As those joining the Church gradually came from all levels of society, including lawyers, rhetoricians, and philosophers, a need for more sophisticated presentations of Christian belief and life became necessary. This led to the development of Christian schools. At first, they were developed on already prepared locations. Alexandria for a long time had pagan and Jewish schools. Philo was Representative of the Jewish tradition there and attempted to make the Old Testament meaningful for Alexandrian Jews, promoting allegorical interpretations of Biblical stories. Abraham, for him, was not just the literal Abraham from Ur in Chaldea who was told by God to search for the land of promise; he was every Jewish searcher for covenant fulfillment. Origen (d. 253) learned his allegorical principles from Philo and developed in the same local a Christian allegorical reading of the Old and New Testaments. The chief members of this school were Ammonius, Athanasius, and Clement of Alexandria. In 232, Origen was forced to move his school to Caesarea, a community that later counted among its members the Cappadocians: Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa. In reaction to Origen’s allegorical method, a Christian school was begun at Antioch by Lucian of Samosota at the end of the third century. It concentrated on grammatical exposition and the literal and historical interpretation of the Scriptures. It counted among its alumni John Chrysostom and Theodore of Mopsuestia. Antioch also established another school, in Edessa, that flourished under Ephraem the Syrian (d. c. 370) and Nemesius of Emesa (fl. 350-400). Although many controversies arose in these schools, it was also in them that the formulation of many Christological truths was established.
World History
