Translations of some more catena fragments from the work of Origen on Ezekiel have arrived. These are useful and help get a complete picture.
The second is a translation of Delarue’s introduction where he discusses what he does. It’s very interesting! These old introductions are often full of useful info. Delarue frankly confesses that in many cases he has no certain idea of whether the material is by Origen or not! He writes:
The trustworthiness of these catenae, however, is very questionable. For in them the names of the writers from whose fragments they have been patched together are so very often mixed up and confused that those which one catena ascribes to Origen are attributed in another catena to Didymus or Eusebius or Theodoret or some other interpreter. Add to this the fact that even when the unanimous consent of the catenae ascribes a certain fragment to Origen, I have often discovered it belongs to Eusebius or Theodoret or to some other writer, on the basis of the published commentaries of these Fathers.
He goes on to discuss his approach. We will definitely have to include this preface somehow in the book.
But … the more work I do with catenae, the more evident it becomes to me that we need new modern editions, not of extracts from catenae, but of catenae themselves. They are compositions, and should be edited as such, a stemma established, and so forth.