The Commentaries

The scriptural commentaries were the bulk of Bede’s output and the work he valued above everything else, the Ecclesiastical History included. In his own list of his writings at the close of the History he sets the biblical works first and lets them dominate, and he thought of himself, before he was a historian or a computist, as a biblical scholar in the service of the Church. This file surveys the major commentaries — on Genesis, the Tabernacle and the Temple, Ezra and Nehemiah, the Song of Songs, Samuel, Mark and Luke, Acts, the Catholic Epistles, and the Apocalypse — together with the Homilies on the Gospels, and sets out their governing purpose: to make the exegesis of the Fathers available to a Latin-reading English clergy who had neither the books nor the languages to reach it themselves.

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

What Bede Counted as His Life’s Work

The Ecclesiastical History is the work for which Bede is remembered, but it is not the work he would have named first if asked what he had done with his life. The evidence for this is Bede’s own, and it is decisive. At the end of the History, in the autobiographical note of HE 5.24, Bede appends a list of his writings — the nearest thing the early Middle Ages offers to an author’s own bibliography — and the order is telling: he opens not with the history he has just finished but with the biblical commentaries, running through the books of Scripture he has expounded before he ever reaches the History, the hagiography, or the works on time (HE 5.24; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The scriptural exposition comes first because it came first in Bede’s own estimate of his vocation: he was a monk whose primary labour was the reading and explaining of the Bible, and everything else, the history not excepted, stood at the edge of that centre (Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010, Holder on Bede as exegete; Ward 1990).

The sheer bulk confirms the priority. By any reckoning the commentaries and homilies make up the largest part of Bede’s surviving corpus, far outweighing the historical and computistical works together, and they occupy the whole arc of his writing life, from the Apocalypse commentary of his early maturity to the works on Ezra–Nehemiah and the Temple of his last years (Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010). The man who dictated a translation of John’s Gospel on his deathbed, as his pupil Cuthbert records, was being faithful to the end to the work he had always thought his proper one (Cuthbert, Epistola de obitu Bedae; Colgrave & Mynors 1969; see The Library and the Method).

The Purpose: Transmission for a Church Without Books

Bede’s commentaries have a clearly stated and consistent purpose, and it is not originality. Bede did not set out to say new things about Scripture; he set out to gather what the Fathers had already said and to put it, in usable form, into the hands of a clergy who could not reach it on their own. The English Church of Bede’s day was a young Church, a bare century from its conversion, served by priests and monks whose Latin was often thin and whose access to the great patristic libraries was, outside a few centres like Wearmouth-Jarrow and Canterbury, effectively nil. For such readers the commentaries of Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, and Gregory were as good as unavailable — too long, too many, too scattered, and too dependent on a learning the local clergy did not have (Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010, Holder on the exegetical works; Ward 1990).

Bede’s answer was the digest: a commentary that ran through a book of Scripture verse by verse, drawing the relevant comment from each Father at each point, abbreviating and arranging so that a single accessible volume gave the reader what he would otherwise have had to assemble from a shelf he did not possess. Bede’s exposition On the Gospel of Luke, dedicated to Bishop Acca of Hexham, states the programme openly: Bede has gathered his exegesis “from the works of the venerable Fathers,” naming Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory, and Jerome, and he asks that what he has taken be credited to them (Bede, In Lucae evangelium expositio, preface; Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010). The commentaries are, in this sense, a work of transmission rather than invention — a deliberate channelling of the consensus of the Fathers into a Church that had the faith but not yet the books. This is not a confession of poverty but a description of a vocation: Bede understood the conserving and handing-on of the patristic inheritance to be a service to the whole Church, and he performed it with a care for accuracy and attribution rare in his age (see Exegesis and the Fathers).

