ancient city of Alexandria

Alexandrian Allegory:

Finding the Soul

We will take a number of representative passages of the great Jewish and Christian teachers Philo and Origen on the exegesis of the Old and New Testaments and consider how they illustrate a distinctive approach to the text. The written text before us is merely the ‘body’, while allegorical exegesis, proceeding according to certain fixed procedures, is that which finds the ‘soul’. In this way we can see a distinctively Alexandrian approach to the discovery of meaning.