La parabola della zizzania nei primi tre secoli

Early christian exegesis of the parable of weeds is various and fragmentary up till Origen, but unfortunately the first systematic commentary, written by the great Alexandrian exegete, today is mostly lost to us. A series of discontinuous and occasional testimonies, ranging from the apocrypha to the Psedudo-Clementines, from the gnostic writings to Irenaeus, from Tertullian’s anti-heretical polemic to the disciplinary contrasts between Rome and Carthage («Hippolytus», Cyprian, Novatian), up till the Alexandrian Clement and Origen, provides in nuce evidence of the variety of interpretations of the parable in the course of time, including anthropological, ascetic, anti-Jewish, anti-heretical, and ecclesiological understandings. The ecclesiological use of the parable, however, begins only in the third century in the context of the disciplinary conflicts between two opposite ideas of church.