The Medieval Christian Bible
"Hear my teaching, O my people; / incline your ears to the words of my mouth ... We will recount to generations to come / the praiseworthy deeds of the LORD, / and the wonderful works he has done." — Psalms 78:1,4
The English word “Bible” derives, via French and Latin, from the Greek word biblía, which originally meant “books” (plural), not simply “book” or, as it is sometimes known among modern Christians, the Book. Knowing the original Greek word is useful, as keeps in our minds that “the Bible” as medieval audiences read and understood it, was a beast of many colors, comprising a plurality of shorter books across a number of different genres. Some of these books contained sacred history, like Genesis, Exodus, Kings, or even the Acts of the Apostles. Some almost approached romance, like the Book of Esther or the Book of Jonah. Some were books of prophecy — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Zechariah, Daniel, and a host of others, including the Christian Bible’s final book, the Book of Apocalypse. Certain books — like the Book of Leviticus or parts of the Book of Ezra — contain detailed instructions about the rituals of sacrifice and purification pertaining to the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. Others, in contrast, consisted of poetry, like the magnificent Book of Psalms or the Song of Songs. Others still were what scholars of the ancient world would term “wisdom literature”: the Book of Proverbs, The Book of Ecclesiastes, the Wisdom of Solomon, for example. Several of the separate books of the Bible sit within several genres. The Book of Job is both wisdom literature and sacred narrative; the Book of Daniel yokes prophecy to romance. And within the New Testament — the later, most uniquely Christian part of the Bible — there are two further genres: Gospels, four in number, recounting the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; and epistles, letters from some of Jesus’ earliest followers, especially the Apostle Paul, addressing doctrinal and pastoral issues. The Bible as a whole is a veritable patchwork of tone, style, and purpose. Some parts read like myth, some like chronicle, some like doctrine, and some are almost “inspirational.” Parts of the Bible — Exodus, for instance, or the First Book of Maccabees, of the Book of Judith, or the four Gospels, or the Book of Acts — are often surprisingly exciting, though many others are also (probably even to many medieval readers) rather dull.
of other early Christian writings from this early period (the Didache, The Shepherd of Hermas, The Gospel of Thomas, the epistles of Clement of Rome and Ignatius of Antioch, and Polycarp, the hypothesized “Book of Q”), there is much evidence that suggests that the Christian New Testament was already beginning to take its canonical form by the early years of the second century.
The Latin Vulgate Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, were in a very real way the cornerstone of the Christian faith throughout the Middle Ages. Although generally only clergy could read the Bible in its original, knowledge of the Latin Bible disseminated from the literate to the non-literate and proved in a myriad of ways to be an almost endlessly rich resource for the ways that medieval Christians understood their religion and themselves. Practically every single mass involved the reading aloud of several passages from the Bible, typically one from the Old Testament, one from the New Testament epistles, and a third from one of the four Gospels. Most masses also involved the singing or chanting of one or more of the Psalms — the great collection of Old Testament poems that explored all the contours of monotheistic commitment. Many masses, especially Sunday masses, also involved a homily, a guided reflection by the presiding priest on the spiritual meanings of the particular read passages. Outside of the monasteries, these homilies were typically in the local vernacular. Part of the basic religious instruction for most medieval Christians would be to memorize some short passages from the Latin Bible, certainly the Lord’s Prayer (or Paternoster), but perhaps also a few Psalms, or the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:2-17) or the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-11) or the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), or some other notable passage. Monks and nuns, it is true, were encouraged to study the Bible, and they in fact produced throughout the Middle Ages some of the finest glosses
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and commentaries on it, but casual reading was fairly rare. Even the readings during the mass tended to be only a dozen or so verses long, just enough to give an audience something to meditate on throughout the week, just enough to provide the homilist with abundant material for his sermon.
Bibles themselves were large and expensive to produce, involving thousands of man-hours of copying the text and hundreds if not thousands of sheets of vellum. And so while every church was expected to have a copy, private reading copies were a luxury item, even after the spread of smaller-format Bibles in the later Middle Ages. The Bibles Moralisées of the thirteenth century, privately owned, sumptuously illustrated, and almost profligate in their use of gold leaf and white space, demonstrate that Bibles could be just as much status symbols as aids to devotion. Other sorts of shorter biblical books were often produced for more pedestrian uses. Many churches would have a book of just the Gospels, used and displayed during the mass (the famous Book of Kells is such a text). Psalters, or collections of just the Book of Psalms, often illustrated, were common from the Carolingian period on. In the later Middle Ages, Books of Hours became more prevalent: these typically contained selections from the Gospels and the Psalms, a calendar of feast days, along with litanies and other common prayers. Books of Hours enabled private lay individuals and households to pray the canonical hours in imitation of the devotional practices of the religious orders.