The Apocalypse: The Earliest Major Commentary

The earliest of Bede’s substantial scriptural works is generally taken to be his Expositio Apocalypseos, the commentary on the Revelation of John, written probably around 703–709, in his early thirties [Disputed: the relative order and absolute dating of several of Bede’s commentaries are debated, but the Expositio Apocalypseos is generally judged his earliest major exegetical work; the chronology of the others, especially the relation of the Acts Expositio to its Retractatio and the placing of On Genesis, is reconstructed from internal cross-references and dedications rather than from dated colophons — see Brown 2009 and DeGregorio 2010, Holder, on the difficulties]. The Expositio reads the Apocalypse not as a coded prophecy of the end-times to be decoded against current events but as a figural account of the whole life of the Church between the two comings of Christ — a reading Bede takes over above all from the African exegete Tichonius, mediated through Augustine and Primasius (Bede, Expositio Apocalypseos; Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010). Bede sets out at the head of the work a scheme of the “rules” for reading prophetic and figurative Scripture, and his restraint about date-setting and apocalyptic speculation, which marks his later work on the reckoning of time as well, is already present here (Bede, Expositio Apocalypseos, preface; see Bede and the Greek Tradition). The commentary is now available in the Translated Texts for Historians series in the translation of Faith Wallis (Liverpool, 2013), with a full account of Bede’s sources and method.

Genesis, the Tabernacle, and the Temple

Among the Old Testament commentaries the most important are the work On Genesis (In Genesim) and the two great allegorical expositions of the wilderness sanctuary and its successor, On the Tabernacle (De tabernaculo) and On the Temple (De templo). The commentary On Genesis, which Bede revised and extended over time, takes the opening chapters of the Bible — the creation, the fall, the flood, the patriarchs — and expounds them in the patristic manner, the literal sense first and then the spiritual, drawing heavily on Augustine’s literal commentary on Genesis and on Basil’s Hexaemeron as Ambrose had transmitted it (Bede, In Genesim; Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010). For an Orthodox reader the work is a witness to how the Six Days were read in the pre-Schism Latin West: the literal order of creation honoured, and beneath it the figures of Christ and the Church.

De tabernaculo and De templo are the purest examples of Bede the allegorist. Taking the minute Old Testament descriptions of the desert Tabernacle (Exodus 24–30) and of Solomon’s Temple (1 Kings 5–7; 2 Chronicles 3–4), Bede reads the whole apparatus of the sanctuary — its courts, veils, vessels, measurements, materials, and ministers — as a sustained figure of the Church of Christ and of the spiritual life of the soul within it (Bede, De tabernaculo; Bede, De templo; Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010, Holder; O’Reilly’s introduction to the TTH On the Temple). The gold of the sanctuary is the brightness of wisdom, the many-coloured curtains are the variety of the virtues and the nations gathered into one Church, the structure rising stone on stone is the Church built of living stones upon Christ the cornerstone: the building becomes a map of the Body of Christ. Both works are translated in the Translated Texts for Historians series — On the Tabernacle by Arthur Holder (Liverpool, 1994) and On the Temple by Seán Connolly with an introduction by Jennifer O’Reilly (Liverpool, 1995). They are the place to watch Bede’s theory of the spiritual senses actually at work over a long stretch of text, and they are treated for their method in the companion file (see Exegesis and the Fathers).

Ezra–Nehemiah and the Building of the Second Temple

Bede’s commentary On Ezra and Nehemiah (In Ezram et Neemiam), one of the latest of his works, belongs with the Temple commentaries as a third great meditation on building and rebuilding the house of God. Taking the return from the Babylonian exile and the reconstruction of the Temple and the walls of Jerusalem under Ezra and Nehemiah, Bede reads the rebuilding as a figure of the restoration of the Church and of the soul after the exile of sin, and — more pointedly than in his earlier work — as a model for the reform of the Church in his own day (Bede, In Ezram et Neemiam; DeGregorio 2010; DeGregorio, introduction to the TTH translation). Scott DeGregorio’s translation, Bede: On Ezra and Nehemiah (Translated Texts for Historians 47; Liverpool, 2006), and his accompanying studies have shown that this late commentary shares the reforming concern of the Letter to Egbert: Bede’s Ezra, the scribe who restores the law and rebuilds the worship of God, is held up as a pattern for the bishops and teachers of a Church Bede thought had grown lax (DeGregorio 2006; see Legacy and Assessment). The commentary is thus a bridge between Bede the exegete and Bede the reformer: the spiritual reading of the rebuilt Temple carries a practical edge.

