Bede and the Greek Tradition

Bede never travelled, never saw Constantinople or Antioch, and worked in a Latin monastery at the edge of the known world; yet the Greek and Eastern tradition reached him by real channels, and he reached back toward it. He learned enough Greek to correct his own commentary on Acts against the Greek text; he stood at one remove from a flourishing school of Greek learning planted at Canterbury by Theodore of Tarsus and Hadrian; and he knew the Holy Land through the pilgrim report of Arculf. This file sets out what is solid in Bede’s contact with the East — and is careful to flag what is uncertain, neither overstating his Greek nor crediting him with Eastern sources he did not have.

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

How Much Greek Did Bede Have?

The honest answer is: some, and more by the end of his life than at the beginning. Bede’s working language was Latin, and the overwhelming bulk of his reading was in Latin — the Vulgate, the four great Latin Doctors, the Latin chronicles and computistical handbooks. He was not a Greek scholar in the sense that the masters of the Eastern schools were, and nothing in his corpus suggests he could compose in Greek or read it with ease across a range of authors. But it would be equally wrong to say he had no Greek at all. The evidence shows a real, if limited, competence, acquired and improved through deliberate effort, and put to genuine scholarly use (Brown 2009; Lapidge, in DeGregorio 2010; Ward 1990).

The decisive evidence is the Retractatio in Actus Apostolorum — the “Reconsideration of the Acts of the Apostles.” Early in his career Bede had written an Expositio Actuum Apostolorum, a commentary on Acts. Later in life he returned to the book and wrote a second work, the Retractatio, in which he revisits his earlier comments and corrects them — and a substantial part of that revision consists of going back to the Greek text of Acts and noting where the Latin he had used differed from it, where the Greek clarified a sense he had earlier misread, and where variant readings bore on the interpretation (Bede, Retractatio in Actus Apostolorum; Brown 2009; Lapidge, in DeGregorio 2010).

The title itself is a deliberate gesture. Retractatio — “reconsideration,” or “going-back-over” — is the word Augustine had used for his own Retractationes, the late work in which he reviewed his whole output and corrected what he now saw differently; Bede, naming his second book on Acts a Retractatio, places himself consciously in that Augustinian posture of the scholar who submits his earlier self to revision (Bede, Retractatio in Actus Apostolorum; Brown 2009). What is remarkable is the ground of the revision. It is not that Bede had changed his theological mind, but that he had since gained access to a better witness to the text — the Greek — and held himself bound to follow it. This is the same Bede whose hallmark throughout his commentaries is the marginal naming of his sources and the refusal to claim more than he can show; here that discipline is turned on his own past work, and the instrument of correction is the Greek New Testament. For a Latin monk of the early eighth century to revise a finished commentary against the Greek of Acts is an act of textual conscience of a high order, and it is the single clearest demonstration that his Greek was not ornamental but operative (Bede, Retractatio in Actus Apostolorum; Lapidge, in DeGregorio 2010; on the same incident as evidence of his exegetical judgement, Exegesis and the Fathers). The very existence of the Retractatio is a portrait of Bede’s scholarship at its most careful: a man who, having written, learned more, and went back to set his earlier work right against a better witness. That he could do this at all means he had acquired enough Greek to collate the text of Acts and make exegetical judgements from it (on the Acts works generally, see The Commentaries; on the Retractatio as evidence of his judgement, Exegesis and the Fathers).

The Bilingual Manuscript of Acts

Behind the Retractatio lies a particular book. Scholars have long connected Bede’s access to the Greek of Acts with a surviving bilingual manuscript: the Codex Laudianus (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Gr. 35), a sixth-century Greek–Latin diglot of the Acts of the Apostles, with the Greek and Latin set in parallel columns. The Laudianus is an early and important witness to the text of Acts, and it is generally held to have been in England — at or available to Wearmouth-Jarrow — in Bede’s lifetime, and to be the, or a, manuscript whose Greek column Bede consulted when he wrote the Retractatio (Brown 2009; Lapidge, in DeGregorio 2010). The bilingual format matters for understanding the limits of Bede’s competence: a diglot with the Latin running alongside is exactly the tool by which a Latin scholar with modest Greek can work his way into the Greek text — using the Latin as a bridge, checking word against word, and so reaching real text-critical results without commanding the language at large. The picture that emerges is plausible and well-grounded, though the identification of the precise manuscript and the exact mechanics of Bede’s use carry the ordinary uncertainties of palaeographical reconstruction, and are presented here as the scholarly consensus rather than as documentary certainty (Brown 2009; Lapidge, in DeGregorio 2010).

