The early canon law

Few things are more firmly rooted in the Middle Ages than the church's canon law. It is true that medieval society produced universities, parliaments and secular legal systems, but these have developed in ways which make the originals hard to recognise now. Canon law on the other hand, acquired its classical shape by about 1350 and despite subsequent developments, still remains closely tied to it. Secularisation has pushed it to the margins of modern life, but within the church it retains its traditional role, and it is not unusual for ancient precepts and examples to be cited even today as valid principles for modern use.

Canon law came into being because the church needed rules to govern its internal life and define its relationship to wider society. The question of who should be permitted to minister in the church's name (and at what level), the administration of the sacraments and the regulation of spiritual matters, including such things as divorce and defamation of character, formed the core issues around which a body of legal principles and precedents was developed. To them were added matters dealing with church finance, the rights and duties of the clergy in relation to secular society and the rules of procedure used in the church courts. As the power of the church increased in the Middle Ages, so its canon law reached more deeply into the lives of ordinary people so that, even after the church retreated from the secular sphere, its legal system left a deposit of principles and procedures which still influence western societies today.

The medieval period, considered here broadly to lie between the compilation of the Babylonian Talmud c. 600 ce and the end of the fifteenth century, is crucial for the history of the Hebrew Bible. The biblical canon and the tripartite classification of the twenty-four books into Law (the Torah or Pentateuch), Prophets (Nevi’im) and Hagiographa (Ketuvim) had long been established. The consonantal text, too, had been standardised well before; a large proportion of the Bible manuscripts from the Judaean desert from the beginning of the Christian era attest already to a type of consonantal text similar to that seen in later medieval manuscripts. Nonetheless, in the Middle Ages the Hebrew Bible was subject to many changes. First, the books acquired a new shape: alongside the traditional scrolls, which continued to be used in the liturgy, the biblical text was now copied in the codex format. Second, the fixed consonantal text was provided with written vowels, cantillation signs (‘accents’) and textual notes known as the Masorah (usually translated as ‘tradition’). These masoretic additions not only recorded the various traditions of pronunciation but also imposed a fixed interpretation of those words whose purely consonantal form could be read in different ways. The introduction of the vowels, together with the growing influence of philosophical and scientific debates in the Arab world, proved to be one of the essential factors leading to the development of new approaches to the biblical text – namely, the birth of grammar and lexicography and of a new type of ‘proto-scientific’ commentary distinct from the Late Antique genres of homiletic and legendary midrashim (collections of exegesis and exposition of scripture). Last but not least, the geographical spread of Jewish communities accounted for a diversity of hand-copied Bibles, which show the influence of the book-making techniques of non-Jewish neighbours.

These three aspects of the Hebrew Bible in the Middle Ages – the scroll and codex, the Masorah, and the diversity of the Bible as a book – will be the focus of this chapter. They will be preceded by a brief review of the extant corpus of medieval Bible manuscripts and their role in modern Bible editions.

The subheadings used below – wall paintings and mosaics, sculpture, stained glass, altarpieces – which are supplemented by references to textiles, reliquaries and altar furniture, provide an indication of the enormous amount of material involved in this topic, even though a large proportion no longer survives.

Purpose and audience

Gregory the Great's twofold justification of images, that they can teach the unlettered and also stimulate religious emotion, remained standard throughout the Middle Ages. Bonaventure and Durandus were among those who quoted Gregory's dictum. Jean Gerson compared a good sermon with a pious painting in its ability to ‘inspire devotion’ and John Mirk, in defending images against the Lollards, insisted that ‘there are many thousand people who could not imagine in their hearts how Christ was treated on the cross, except as they learnt it from the sight of images and paintings’.

Durandus’ emphasis on the symbolism of the medieval church andits liturgy was taken up during the early twentieth century by Emile Mâle, whose influence on the subject has been profound. Mâle stressed the fundamental importance of the text behind the image, but when it came to New Testament depictions in churches it was, he said, the liturgy which determined the choice of scenes. Life of Christ cycles were largely limited to the childhood and passion with very little depiction of the ministry because of the liturgical emphasis on Christmas-Epiphany and Holy Week respectively. This may be applicable to France but in other countries, as we shall see, Christ’s miracles were commonly depicted in churches.

Nevertheless, a general relationship of art and liturgy remained widely acknowledged and in recent decades detailed studies of this relationship have become central to research in this field. A study of the well-known relief of the penitent Eve from the lintel of the north portal at Autun Cathedral concluded that the lintel and the tympanum above with the raising of Lazarus (destroyed) identified it as the portal of penance and confession by which penitents entered the church on Maundy Thursday.

