I submitted to my dissertation director a draft of a section on Origen’s interpretation of the “chair of Moses” in Matt 23.2. The section gives a selective biography of Origen, notes the texts used for the analysis, analyzes Origen’s comments on Matt 23.1–4 (Comm ser. Matt. 9–10), and then states a summary of the findings. It runs about 24 pages double-spaced. (Not all of the sections will be so long, I hope.)

I’ll offer the final sentence of that section, as it is currently drafted:

In short, for Origen, the “chair of Moses” text is a prompt for discussing the goodness and spirituality of the law, the salvation-historical shift in legal application brought about by Christ’s advent, and some third-century boundaries between Christianity and Judaism.

Now, traveling slightly backward in time, I move on to Tertullian’s On Monogamy 8, which has a brief mention of the “chair of Moses.”