“And Peter, on whom the Church of Christ is built, against which the gates of hell shall…”
And Peter, on whom the Church of Christ is built, against which the gates of hell shall not prevail left only one epistle of acknowledged genuineness.
Origen · Commentary on the Gospel of John · ANF IX, Commentary on John, Book V §3
Origen is arguing that the apostles wrote very little — Paul only a few lines to a few churches, John one gospel though he said the world could not hold what might be written — and the aside he drops in passing is the one worth keeping: he calls Peter the man the Church of Christ is built on, and in the same breath doubts the second letter that bears his name. Both halves are ordinary for him, and the first sits directly against what he says about Peter in the Commentary on Matthew.
How this is known
These words were matched, word for word, against this project’s own copy of the volume cited.
Book V, section 3 of the Commentary on John, headed The Apostles Wrote Little, in the region of ANF vol. 9 that carries the fifth book. Book V survives only in the Philocalia and is printed here as From the Fifth Book.
Read in Menzies, ANF vol. 9 (1897) · Allan Menzies
Also by
- Origen every saying recorded of this person, and their page