Theodore, Hadrian, and the Canterbury School

The larger channel of Greek and Eastern learning into Bede’s England did not run through Bede’s own study but through Canterbury, two generations before. In 668 the see of Canterbury was filled by Theodore of Tarsus — a Greek, born at Tarsus in Cilicia, the city of the Apostle Paul, schooled in the Greek East and steeped in its theology and learning — who came to England as an old man and governed the English Church as archbishop of Canterbury from 669 until his death in 690. With him came Hadrian, abbot, an African by origin and likewise a master of Greek and Latin, who was set over the monastery of Sts Peter and Paul at Canterbury and made it a school. Together Theodore and Hadrian planted at Canterbury a centre of learning of a kind England had not before possessed, bringing Greek learning, an Antiochene cast of biblical interpretation, and Eastern knowledge of liturgy and the reckoning of time (Bede, HE 4.1; Brown 2009; Lapidge, in Bischoff & Lapidge 1994).

Bede praises this school in his own words, and his testimony is the most important single witness to it. In the Ecclesiastical History he records that Theodore and Hadrian gathered a crowd of students and poured into their minds daily the streams of wholesome learning, teaching not only the Scriptures but the arts of metre, astronomy, and computus — and, in a sentence Bede plainly means as the measure of the school’s success, he says that some of their pupils were still living in his own day who knew Latin and Greek as well as they knew their native English tongue (Bede, HE 4.2; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The claim is striking and is reported here as Bede’s own assessment: that the Canterbury of Theodore and Hadrian produced Englishmen fluent in Greek, and that survivors of that schooling were Bede’s contemporaries. Bede also records Theodore’s arrival and his governance of the English Church, his settling of disputes and his ordering of its discipline, treating him as a figure of the first rank in the conversion-era Church (Bede, HE 4.1–2; on the conversion narrative, The Historia Ecclesiastica).

The Canterbury Biblical Commentaries

That the Canterbury school was not merely a name but a working centre of Greek-inflected, Antiochene-leaning biblical scholarship has been demonstrated in modern times by the recovery of its actual teaching. Bernhard Bischoff and Michael Lapidge identified and edited a body of biblical glosses and commentaries — the “Canterbury biblical commentaries” — that preserve, in the form of classroom notes, the exegetical teaching of Theodore and Hadrian themselves (Bischoff & Lapidge, Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian, 1994). These commentaries show a distinctly Eastern, literal-historical, Antiochene sensibility — an attention to the plain sense, to realia, to geography, language, and natural history, drawing on Greek learning and on the kind of exegesis associated with the school of Antioch rather than the more thoroughgoing allegory of the Alexandrian tradition. They are the concrete evidence that a strand of Greek Eastern exegesis was actually taught on English soil in the generation before Bede, and they form part of the background against which Bede’s own scholarship developed, even where a direct line of dependence cannot be drawn (Bischoff & Lapidge 1994; Lapidge, in DeGregorio 2010; on Bede’s exegetical method, Exegesis and the Fathers). How far Bede was directly shaped by the Canterbury material is a question to be handled with care; what is solid is that the Eastern, Antiochene strand was present in his England and not foreign to the world in which he learned.

Eastern Fathers in Latin Dress

Apart from his own Greek and the Canterbury school, the Greek Fathers reached Bede chiefly as they reached the whole early-medieval Latin West: in translation. Bede knew Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History — the model and in part the title of his own — in the Latin version and continuation of Rufinus of Aquileia, and Eusebius-Rufinus was among his most important sources for the early history of the Church (Brown 2009; Ward 1990). Through such Latin channels something of the Greek historical and patristic tradition was available to him. But this is a point where it is easy to overclaim, and the discipline of this collection is to refuse to. The systematic translation of the Greek Fathers into Latin that would later enrich the medieval West was, in Bede’s day, only partial; one must not credit Bede with a library of Greek theology in Latin that did not yet exist. In particular, the corpus of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite — so formative for later Western and Eastern mystical theology — had not yet entered the Latin West in a form Bede used; he is not to be read as a reader of the Areopagite, and the standard scholarship does not present him as one (Brown 2009; and on the limits of his Greek patristic access, Lapidge, in DeGregorio 2010). What can be said soberly is this: Bede knew the Greek tradition where Latin gave him access to it — Eusebius through Rufinus above all — and reached toward the Greek text directly in the one case, Acts, where the Retractatio shows him doing the work; beyond that, claims of direct dependence on the Greek Fathers should be made cautiously and case by case.