Bibles themselves were large and expensive to produce, involving thousands of man-hours of copying the text and hundreds if not thousands of sheets of vellum. And so while every church was expected to have a copy, private reading copies were a luxury item, even after the spread of smaller-format Bibles in the later Middle Ages. The Bibles Moralisées of the thirteenth century, privately owned, sumptuously illustrated, and almost profligate in their use of gold leaf and white space, demonstrate that Bibles could be just as much status symbols as aids to devotion. Other sorts of shorter biblical books were often produced for more pedestrian uses. Many churches would have a book of just the Gospels, used and displayed during the mass (the famous Book of Kells is such a text). Psalters, or collections of just the Book of Psalms, often illustrated, were common from the Carolingian period on. In the later Middle Ages, Books of Hours became more prevalent: these typically contained selections from the Gospels and the Psalms, a calendar of feast days, along with litanies and other common prayers. Books of Hours enabled private lay individuals and households to pray the canonical hours in imitation of the devotional practices of the religious orders.
Many medieval Bibles, especially those produced for use in monastic settings, contained glosses — running commentaries explaining difficult words or passages, analyzing the text, or relating the biblical text to doctrinal points; glosses could be placed in the margins of the text or even interlineally (hence the phrase “reading between the lines”). Glosses were often particularly focused on clarifying typology, that is, they aimed at showing how various elements of the Old Testament narratives were fulfilled in the New Testament. Many of these glosses were produced by famous Church fathers like St Augustine (d. 430), St Ambrose (d. ca 397), St Jerome (d. 420), and St Gregory the Great (d. 604), or by later authorities such as Rabanus Maurus (d. 856) or Anselm of Laon (d. 1117). By the High Middle Ages, many Bibles adopted what became known as the Glossa Ordinaria, a standardized anthology of commentaries, composed perhaps in the cathedral school of Laon in the first half of the twelfth century. The Glossa Ordinaria was a magisterial supplement to the actual biblical text, and it was considered uniquely authoritative and useful. Indeed, the dissemination of the Glossa
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may have been a spur to the great scholastic theological syntheses of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries achieved by Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and others. More indirectly, the program of typology enshrined by the Glossa Ordinaria would lead in the later Middle Ages to the production of pauper’s Bibles (biblia pauperum), which were image-heavy (and sometimes abbreviated) Bibles that aligned Old Testament episodes with their New Testament fulfilments. An image of Moses lifting the serpent above his head might, for instance, be co-ordinated with an image of Christ uplifted upon the Cross; a picture of Jonah escaping from the belly of the whale might be coupled with an image of Christ’s Resurrection.
Whether read privately at intervals, or studied with the aid of typological glosses, or experienced verbally in the context of a sermon, or even visually through a Bible moralisée or pauper’s Bible, the general narrative content of both the Old and New Testaments would be absorbed into the worldviews of even reasonably attentive medieval Christians. It will be useful, then, to rehearse here what some of these contents were. The books of the Old Testament told the story of the creation of the world by a benevolent God and of this God’s special concern for the people of Israel. The Book of Genesis opens with God’s creation of the world in six days (a topic of great interest to many, many patristic and medieval commentators). It continues on to the creation and disobedience of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden (an episode which Augustine and then practically the entire tradition of Western theology after him refers to as the Fall of Man); then to God’s destruction of the world by means of a great flood and his salvation of Noah and his family, who would re-people the earth; the special covenant with the just Abraham; the averted sacrifice of Abraham’s son Isaac; and the eventual passage of Abraham’s descendants, the Hebrews, into slavery in Egypt. The next four books of the Old Testament — and most memorably the Book of Exodus — tell the story of how God, acting through his prophet Moses, led the Hebrew people out of Egypt and toward the Promised Land of Israel; it is also through Moses that God establishes the Law through which the Israelites should govern themselves and properly worship their deity. The story of Israel continues in the Books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, and 1 and 2Samuel, of how the Israelites were first governed by judges and then eventually by kings,
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culminating in the reigns of the two most famous kings, David and his son Solomon. Subsequent books (Kings, Chronicles) tell of the rather lackluster kings who followed Solomon, of the division of the Kingdom of Israel into two kingdoms (Israel and Judah), of the eventual conquest first of Israel by the Assyrians and then of Judah by the Babylonians, and of the deportation of the inhabitants of Judah (now called Judaei or “Jews”) into a roughly forty-year period of exile, their so-called “Babylonian Captivity.” The Book of Ezra relates how, after the Persian conquest of the Babylonian Empire, the Jews — though now without a king — were allowed to return to Judah and to rebuild the Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem.
