MAYBE IT'S JUST ME, but I am surprised that John R. Franke sets out to assess the legacy of Origen in his Christianity Today (Christian History) article "Origen: Friend or Foe?" without a single reference to the Hebrew language, the Septuagint, or the Hexapla. This article ignores Origen's fascination with and massive contribution to the study of the "bare letter of the text" of the Old Testament in Hebrew and Greek, and it seems to me that this gives an imbalanced picture of him. Much of Origen's fame as a biblical scholar came not just from his allegorical commentaries but from his text-critical work on the Bible. The Hexapla was consulted in Caesarea for centuries by important scholars in the Church, including Pamphylius, Eusebius, and Jerome, and parts of it were copied (often, granted, in a way that just caused textual confusion). The Septuagint column was translated into Syriac by Paul of Tella in the seventh century. I would think that all this counts for something in assessing Origen's contribution to theology.