04 — The Biblical Scholar

The center of Bede’s own sense of his vocation, and the largest part of his output: the vast body of scriptural commentary he prized above the Ecclesiastical History itself. In the work-list that closes the History, Bede sets the biblical commentaries first and lets them dominate, because before he was a historian or a computist he was a monk whose chief labour was the reading and explaining of the Bible. This section surveys those commentaries and homilies, and then sets out the patristic method behind them — the spiritual senses of Scripture and Bede’s deliberate, humble debt to the four great Latin Doctors.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Doctor of the Church; the Father of English History)

To read Bede only as the author of the Ecclesiastical History is to read him as posterity has chosen to, not as he read himself. His own bibliography at HE 5.24 opens with the scriptural works and runs through book after book of the Bible before it ever reaches the history; the commentaries and homilies make up the bulk of his surviving corpus and span the whole of his writing life, from the early Apocalypse to the late Ezra–Nehemiah and On the Temple; and he died, his pupil Cuthbert records, dictating a translation of the Gospel of John. The two files of this section take, first, the commentaries themselves — what they are, which books they cover, and the purpose that governs them all, the transmission of the Fathers’ exegesis to a young English Church that lacked the books and the languages to reach it — and, second, the method: Bede the tradent, standing under Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, and Gregory rather than over them, naming them in his margins, reading Scripture in its literal and spiritual senses, and yet exercising real judgement, as the Acts Retractatio shows when he goes back to the Greek.

Files in This Section

File Description
The Commentaries The scriptural commentaries as the bulk of Bede’s output and the work he valued above the History (HE 5.24): a survey of the major works — On Genesis, On the Tabernacle and On the Temple, On Ezra and Nehemiah, On the Song of Songs, On Samuel, On Mark and On Luke (with the preface to Acca), the Expositio and Retractatio on Acts, On the Seven Catholic Epistles, the earliest-written On the Apocalypse, and the Homilies on the Gospels — and their governing purpose, to make the Fathers’ exegesis available to a Latin-reading English clergy.
Exegesis and the Fathers Bede’s patristic method: his deliberate, humble debt to the four Latin Doctors — Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, and Gregory the Great, “our apostle” — and the marginal source-marks naming them; the spiritual senses of Scripture (literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogical) at work in De tabernaculo, De templo, and In Cantica; his standing under the Fathers as a tradent of the consensus patrum, with real judgement (the Acts Retractatio and the Greek); and the Orthodox resonance of typology and the spiritual reading.

See Also

  • The Library and the Method — the books Bede had and the source-marks by which he attributed his exegesis, the foundation of the commentaries
  • The Historia Ecclesiastica — the work Bede listed after his commentaries, written by a mind formed in exegesis
  • The Lives of Cuthbert — Bede’s hagiography, another expression of the same patristic and spiritual reading of holiness
  • Bede and the Greek Tradition — Bede’s limited Greek and the Acts Retractatio where he revises his exegesis from the Greek text
  • St. Gregory the Dialogist — “our apostle,” whose Moralia in Iob and homilies shaped Bede’s practice of the spiritual senses
  • Holy Scripture — the Orthodox understanding of Scripture read spiritually and within the tradition
  • The Church Fathers — the consensus patrum under which Bede read and which he gathered and transmitted

References

  • Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum). Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (The list of writings at HE 5.24, headed by the biblical commentaries; the life of Gregory the Great at HE 2.1.)
  • Bede. On the Tabernacle. Trans. Arthur G. Holder. Translated Texts for Historians 18. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994.
  • Bede. On the Temple. Trans. Seán Connolly, intro. Jennifer O’Reilly. Translated Texts for Historians 21. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995.
  • Bede. On Ezra and Nehemiah. Trans. Scott DeGregorio. Translated Texts for Historians 47. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006.
  • Bede. Commentary on Revelation (Expositio Apocalypseos). Trans. Faith Wallis. Translated Texts for Historians 58. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013.
  • Bede. Homilies on the Gospels. Trans. Lawrence T. Martin and David Hurst. 2 vols. Cistercian Studies 110–111. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991.
  • Brown, George Hardin. A Companion to Bede. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009.
  • DeGregorio, Scott, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bede. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
  • Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990.