Reading the Bible in the Middle Ages

Jinty Nelson, Damien Kempf, Jinty Nelson, Damien Kempf

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781474245739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

For earlier medieval Christians, the Bible was the book of guidance above all others, and the route to religious knowledge, used for all kinds of practical purposes, from divination to models of government in kingdom or household. This book's focus is on how medieval people accessed Scripture by reading, but also by hearing and memorizing sound-bites from the liturgy, chants and hymns, or sermons explicating Scripture in various vernaculars. Time, place and social class determined access to these varied forms of Scripture. Throughout the earlier medieval period, the Psalms attracted most readers and searchers for meanings. This book's contributors probe readers' motivations, intellectual resources and religious concerns. They ask for whom the readers wrote, where they expected their readers to be located and in what institutional, social and political environments they belonged; why writers chose to write about, or draw on, certain parts of the Bible rather than others, and what real-life contexts or conjunctures inspired them; why the Old Testament so often loomed so large, and how its law-books, its histories, its prophetic books and its poetry were made intelligible to readers, hearers and memorizers. This book's contributors, in raising so many questions, do justice to both uniqueness and diversity.

1

Twelfth-Century Notions of the Canon of the Bible

Cornelia Linde

In 1442, at the Council of Florence, the Catholic Church issued a decree that formally established the canon of the Bible. It was the first time that a binding list for the whole of Catholic Christendom was decided.1 Prior to this, the canon already had what was, in many respects, a stable shape. Yet it still preserved a certain degree of elasticity – at the very least, in the minds of theologians. While conventional boundaries delimited the range of discussion, sacred Scripture was, throughout the Middle Ages, not a rigid construct of fixed content that followed a formal arrangement. Instead, the Church Fathers and later medieval thinkers regarded its composition, as well as the number and order of canonical books, as a legitimate subject for scholarly debate.

Modern scholarship has devoted little attention to medieval debates over the canon. Bruce Metzger concluded that the canon of the New Testament – his object of study – was only rarely the subject of discussion in the Latin West.2 But besides practical decisions, such as whether to include or exclude Baruch or the Epistle to the Laodiceans in manuscripts of the Bible, medieval scholars throughout the centuries engaged with the structure and composition of Scripture on an abstract level.3 This chapter focuses on the views of the canon held by two prominent twelfth-century scholars, Hugh of St Victor and Robert of Melun. After a brief but, for these purposes, indispensable overview of statements made by the Church Fathers and other early authorities, the focus of this study will be on examination of the two theologians’ approaches to, and methodology for, deciding upon and interpreting the canon of Scripture.

Early authorities

While the 1442 bull Cantate Domino contained the first official point of reference that applied to all Catholics, several late antique Church councils included decrees on the canon which were valid on a regional level. A detailed catalogue of biblical books was compiled, for instance, at the Council of Rome in 382, and in 397 the Council of Carthage also issued a list of canonical writings – yet not without appending, in at least one manuscript, a note stating that the Church in Rome still needed to confirm this decision.4 Lee Martin McDonald regards these early decrees as confirmations of the canonicity of books already widely used rather than as an attempt at establishing and prescribing the biblical canon.5 In this light, it is not surprising that divergent views circulated in the Latin World. Most notably, the Church Fathers Jerome and Augustine put forward fundamentally different concepts of the canon. Notwithstanding their radical disagreement, both positions obtained major influence – a surprising fact to which little attention has been paid in modern scholarship.

As translator of Scripture, Jerome was without doubt the single most important figure in the history of the Latin Bible. Strongly influenced by his profound knowledge of Hebrew Scripture, he modelled his position on the by then well-established Jewish ideas of the canon. In the Prologus galeatus, the preface to his translation of Kings, he compiled what was to become a fundamental itemization of the Old Testament canon. Jerome followed Jewish tradition as it had established itself in the first and second century ce by dividing the Old Testament into three sections: Law, Prophets and Hagiographa. The contents of these three groups correspond largely, although not exactly, to those of the three divisions of the Hebrew Tanakh.6 The Law consists of the Pentateuch; the eight Prophets are Joshua, Judges including Ruth, Samuel (1 and 2 Kgs), Melakhim (3 and 4 Kgs), Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Minor Prophets. The nine Hagiographa, finally, are made up of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Daniel, 1 and 2 Chronicles, 1 and 2 Ezra, and Esther. The sum of these books – five Books of Moses, eight Prophets and nine Hagiographa – is 22, the same number, Jerome notes, as the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. And just as five letters of the Hebrew alphabet have a different shape if at the end of a word, so, too, five of these 22 books can be divided into two each, namely Samuel, Melakhim, Chronicles, Ezra, and Jeremiah with Lamentations.7 This attention to the precise number of books and their symbolism was adopted and expanded in the Middle Ages, not least due to Isidore’s exhortation to pay heed to numbers in the Bible.8