The second half of the Old Testament is dominated by books of prophecy: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Baruch, Ezekiel, and Daniel, along a dozen “minor” prophets (Hosea, Amos, Malachi, etc.). Modern readers understand the word “prophecy” to mean “predictions about the future,” but the Old Testament prophets offer more a mix of jeremiad and denunciation, exhorting the people of Israel to love and worship the one God and to turn away from their wicked ways. They often do, it is true, predict dire consequences. In fact, most of the books of the prophets were written when the conquests by the Assyrians and Babylonians felt imminent, and the prophets were quick to attribute the loss of the Promised Land as God’s just punishment for the moral waywardness of the children of Abraham. However, for medieval readers (and, indeed, for Jesus’ earliest followers), the Prophets were fascinating because, nestled within the long diatribes against Israelite wickedness and the warnings of coming troubles, were a series of statements — or perhaps they are more just developed images — predicting the eventual arrival of a Messiah would deliver Israel from her troubles and restore her fortunes. The Messiah, “the Anointed One,” the Suffering Servant, Emmanuel — medieval Christians and their earlier forebearers read these figures of Hebrew prophecy as indicating the advent and triumph of Jesus Christ.
The second half of the Old Testament is dominated by books of prophecy: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Baruch, Ezekiel, and Daniel, along a dozen “minor” prophets (Hosea, Amos, Malachi, etc.). Modern readers understand the word “prophecy” to mean “predictions about the future,” but the Old Testament prophets offer more a mix of jeremiad and denunciation, exhorting the people of Israel to love and worship the one God and to turn away from their wicked ways. They often do, it is true, predict dire consequences. In fact, most of the books of the prophets were written when the conquests by the Assyrians and Babylonians felt imminent, and the prophets were quick to attribute the loss of the Promised Land as God’s just punishment for the moral waywardness of the children of Abraham. However, for medieval readers (and, indeed, for Jesus’ earliest followers), the Prophets were fascinating because, nestled within the long diatribes against Israelite wickedness and the warnings of coming troubles, were a series of statements — or perhaps they are more just developed images — predicting the eventual arrival of a Messiah would deliver Israel from her troubles and restore her fortunes. The Messiah, “the Anointed One,” the Suffering Servant, Emmanuel — medieval Christians and their earlier forebearers read these figures of Hebrew prophecy as indicating the advent and triumph of Jesus Christ.
In the center of the Old Testament are a number of books — often referred to as the wisdom books — that seem less interested in recounting the past and future history of the Israelites and are instead explore more fully the moral, philosophical, emotional, spiritual, and even aesthetic aspects of devotion to the monotheistic God of Israel. The Book of Job, for example, addresses the problem of evil: why do bad things happen to good people? It tells the story of the faithful Job who, though he tragically loses his family, property, and personal health, never curses God and is in the end rewarded. The Book of Psalms contains one hundred and fifty poems or songs of praise to the Lord God. They articulate the full range of human emotion — joy and delight in the beauty of God’s creation; awe at God’s holiness; trust in God’s generous bounty; anger against evildoers and against all manner of afflictions; penitence at one’s own evil deeds; even despair at the thought of abandonment by God (see esp. Psalm 21). The Psalms were a regular part of medieval life. At least one or two were chanted at every mass, and people living under monastic rule not only memorized all the Psalms but recited them in a prescribed cycle throughout the week. The other wisdom books of the Old Testament (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Ecclesiasticus) echo many of the themes of the Psalms, often augmenting them with specific practical applications. But perhaps the most commented upon wisdom book was the Song of Songs (also called the Song of Solomon). The Song of Songs, as it stands, is an epithalamic rhapsody celebrating in startlingly sensuous language the romantic love between two lovers. The male voice was understood in the Middle Ages to be that of Solomon, the tenth-century BCE king of Israel; the female voice was identified as his exotic queen. Obviously, Christian communities encountering this frankly erotic text did not hesitate to construct for it allegorical interpretations. While there were a rich variety of such readings of the Song of Songs throughout the medieval period — including an especially detailed and influential set of sermons elucidating the text by the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clarivaux — the commentaries in the main presented the idea that the love between the Song’s Bride and Bridegroom was an allegory for the love between God and the Church, or between God and the individual soul.
