PROLEGOMENA.

Since there are many more matters to be treated with greater precision in this new edition of Origen’s books Against Celsus—whether you consider their quantity or their gravity—than can be contained within the limits of this volume, and since we intend to treat them individually and diligently in their own proper time, it shall suffice for now to prefix the words of Ruaeus Charles de la Rue, an 18th-century editor of Origen, which are found in the Preface to Volume I of the Works of Origen. He writes as follows:

The first edition of these golden books See Origen, Works, ed. Ruaeus, Vol. I, Preface, p. IX et seq. appeared in Latin only in Rome in the year 1481, dedicated to the Supreme Pontiff Sixtus IV by the translator Christophorus Persona, a Roman and Prior of Santa Balbina, as is evident from the words read at the end of the edition: "The end of Origen Against Celsus, which Christophorus Persona, a Roman, Prior of Santa Balbina in the city, and most skilled in both Latin and Greek, translated faithfully from the Greek and corrected. Master Georgius Herolt of Bamberg printed it in Rome, in the year of the incarnation of the Lord 1481, during the reign of the Supreme Pontiff Sixtus IV, in the tenth year of his papacy."