The Prosopological Reading of the Term πρόσωπον – persona in the Works of Origen and Tertullian

In Late Antiquity, the word persona acquired its own theological identity from common speech. One step along this path was the application of prosopological exegesis to biblical texts, a form of interpretation developed by Hellenistic scholars aimed at identifying the “voices” of the “characters” in a poem. A comparison between Origen of Alexandria’s and Tertullian’s use of this kind of exegesis shows at what stage of specialization both the term and the concept of persona were in the third century.