The books of the New Testament present far less variation in style and focus among themselves than those of the Old Testament, having been produced within a more condensed time frame and for more or less similar audiences. The entire New Testament might be said to narrate the life of Jesus and its aftermath: his resurrection, his ascension to heaven, the deeds of some of his followers, and his prophesied return at the end of time to judge the living and dead. The New Testament opens with the Four Gospels — the word gospel deriving from Old English god spel, itself a calque on the Latin/Greek term evangelium, “good news.” And the “good news” all the Gospels relate is the earthly Incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in first-century Palestine. The first three gospels one encounters in the New Testament — the Gospels According to Matthew, Mark, and Luke — are known collectively as the Synoptic Gospels; they all narrate more or less the same story of Jesus’ life, although each gospel has its own idiosyncratic character and there is some shuffling of episodes and some shifting of emphasis across the three. Matthew emphasizes Jesus’ sermons and the many continuities with the traditions of the Hebrew Bible. Mark provides a terser account, focusing on the “newness” of Jesus’ ministry and emphasizing his status as an exorcist, a healer, and a worker of miracles. The Gospel According to Luke underscores Jesus’ solidarity with his fellow human— especially women, the destitute, and the outcast — and is concerned to clarify Jesus’ place within God’s grand plan for the salvation of the world. The fourth gospel, the Gospel According to John takes a different style and presents much substantially different content from the three Synoptic Gospels. John’s Jesus speaks in bold metaphors — “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life,” “I am the Good Shepherd,” “I and the Father are one” — and John identifies Jesus at the beginning of his gospel as the Word of God, insisting that Jesus was coeval with God from the dawn of time, thus laying the foundation for the later elaboration of the doctrine of the Trinity: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God …”
"It is written, 'Not by bread alone does man live, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.'" — Jesus in the Gospel According to Matthew 4:4, quoting Deuteronomy 8:3 |
The majority of the rest of the New Testament explores the works of Jesus’ earliest followers. The book known as The Acts of the Apostles (often called just “Acts” for short), written by the same person who wrote the Gospel According to Luke, tells of how, after Jesus’ ascension into heaven to sit at the right hand of God the Father, the Holy Spirit came upon Jesus’ disciples (and the Virgin Mary), inspiring them with joy and zeal and giving them the ability to speak in tongues in order to spread the good news of the Resurrection and to prepare the world for Jesus’ second coming. Acts also intertwines the story of Paul of Tarsus, who begins as an agent of the Pharisees, persecuting Christians, but who has a miraculous conversion experience — during which he encounters the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus — and subsequently becomes a tireless apostle to the Greek-speaking world, converting Jews and Gentiles alike. The New Testament follows the Acts of the Apostles with twenty-one epistles, or letters, written by various first-century Christians to different Christian communities. Fourteen of these were attributed to Paul during the Middle Ages, although modern scholars now recognize that Paul did not author several of them. The seven remaining epistles (known as the Catholic epistles) were attributed, with questionable authenticity, to some of the other early disciples: Peter, James, John, and
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Jude. Overall, the epistles address matters, both doctrinal and practical, relevant to the communal life of the early Church. Medieval Christians could typically expect to hear a reading from one of the epistles during most masses.
The final book of the New Testament, and in fact the final book of the entire Christian Bible, is the Book of Apocalypse, now more familiarly known by its Protestant name, the Book of Revelation. The book purports to relate a prophetic vision that was revealed to the Christian hermit John of Patmos (a figure whom most medieval readers conflated with the author of the Gospel According to John). In language that is highly allusive and yet also intriguingly vague, Apocalpyse narrates the end of the world, standing as an apt bookend to the Book of Genesis at the opening of the Bible. It is fitting, then, that God declares in this book that “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end” (21:6). After recounting a number of ambiguous cataclysms ushered in by terrible harbingers like the Four Horsemen and the Beast, the vision culminates with the Second Coming of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the final Day of Judgment, and the revelation of the heavenly New Jerusalem. The Book of Apocalypse, both in its redolent imagery and in its appeal to a final reckoning, has exerted an outsized influence over the medieval (and post-medieval) imagination. In both imagery and content, the matter of Apocalypse certainly impacted medieval ideas about the afterlife, about the particular tang and texture of both Heaven and Hell. On a more terrestrial level, the eighth-century Spanish monk Beatus of Liébana produced a massively popular Commentary on the Apocalypse that demonstrated the perennial applicability of the text’s imagery to the unfolding life of the Christian Church. Religious visionaries like Hildegard of Bingen or Joachim of Fiore (and later even William Blake!) likewise drew heavily from the book’s multivalent and potent symbols. Even more secular writers like Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Prophecies of Merlin, Dante Alighieri in the final cantos of his Purgatorio, or William Langland throughout Piers Plowman could count on the power of apocalyptic imagery to invigorate their texts.
