holy Spirit’s having then appeared in the form of a dove.” You can’t get more explicitly literalist than that.
Indeed, in Against Celsus 1.45 Origen relates an actual conversation he had with a Jew in which he said the Gospel stories should be accounted as historically true as the histories of Moses, because “testimony is borne” regarding Jesus’s activities on earth “by the disciples in the Gospels,” so why won’t they believe that? Then Origen even outright tells us that Christians “accept as true the miraculous circumstances related of [Jesus] by his disciples,” thus affirming that Christianity as a whole, so far as Origen was concerned, was historically literalist with regard to the Gospels. Figurative meaning was only a layer atop it—in addition, not instead.
Origen then goes on to argue we can know the Gospel stories actually happened because they fulfilled prophecies in the Jewish scriptures (Against Celsus 1.46-55), which as I already noted entails literalism.
Origen even deploys the “disciples must be telling the truth because they were willing to die for it” and “these stories would be too embarrassing to invent” arguments (Ibid. 2.10), both of which were as bogus then as now (on the former, see Did the Apostles Die for a Lie?; on the latter, see Proving History, index, “criterion of embarrassment”). Nevertheless, these are arguments only a literalist would make.
And that’s just halfway through book 2 of an eight volume work that continues in the same vein throughout. Even if we supposed Origen is pretending to hold these views (and as we’ll see shortly, he might have been), this is a treatise Origen wrote to a fellow Christian, Ambrosius, who was disturbed and worried by Celsus’s critique and wanted Origen to compose and publish a reply for his own and the religion’s benefit. Origen is thus writing to and for fellow Christians. Which entails his fellow Christians were Gospel literalists. By which, again, I don’t mean Christians who rejected allegorical readings, but who rejected any notion that what the Gospels say was not also historically true (except when they had no choice but to concede it wasn’t).
To illustrate why this matters, I’ll draw on what I wrote on this point in 2005. In Origen’s Homilies on Jeremiah 18.4.2 he says, “Each person according to his capacity understands the Scriptures,” such that “One takes the sense from them more superficially, as if from the surface level of a spring. Another draws up more deeply as from a well.” And in Against Celsus 3.45-46 Origen reiterates the Markan methodology: that the uneducated “outsiders” are to take stories literally in order to be saved, as they can’t spare the time to acquire the education and study needed to understand those stories allegorically as “insiders” are instructed to do.
As Origen there puts it:
If you come to the books written after the time of Jesus [e.g. the Gospels], you will find that those crowds of believers who heard the parables happened to be, as it were, “outside,” and worthy only of the “external” meaning, while the disciples learned in private the [real] explanation. For, “In private, to his personal disciples,” Jesus “unraveled everything,” placing first above the crowds those who claimed a right to know His wisdom.
Thus, as Paul himself said, there is a gospel for the simpleton, whom he calls “babies” (1 Corinthians 3:1; cf. 2:13-16 and 2:1-5), and a gospel for “grown ups” (2:6-7). Origen then explains that the latter is concealed from the simpleton because it might turn him away from the faith and thus away from salvation, while only a very few people fully grasp the real truth.
This “doctrine of double truth,” wherein the “literal” is for the simple believer and the “allegorical” for the advanced, sophisticated believer, and the former must not be told this openly lest they lose their faith, has been studied by several scholars, most prominently by Gunnar Hällström (in Fides Simpliciorum according to Origen of Alexandria) and Joseph Trigg (in “Divine Deception and the Truthfulness of Scripture” in Origen of Alexandria: His World and His Legacy). Trigg concludes Origen argues that it was better for the simpleton to believe literally in what the Bible says even when the literal meaning isn’t true. Thus, for example:
When Origen expressly denies that he holds an opinion and never indicates otherwise, we must take him at his word. Nevertheless, we must pay close attention to what Origen actually says, and follow carefully the logic of his arguments and the implications of the analogies he draws and the scriptural texts he cites. He does leave hints of his real position while suggesting another to edify the simple or to avert their suspicions.
Origen was not alone. Eusebius, for example, appears to have endorsed similar reasoning (see Note 6 in my summary of The Formation of the New Testament Canon). This suggests a spectrum of ways to view the Gospels existed: they probably begin as allegories (e.g. Mark), then are sold as simultaneously literally true and allegorically meaningful (e.g. Justin), and then to some that literal truth is demoted to a convenient lie to promote but not really adopt (e.g. Origen), while to others even the mere suggestion that the literal truth is false is outright damnation-worthy (e.g. Ignatius). Allegory, for them, could be accepted only without denying the literal truth of the factual events signifying it (for an example, see Augustine’s Sermons on the New Testament and Harmony of the Gospels). At this point it is worth pointing out: Origen was subsequently declared a heretic and his writings (more or less) damned.