The Song of Songs and Samuel

The commentary On the Song of Songs (In Cantica Canticorum) takes the Old Testament love-poem and reads it, in the unbroken patristic and Orthodox tradition, as the song of the love between Christ and the Church, and between Christ and the faithful soul — never as mere erotic verse but as the supreme scriptural figure of spiritual union (Bede, In Cantica Canticorum; Brown 2009; Holder, translations of Bede’s exegetical works). Bede prefaces the work with a long polemic against Julian of Eclanum, the Pelagian bishop, defending the doctrine of grace before he turns to the poem itself — a reminder that his exegesis was never disengaged from the doctrinal struggles the Fathers had fought (Bede, In Cantica Canticorum, preface; Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010). The commentary On Samuel (In primam partem Samuhelis), an early and demanding allegorical work on the books of Samuel, reads the history of Samuel, Saul, and David as figures of Christ and the Church; Bede tells us, movingly, that he interrupted its composition at the departure of Abbot Ceolfrith for Rome in 716, so heavy was his grief, before resuming it (Bede, In primam partem Samuhelis, preface to Book 4; Brown 2009; Ward 1990). These two works, less read today, are central evidence for Bede’s confident handling of Old Testament narrative as Christian figure.

Mark, Luke, and the Homilies on the Gospels

In the New Testament, Bede’s two great Gospel commentaries are those On Mark (In Marci evangelium expositio) and On Luke (In Lucae evangelium expositio). The Luke is the earlier and the more important, dedicated to Bishop Acca of Hexham, who emerges from the prefaces as the friend and patron who repeatedly urged Bede to undertake his exegetical projects (Bede, In Lucam, preface to Acca; Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010). It is in this preface that Bede most fully describes his method — the gathering of the four Latin Doctors and the writing of their names in the margins (see The Library and the Method). The Mark draws heavily on the Luke, often reusing Bede’s own earlier exposition where the Gospels run parallel, and the two together gave the English Church a complete Latin commentary on two of the four Gospels distilled from the Fathers (Bede, In Marcum; Brown 2009).

Beside the running commentaries stand the Homilies on the Gospels (Homiliae evangelii), a collection of some fifty homilies on the Gospel readings of the liturgical year. These are not lecture-notes but finished sermons, composed for delivery in the monastic office and following the cycle of the feasts from Advent through Pentecost; they show Bede the preacher rather than the compiler, applying the spiritual sense of the day’s Gospel to the life of the monk and the believer (Bede, Homiliae evangelii; trans. Lawrence T. Martin and David Hurst, Bede the Venerable: Homilies on the Gospels, 2 vols., Cistercian Studies 110–111, Kalamazoo, 1991). Through the later Carolingian homiliary of Paul the Deacon, which drew on them heavily, Bede’s homilies passed into the liturgical reading of the whole medieval West, so that his exposition of the Gospel was heard, anonymously, in churches for centuries (Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010).

Acts and the Retractatio: Bede Revisiting the Greek

Bede’s work on the Acts of the Apostles is in two parts, and it is among the most interesting evidence we have for his mind as a scholar. The first is the Expositio Actuum Apostolorum, a commentary on Acts written relatively early, again at Acca’s prompting. The second, and more remarkable, is the Retractatio in Actus Apostolorum — a “Retraction” or second-thoughts work on Acts, written years later, in which Bede goes back over his earlier commentary and revises it (Bede, Expositio Actuum Apostolorum; Bede, Retractatio in Actus Apostolorum; ed. and study M. L. W. Laistner, Bedae Venerabilis Expositio Actuum Apostolorum et Retractatio, Cambridge, Mass., 1939; Brown 2009). The very title is a deliberate echo of Augustine’s Retractationes, the great Father’s late review and correction of his own works, and Bede’s adoption of it places him consciously in the Augustinian tradition of the scholar who is willing to revise himself (Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010).

