Andrew Jacobs: Epiphanius of Salamis and the Antiquarian's Bible

Scholars often tend to understand Epiphanius of Cyprus (d. 404) as “anti-intellectual,” in part because of his fervent and rabid denunciation of Origen’s allegorical and ahistorical interpretations of the Bible. This paper proposes to correct this understanding of Epiphanius, and the late ancient Bible more generally, by suggesting Epiphanius stands in a different intellectual tradition: that of the educated (if less intellectually elite) antiquarian. When Epiphanius discusses the Bible, he is not averse to figurative interpretation (especially in his lesser-studied works, such as De Gemmis and De ponderibus et mensuris, which are specifically biblical treatises); but he frames his interpretation in an intellectual tradition of compilation, categorization, and concatenation that recalls antiquarian rather than philosophical intellectualism. This paper will execute a close examination of Epiphanius’s conceptions of canon, text, and interpretation, especially set over against Origen’s comparable writings, through his major extant writings. This paper concludes by arguing that Epiphanius’s antiquarian Bible may even have had more purchase among the common educated Christian that the more philosophically framed Bible of Origen and his followers. Integrating the values of both paideia and imperium, Epiphanius’s antiquarian Bible may, in fact, represent a truly Greco-Roman Christian Bible.