Once the biblical literature became established as an alternative body of classics, it would soon be seen as the basis of a new paideia. That Origen is reputed to have established a Christian school with a curriculum embracing the standard subjects of an advanced education is an indication that this development did indeed take place. It would be surprising if this did not mean the adoption of the exegetical practices of Graeco-Roman schools. To demonstrate that Origen's exegesis drew on such standard procedures is the object of this chapter. An initial difficulty, however, is reconstructing what those procedures were.

In the ancient world, secondary literature was much sparser than it is in our world. Sometimes these days it seems that students, especially in Biblical Studies, spend so much time on secondary sources that they rarely read the original texts. It is true that ancient schools also fostered the production of handbooks, compendia and collections of extracts, but the equivalent of our secondary literature was largely oral. Exegesis and commentary went on in class, as indeed to a fair extent it does still. The oral practice of exegesis was so much taken for granted that it is quite difficult to reconstruct exactly how exegesis was done.

A certain amount of material roughly equivalent to our literary criticism has survived among the essays of people like Plutarch, and rhetorical textbooks discuss style and other features of literature. The work of D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom has done much to make such material accessible.