What makes the Retractatio exceptional is that Bede’s second thoughts rest in good part on his having, in the interval, gained access to a Greek-and-Latin bilingual manuscript of Acts; in the Retractatio he repeatedly corrects or refines his earlier exposition by appeal to what the Greek actually says, noting where the Latin he had used was inexact (Bede, Retractatio; Laistner 1939; Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010). For a Latin monk of the early eighth century, whose Greek was limited and largely self-acquired, this is a striking act of textual conscience: Bede goes behind the Latin to the original tongue of the New Testament and lets it correct him. The Retractatio is thus a small monument to the thing that raises Bede above a mere compiler — a real, if modest, exegetical and textual judgement exercised under the Fathers, not merely a stitching-together of their words (see Bede and the Greek Tradition).

The Catholic Epistles

Bede’s commentary On the Seven Catholic Epistles (In epistulas septem catholicas) — James, the two of Peter, the three of John, and Jude — was one of his most widely copied and influential works, and for much of the Middle Ages it was effectively the standard Latin commentary on these letters (Bede, In epistulas septem catholicas; trans. David Hurst, Bede the Venerable: Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles, Cistercian Studies 82, Kalamazoo, 1985; Brown 2009). Here Bede expounds the moral and doctrinal teaching of the apostolic letters with a strongly practical and pastoral cast — faith and works in James, the grace of Christ and the holiness of life in Peter, love and the confession of the incarnate Word in John — and the work shows how thoroughly Bede had absorbed the patristic reading of these texts into a clear, usable exposition for the clergy. Its long popularity is itself a measure of how well Bede succeeded in his stated aim.

The Shape of the Whole

Taken together the commentaries form a body of work that spans most of the Bible and the whole of Bede’s life, and that he plainly regarded as his chief contribution (HE 5.24, the work-list; Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010). The achievement is not that of a man saying new things but of a man making the old things usable: gathering the consensus of the Fathers, attributing it honestly, abbreviating it faithfully, and handing it to a Church that needed it. That, and not the History, is what Bede thought he had been put in the world to do, and the History itself is the work of a mind formed by this long discipline of reading Scripture under the Fathers. The method behind the commentaries — the patristic synthesis, the spiritual senses, the standing-under rather than over the Fathers — is the subject of the companion file (see Exegesis and the Fathers).

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 autobiographical note and list of writings at HE 5.24, where the biblical commentaries head the list.)
Bede. On Genesis (In Genesim). Trans. Calvin B. Kendall. Translated Texts for Historians 48. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008.
Bede. On the Tabernacle (De tabernaculo). Trans. Arthur G. Holder. Translated Texts for Historians 18. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994.
Bede. On the Temple (De templo). Trans. Seán Connolly, with an introduction by Jennifer O’Reilly. Translated Texts for Historians 21. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995.
Bede. On Ezra and Nehemiah (In Ezram et Neemiam). Trans. Scott DeGregorio. Translated Texts for Historians 47. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006.
Bede. On the Song of Songs (In Cantica Canticorum) and On Samuel (In primam partem Samuhelis). Cited by book and preface. Latin in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 119B and 119.
Bede. Commentary on the Gospel of Luke (In Lucae evangelium expositio) and Commentary on the Gospel of Mark (In Marci evangelium expositio). Cited by preface and division. Latin in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 120.
Bede. Commentary on Acts (Expositio Actuum Apostolorum) and Retractation on Acts (Retractatio in Actus Apostolorum). Ed. M. L. W. Laistner, Bedae Venerabilis Expositio Actuum Apostolorum et Retractatio. Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1939. English trans. Lawrence T. Martin, The Venerable Bede: Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles. Cistercian Studies 117. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1989.
Bede. Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles (In epistulas septem catholicas). Trans. David Hurst. Cistercian Studies 82. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1985.
Bede. Commentary on Revelation (Expositio Apocalypseos). Trans. Faith Wallis. Translated Texts for Historians 58. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013.
Bede. Homilies on the Gospels (Homiliae evangelii). Trans. Lawrence T. Martin and David Hurst. 2 vols. Cistercian Studies 110–111. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991.
Cuthbert. Letter on the Death of Bede (Epistola de obitu Bedae). In Colgrave & Mynors, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (1969), 579–587.
Brown, George Hardin. A Companion to Bede. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009.
DeGregorio, Scott, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bede. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. (Chapters on Bede the exegete, including Arthur Holder and George Hardin Brown on the commentaries.)
Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990.