With regard to the deuterocanonical books, Jerome’s view of the canon is at odds with their inclusion in his translation. While he translated deuterocanonical books such as Tobit and Judith, which then became a constant part of the Latin Bible, he made it clear that he did not regard them as canonical.9 Compared to the Old Testament, Jerome devoted much less attention to the canon of the New Testament. In a letter to Paulinus, he merely notes that the New Testament consists of the four Gospels, the Pauline Epistles, Acts, the Canonical Epistles and Revelation.10

Jerome’s slightly younger contemporary Augustine promulgated a fundamentally different outlook on the canon in De doctrina christiana. While he, too, advocated that a threefold division underlay the canon of the Old Testament, he distinguished between historia, prophetae and ‘libri qui proprie prophetae appellantur’. Not only do the designations of the three sections not match Jerome’s, but Augustine also came up with a total of twice as many Old Testament books as his older contemporary. The first division, historia, already comprised 22 books on its own: the five Books of Moses, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1–4 Kings, 1–2 Chronicles, Job, Tobit, Esther, Judith, 1–2 Maccabees and 1–2 Esdras. The Prophets consist of the Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus. The third category, finally, is made up of the Minor Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel and Ezekiel.11

Two reasons led to the increase from 22 to 44 books. First, while the content is largely identical to that defined by Jerome, Augustine split books that Jerome had subsumed in one volume into individual items. So, while he insisted that the Twelve Minor Prophets should be regarded as a unit, he nevertheless counted each of them individually in his grand total. Second, and in the end more importantly, Augustine also added the deuterocanonical books such as Tobit and Wisdom to the canon. On this point, the two Church Fathers diverged drastically, and the question of the status of the deuterocanonical books remained a contentious issue throughout the Middle Ages.12

Augustine’s list of 27 New Testament books in the same passage of De doctrina christiana is standard in modern terms, though the order of the books is not necessarily so. He wrote that the New Testament consisted of the four Gospels, 14 Pauline Epistles, 1–2 Peter, 1–3 John, Jude, James, Acts and Revelation, adding up to a total of 27 books.13 The two Church Fathers’ views were by no means the only late antique takes on the canon. Jerome’s adversary Rufinus, for instance, came up with yet another total number of Old Testament books. In his Expositio symboli, he included 25 books in the Old Testament, while the New Testament consisted of the standard 27 books. He concluded his list with the comment that these books are the ones which the Fathers – he is referring to Eusebius’s Historia ecclesiastica in Rufinus’s Latin translation – included in the canon.14

Not surprisingly, Augustine’s and Jerome’s lists gained the greatest currency and both had become well established by the sixth century. An early merger of the two traditions is found in Cassiodorus’s Institutiones. He repeated their differing sums of Old Testament books as well as the grand totals of biblical books without siding with either Jerome or Augustine. Instead, Cassiodorus backed both versions by attributing a deeper meaning to these numbers. His matter-of-fact repetition of the different ways of dividing the canon suggests that the Latin West retained a certain degree of flexibility in its approach to the Bible. The division of the canon, the number of canonical books, as well as the status of the deuterocanonical books were by no means settled. The malleability of the Bible is further supported by the fact that Cassiodorus added a third, alternative count of the biblical books as he had found it in his codex grandior.15 This room for discretion survived throughout the Middle Ages. Ceslas Spicq pointed out that twelfth-century authors adopted Augustine’s but especially Jerome’s ideas concerning the canon,16 so both positions flourished.

Two aspects already found in the writings of the Church Fathers proved particularly influential on later discussions of the canon. First, the notion of a tripartite pattern of the Old Testament became a constant element. Yet it evolved and took on different guises over the course of the centuries. Second, tying the number of books to a deeper meaning, a methodology introduced by Jerome, became a major consideration for those explaining the content and structure of Scripture.17

The twelfth century

Hugh of St Victor

Of twelfth-century authors, possibly the most widely read and at the same time puzzling summary of the canon was pronounced by the highly influential Hugh of St Victor. Hugh, who had entered the Parisian abbey of St Victor in 1115, first publicized his ideas in the late 1120s in his Didascalicon. In the course of the next decade, he repeated his take on this matter in varying degrees of detail in his De scripturis et scriptoribus sacris, Sententiae de divinitate and De sacramentis.18 The main influence on his notion of the canon was Jerome. This is particularly evident with respect to the Old Testament. Hugh copied Jerome’s tripartition into Pentateuch,...