https://blog.israelbiblicalstudies.com/holy-land-studies/swine-gadarene/
Origen was one of the first pilgrims to the ‘Holy Land’ in the sense that we would talk about now, and he tries to reconcile the literal text and the geographical errors in the scriptures with his allegorical exegesis:
Thus we see that he who aims at a complete understanding of the Holy Scriptures must not neglect the careful examination of the proper names in it. In the matter of proper names the Greek copies are often incorrect, and in the Gospels one might be misled by their authority. The transaction about the swine, which were driven down a steep place by the demons and drowned in the sea, is said to have taken place in the country of the Gerasenes. Now, Gerasa is a town of Arabia, and has near it neither sea nor lake. And the Evangelists would not have made a statement so obviously and demonstrably false; for they were men who informed themselves carefully of all matters connected with Judæa. But in a few copies we have found, into the country of the Gadarenes; and, on this reading, it is to be stated that Gadara is a town of Judæa, in the neighborhood of which are the well-known hot springs, and that there is no lake there with overhanging banks, nor any sea. But Gergesa, from which the name Gergesenes is taken, is an old town in the neighborhood of the lake now called Tiberias, and on the edge of it there is a steep place abutting on the lake, from which it is pointed out that the swine were cast down by the demons. Now, the meaning of Gergesa is dwelling of the casters-out, and it contains a prophetic reference to the conduct towards the Savior of the citizens of those places, who besought Him to depart out of their coasts. (ComJn 6.40-41)
Journal of Early Christian Studies 14.2 (2006) 237-238 Origen taught that Scripture has three distinct senses: somatic, psychic and pneumatic—the first literal and the other two figurative—corresponding to the human body, soul, and spirit. His notion of multiple senses, expounded in the fourth book of Peri Archon (On First Principles), dominated biblical interpretation until the Reformation. Most students of Origen, though, have seen little connection between this theory and Origen’s actual practice. In particular, they fail to see a distinct role for a psychic alongside a pneumatic sense. Elizabeth Ann Dively Lauro argues that Origen meant what he said about all three senses and followed the theory in his work. She has a case. Her book carefully examines Origen’s theory of threefold exegesis in Peri Archon 4. By providing distinctive and complementary roles for the psychic and pneumatic senses in passages from his exegetical works, she also demonstrates how Origen actually followed this theory. The passages which Lauro examines do, indeed, show Origen using two interpretations, both allegorical and both Christian, in such a way as to complement each other. The spiritual sense gives access to the great issues of cosmology and eschatology for which Origen was famous; the psychic sense shows how the Christ purifies the believer’s soul. Thus Lauro says that “the psychic sense explains the way in which the believer may pursue temporally the eternal salvation the pneumatic sense presents as a goal . . . . Together they give the hearer both the reason for and the means of reaching salvation” (146). Thus, both senses are Christ-centered; the psychic sense is not, as some commentators have suggested, warmed-over Philo. A strength of this book is the author’s ability to elucidate what Origen actually wrote as opposed to what he must or should have meant.
This ability enables her to make the important point that Origen saw himself as setting forth not his own view but the church’s traditional understanding. It also enables her to achieve valuable clarity about the somatic sense and its relationship to the literal meaning, a source of endless confusion in writings about Origen. Authorial intention has nothing to do with literal meaning; to Origen “literal” meant “not figurative.” The somatic sense of Scripture is a literal sense whose message edifies the reader; a passage where the literal sense is false or unedifying—and there are some—lacks a somatic sense, but no passage of Scripture lacks the other two senses. Functionally, the author of the Bible is the Holy Spirit, who intends a variety of meanings for souls, depending on their needs. Although Lauro’s argument is clear and compelling, she fails to explain why Origen does not employ a psychic sense to complement a spiritual sense in any obvious way except in the handful of passages she analyzes and another handful that she alludes to in a footnote. She does not adequately take into consideration the possibility that Origen had imperfect insight into his own mental processes, a common enough phenomenon. Perhaps the theory of two complementary figurative senses in Peri Archon 4 is incidental to an argument in which Origen’s main point is that the Bible could have valid figurative interpretations even when what it literally says is useless or false. The most impressive of the author’s examples is the Commentary on the Song of Songs, which Origen interprets figuratively to recount the love of the Logos both for the church and for the individual soul. (The Song of Songs has no somatic sense because the letter, a sensual celebration of a human love affair, could only provoke lust; Origen approved Jewish efforts to restrict access to it to those who could properly appreciate it.) Nonetheless, even here Origen’s practice does not quite fit the theory. One cannot identify one sense as temporal and the other as eternal; both seem to recount a temporal process, but one is individual and the other corporate. To make a convincing case that Origen was not seduced by a specious…
“We must say that the attempt to prove almost any story, even if true, as historical fact and to produce complete certainty on the subject is one of the most difficult tasks, and in some cases impossible.” | Origen, Contra Celsum I:42
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