The final book of the New Testament, and in fact the final book of the entire Christian Bible, is the Book of Apocalypse, now more familiarly known by its Protestant name, the Book of Revelation. The book purports to relate a prophetic vision that was revealed to the Christian hermit John of Patmos (a figure whom most medieval readers conflated with the author of the Gospel According to John). In language that is highly allusive and yet also intriguingly vague, Apocalpyse narrates the end of the world, standing as an apt bookend to the Book of Genesis at the opening of the Bible. It is fitting, then, that God declares in this book that “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end” (21:6). After recounting a number of ambiguous cataclysms ushered in by terrible harbingers like the Four Horsemen and the Beast, the vision culminates with the Second Coming of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the final Day of Judgment, and the revelation of the heavenly New Jerusalem. The Book of Apocalypse, both in its redolent imagery and in its appeal to a final reckoning, has exerted an outsized influence over the medieval (and post-medieval) imagination. In both imagery and content, the matter of Apocalypse certainly impacted medieval ideas about the afterlife, about the particular tang and texture of both Heaven and Hell. On a more terrestrial level, the eighth-century Spanish monk Beatus of Liébana produced a massively popular Commentary on the Apocalypse that demonstrated the perennial applicability of the text’s imagery to the unfolding life of the Christian Church. Religious visionaries like Hildegard of Bingen or Joachim of Fiore (and later even William Blake!) likewise drew heavily from the book’s multivalent and potent symbols. Even more secular writers like Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Prophecies of Merlin, Dante Alighieri in the final cantos of his Purgatorio, or William Langland throughout Piers Plowman could count on the power of apocalyptic imagery to invigorate their texts.
The language and imagery of the Christian Bible, both Old and New Testaments, thus permeated deeply into the rhetoric and worldviews of countless medieval Christians. Augustine of Hippo’s autobiographical Confessions is virtually riddled with biblical quotations; his point is that he could hardly make sense of himself without the words of divine Scripture. And yet medieval Christians also had a keen sense that the various books of the Bible were written by human authors. Moses was deemed the author of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament, David was considered the author of most of the Psalms, and Solomon the author of most of the wisdom books. The books of the prophets were assumed to be first-person accounts by the historical prophets themselves — Isaiah, Ezekiel, Habbakuk, Zechariah, etc. As for the New Testament, medieval readers viewed all these texts as essentially “signed”: the apostles Matthew and John were the authors of their gospels, the apostle Peter’s associate Mark the author of his, and Paul’s associate Luke the author both of the gospel known under his name and of the Acts of the Apostles. And the epistles were all considered to have been written by Paul, barring the ones ascribed to the other apostles.
Modern biblical scholarship views these attributions of authorship as great deal less straightforward than this, but, ultimately, despite the medieval penchant for citing “authorities,” the identity of the authors may not have mattered much. For medieval Christians, the true author of all the sundry books of the Bible was God himself, the Holy Spirit moving through the minds, mouths, and pens of mortal humans, each with their own important but, in the end, limited perspective. While the New Testament always superseded the Old Testament for medieval readers, the final authority within the Christian religion lay not within the pages of a book but in the person of Jesus Christ, in his words and actions upon the earth. The entire Bible, then, might be said, in its every book, chapter, verse, and letter, to be always pointing beyond itself to the ever-living Word of God.
Further Reading
- Ann Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 2001)
- Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly, The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages: Production, Reception & Performance in Western Christianity (Columbia University Press, 2011)
- Madeline Caviness, "Biblical Stories in Windows: Were They Bibles for the Poor?" in The Bible in the Middle Ages: Its Influence on Literature and Art, ed. B. S. Levy
- Joseph Dyer, "The Singing of Psalms in the Early Medieval Office," Speculum 64.3 (1989):535-78
- M. T. Gibson, The Bible in the Latin West (Notre Dame University Press, 1993)
- M. T. Gibson, "The Place of the Glossa Ordinaria in Medieval Exegesis," in Ad Litteram: Authoritative Texts and Their Medieval Readers, eds. M. D. Jordan and K. Emery (Notre Dame University Press, 1992), pp. 5-27
- Christopher du Hamel, The Book: A History of the Bible (Phaidon Press, 2001)
- E. Anne Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011)
- Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (University of Notre Dame Press, 1989)
- Franz Van Liere, An Introduction to the Medieval Bible (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
- Bruce Waltke and James M. Houston, The Psalms as Christian Worship: A Historical Commentary (Eerdmans, 2010)
- Roger S. Wieck, Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art (George Braziller, 1997)