The Holy Land Through Arculf and Adomnán

There is one further, vivid channel by which the Christian East reached Bede’s desk: the report of a pilgrim to the Holy Land. The Frankish bishop Arculf, returning from the East, was driven by storm to the coasts of Britain and came to Iona, where the abbot Adomnán took down from his account a description of the holy places of Jerusalem, Palestine, and the wider East — the church of the Holy Sepulchre, the sites of the Lord’s life and Passion, the topography and wonders of the region — and wrote it up as a treatise, De locis sanctis, “On the Holy Places.” Bede tells this whole story in the Ecclesiastical History, devoting chapters to Adomnán, to Arculf’s pilgrimage, and to the holy places themselves as Arculf had seen them (Bede, HE 5.15–17; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Bede thought the material valuable enough that he made his own De locis sanctis, an abridgement and reworking of Adomnán’s account, distilling Arculf’s eyewitness report of the Christian East into a compact form for his readers (Bede, De locis sanctis; and the summary in HE 5.15–17; Brown 2009). It is a small but telling instance of how the East reached Northumbria: not through Bede’s travel, which never happened, but through the chain of an Eastern pilgrim, an Iona abbot’s pen, and Bede’s own careful copying — so that a monk who never left his island could give his readers a description of the Holy Sepulchre at second and third hand, named source by named source in the manner that is his hallmark.

What Is Solid, and What Is Not

It is worth drawing the threads together with the discipline of distinguishing the secure from the uncertain. Solid: Bede had real, limited, improving Greek; he used it to collate the Greek text of Acts and produce the Retractatio; a bilingual Greek–Latin Acts (associated with the Codex Laudianus) lies behind that work; the Canterbury school of Theodore of Tarsus and Hadrian brought genuine Greek and Antiochene learning to England in the generation before him, as Bede himself testifies (HE 4.1–2) and as the recovered Canterbury commentaries confirm; Bede knew Eusebius through Rufinus; and he transmitted an eyewitness account of the Christian Holy Land through Adomnán and Arculf (HE 5.15–17). Uncertain or to be denied: that Bede commanded Greek as a working scholarly language across many authors (he did not); that he read the Greek Fathers widely in the original (he did not); that he used Pseudo-Dionysius (he did not); and the precise mechanics and manuscript-identifications behind the Retractatio, which rest on reasoned scholarly reconstruction rather than on Bede’s own statements (Brown 2009; Lapidge, in DeGregorio 2010; Bischoff & Lapidge 1994). The truthful portrait is of a Latin monk at the western edge of Christendom who, by his own diligence and by the learning others had carried west before him, kept open a real if narrow window onto the Greek and Eastern tradition — and who, characteristically, used what he could reach with exactness and named where he had it.

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. Cited by book and chapter. (Theodore of Tarsus and Hadrian and the Canterbury school, HE 4.1–2, including Bede’s testimony that their surviving pupils knew Latin and Greek as well as their native tongue, HE 4.2; Adomnán, Arculf, and the holy places, HE 5.15–17.)
Bede. Retractatio in Actus Apostolorum (Reconsideration of the Acts of the Apostles). Cited by title. (Bede’s revision of his earlier Expositio Actuum Apostolorum against the Greek text of Acts.)
Bede. De locis sanctis (On the Holy Places). Cited by title. (Bede’s abridgement and reworking of Adomnán’s account of Arculf’s pilgrimage.)
Adomnán of Iona. De locis sanctis. Cited by title. (The account of the holy places taken down from the pilgrim Arculf, Bede’s source.)
Bischoff, Bernhard, and Michael Lapidge, eds. Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian. Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. (Identification and edition of the Canterbury biblical commentaries; the Greek and Antiochene character of Theodore and Hadrian’s teaching.)
Brown, George Hardin. A Companion to Bede. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009. (Bede’s Greek; the Retractatio and the bilingual Acts / Codex Laudianus; Eusebius through Rufinus; the limits of Bede’s Greek patristic access.)
DeGregorio, Scott, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bede. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. (Michael Lapidge and others on Bede’s Greek, the Canterbury school, and his sources.)
Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990. (Bede’s learning, languages, and use of Eusebius-Rufinus.)