Tuesday, January 18, 2011

But wisdom is also called the stainless mirror of the ἐνέργεια or working of God. We must first understand, then, what the working of the power of God is. It is a sort of vigour, so to speak, by which God operates either in creation, or in providence, or in judgment, or in the disposal and arrangement of individual things, each in its season. For as the image formed in a mirror unerringly reflects all the acts and movements of him who gazes on it, so would Wisdom have herself to be understood when she is called the stainless mirror of the power and working of the Father: as the Lord Jesus Christ also, who is the Wisdom of God, declares of Himself when He says, The works which the Father does, these also does the Son likewise. (Book I, Chapter 2, Part 12)

The stainless mirror to which Origen refers is from the seventh chapter of the Book of Wisdom:
For Wisdom is mobile beyond all motion, and she penetrates and pervades all things by reason of her purity.

For she is an aura of the might of God and a pure effusion of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nought that is sullied enters into her.

For she is the refulgence of eternal light, the spotless mirror of the power of God, the image of his goodness.

And she, who is one, can do all things, and renews everything while herself perduring; And passing into holy souls from age to age, she produces friends of God and prophets.
In the two centuries or so prior to Jesus, Hellenistic concepts had a profound impact on Jewish thought, especially reflected in the wisdom literature of the deuterocanonoical texts and the works of Philo. Similar influences can be perceived in literature recovered from the Essene or Zakokite communities contemporary with Jesus.

I assume Jesus was familiar with these strains of thought, but they are either absent or very subtle in what we are told of Jesus' teaching.

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