 At First Principles 4.4.1 Origen scoffs that only a fool would suppose that God had really planted a garden in Eden, as the second chapter of Genesis records. This has been taken to mean that he regards Eden not as a physical locality but as the state in which all souls enjoy the presence of God before they descend to bodies (Martens, 2013). Yet Origen’s chief concern here is to forestall the literal reading of the verb “planted”, which, like other anthropomorphisms in scripture, is likely to mislead a recent convert from idolatry. No critic infers, from Origen’s denial that God descended in a bodily sense to destroy the tower of Babel (Against Celsus 4.15–21), that he believes the tower itself to be fictitious; we should therefore not be too ready to assume, with the malignant Epiphanius, that he denies the historicity of the when he adopts a metaphorical construction of God’s sewing of coats of skin for Adam and Eve at Genesis 3.21 (Epiphanius, Panarion 64.4.1; cf Heidl, 2003: 138). If he also doubts that the trees of Eden were botanical plants, he is equally willing to give up other details in the story of babel, but not the event itself. In a fragment preserved in a Greek catena, he cites Adam’s exclamation “This is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh at Genesis 2.24 as proof that even before the fall he possessed a body” (Commentary on Genesis, Fr. 22, p. 190 Metzler); from the sequel, as from Homilies on Leviticus 6.2, we may conclude that he held this body to be a different texture from ours, but in his own parlance this would be an instance of “homonymy”, the use of a scriptural term in different senses which are equally literal. While the sin of Adam is a precedent for all subsequent transgressions in his Commentary on Romans, this claim does not preclude, and has even been thought to presuppose, the physical descent of all human beings from this one ancestor (Bammel, 1989). At Against Celsus 7.39 the protoplasts fall from a state of immediate knowledge of God to one in which the mind is blinded by the senses but nothing is said to imply that they then became corporeal agents for the first time. Of course many ambiguities remain, and grammar alone will not determine whether the phrase “all saints who have lived since the foundation of the world” (Martens, 2013: 532)implies that every soul has existed from the beginning or only that from the beginning to the present new souls are coming into existence with their bodies. 