Daniel Boyarin PHILO, ORIGEN, AND THE RABBIS ON DIVINE SPEECH AND INTERPRETATION In honor of a scholar and a mentsh [Yiddish!], David Johnson, S.J. One of the most important of hermeneutical consequents of Logos theol- ogy was a proclivity for allegory as a mode of interpretation. 1 he concept of a Logos as both the site of absolute creativity as well as the revealer of absolute Truth, of Sophia, will promote allegory as a legitimate and choice mode of in- terpretation. Logos theology, which, as we shall see, is predicated on the no- tion of an Author, a speaker behind the written text, as well as a dual existence for language as signiier and signiied, conduces to interpretation as a herme- neutic of depth. he ontology of human language itself consists in its privi- leged pairing of its signiiers with the transcendental signiied of the Logos. he move toward allegorical interpretation within Christian writing is thus both epistemologically and ontologically (theologically) grounded. Origen himself inds a hermeneutics ungrounded in the Logos to be the source of disagreement within “Judaism,” and the context is interestingly not polemical in nature: “Any teaching which has had a serious origin, and is ben- 11 1. he question of allegory itself deserves a renewed consideration in this context, but this is be- yond the scope of the present text—if not beyond the scope of the present inquiry. Mark J. Edwards, Ori- gen against Plato, ASPTLA (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002), 123–25, makes a gesture in that direction.