Dialogue Against the Marcionites, Exhortation to Martyrdom (Wettstein 1674)

Under Commodus, peace was spread to the Churches throughout the entire world. The word of the Lord in the city of Rome associated many of those illustrious and wealthy men with the faith, along with their children, spouses, relatives, and indeed their whole family. But enough of this argument: nor, I think, is there need for further inquiry regarding whether or not a commemoration of Christian princes could have been instituted in the age of Origen.

The second reason is that no one among the ancients mentions this Disputation. This assertion, however, hardly holds up, since the authors of the Philocalia explicitly mention it, Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian, at the end of ch. 23, otherwise 24: "These writings are found in the Dialogue of Origen against the Marcionites and other heretics, with Eutropius acting as judge and Megethius contradicting." Here, not only is this Dialogue attributed to Origen, but the very words themselves, for the most part, agree with our Dialogue word for word original: "αὐτολεξεὶ" in the aforementioned chapter: which we shall consider more fully below and in its proper place. Abbot Trithemius, in Ecclesiastical Writers, p. 196, lists it among the works of Origen and says that he saw five books of Origen against the heretics translated into Latin, the beginning of which is: "Adamantius said: Who, etc." These books, unless everything deceives me, are this same Dialogue, not only in our Greek codex, but also in three other Oxford manuscripts, as honorable friends have cautioned us, divided into five parts. Nor is it a wonder that Eusebius passed over this Dialogue with a silent foot, or did not expressly mention it, since his purpose was other than to insert the titles of six thousand books of Origen into his History: seeing as he compiled a catalogue of Origen's works elsewhere, to which he refers his reader, Ecclesiastical History bk. 6, ch. 32, saying: "What need is there at present to make an exact catalogue of the words of this man, which requires a separate study, which we have also recorded in the description of the life of Pamphilus, the holy martyr of our time?" Jerome himself also placed an index of his works in the volumes of letters which he wrote to Paula, as he himself indicates in his book On Ecclesiastical Writers under the entry for Origen. If these two catalogues, or even one of them, remained, we would easily distinguish spurious works from his genuine writings. How many struggles, how many disputes with Jews, with heretics...