The emergence of universities in the thirteenth century had a significant impact on the study of the Bible. Preparatory changes had already taken place in the twelfth century at cathedral schools, such as Laon, Chartres and Paris, and at houses of newly founded canonical orders, such as St Victor in Paris. Yet the principal setting for biblical study in the early Middle Ages, namely monasteries, remained an important context, particularly those of the Cistercian order. What was new in the thirteenth century was the emergence of a different institutional setting, universities, some of which possessed a faculty of theology with a corporation of masters responsible for teaching that included biblical instruction. The university structure brought together independent secular clerics who were teaching theology, such as Peter the Cantor, Peter of Poitiers, Simon of Tournai and Stephen Langton, into one corporate body, soon to be joined by members of a new type of religious order, the mendicant friars. These new orders, such as the Franciscans and Dominicans, and later the Augustinian Hermits and Carmelites, ostensibly supported their mission of preaching and care of souls through begging (thus the term mendicant); they saw universities, particularly Paris, as an ideal location for training their most talented members in theology and biblical studies. For the first time the study of the Bible no longer simply served the liturgical, homiletical and spiritual needs of individuals and communities; it became an academic discipline.

Throughout the thirteenth century faculties of theology were limited to certain universities, principally Paris, Oxford and Cambridge, with Paris the most important of that group. Eventually degree-granting theological faculties were created at Toulouse, Bologna, Prague, Vienna, Cologne, Louvain and elsewhere, but the faculty of theology at Paris continued to dominate throughout the late Middle Ages. Equally important, however, were the schools (studia) of the mendicant orders, which paralleled university programmes and were partially integrated with them. Secular clerics and mendicant friars shared a common goal for biblical study: preparation for preaching, even as the content of the Bible provided material for the study of doctrine, speculative theology and ethical teaching. And the speculative aspect of theological study, in turn, had a shaping effect on the study of the Bible.

The Qurʾānic text transmitted to us betrays a peculiar composition, essentially different from that of both the Hebrew Bible – which relates salvation history through a roughly chronological sequence of events – and the Gospels, which narrate the life of Christ and the emergence of the earliest Christian community. The Qurʾān does not present a continuous narrative of the past, but, in its early texts, conjures the future (the imminent day of judgement), while later entering into a debate with various interlocutors about the implementation of monotheist scripture in the present. It consists of 114 text units, known as suras, which vary in length from two-sentence statements to lengthy polythematic communications. These suras are arranged roughly according to their length; the longest suras are placed first, with the shorter ones generally following in order of decreasing length.

Though we possess manuscript evidence only from the last third of the seventh century, the most plausible hypothesis is that the texts in the transmitted Qurʾānic corpus do reflect, more or less faithfully, the wording of communications that were actually pronounced by the Prophet during his ministry in Mecca (610–22 ce) and subsequently Medina (622–32). The strikingly mechanical composition of the corpus betrays both a conservative and a theologically disinterested attitude on the part of the redactors, which fits best with a very early date of redaction. Though the view upheld in Islamic tradition – that the Prophet's recitations were fixed already some twenty-five years after his death by the third caliph, ʿUthmān (644–56), thereby forming the corpus we have before us – cannot be positively proven, there is no evidence to contradict it.

Biblical revolutions

Greek Bibles from Late Antiquity have rightly dominated scholarly interest. Pandects such as the Codex Vaticanus, perhaps a creation sponsored by the emperor Constantine from the Eusebian scriptorium of Caesarea, or the newly reunited – in virtual form – Codex Sinaiticus, stand like milestones in the history of the transmission of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, first accomplished at Alexandria and known as the Septuagint. These ancient manuscripts of the complete Old and New Testaments stood at the forefront of innovation in the history of the book, themselves marking, or at least greatly contributing to, the transition from scroll to codex. While the practical advantages played a part in the transition, it has been suggested that the particularly Christian interest in making use of the codex from an early period also reflected an ideological stance, aimed at visibly underlining the independence acquired by the Greek Christian scriptures with respect to their Jewish antecedents, which were traditionally written on parchment scrolls.

The relation to its Jewish urtext, culturally part of an ongoing ‘dialogue with Judaism’, in Pelikan's phrase, remained a key aspect of the history of the Greek Bible in the Middle Ages. At the same time, the imperial patronage presumed for the early Bibles has been read symbolically as preparing the way for the extraordinary sponsorship of ‘imperial’ Bibles during the period.

German and Netherlandish Bibles to the advent of printing

Despite centuries of specialised scholarship on vernacular Bibles, abiding preconceptions cloud public and even scholars’ ideas about the availability of scripture in the common tongue and the access of laypeople to the Bible in the Middle Ages. Germanic versions of the entire Bible, such as Ulfilas’ Gothic Bible, of individual books or parts of books (such as Psalms) and of biblical retellings (the Diatessaron, or ‘gospel harmony’, for example), appeared in the first centuries of Germanic Christianity. The Bible has almost always been available in Germanic (and other European) vernaculars, and accessible to a range of people starting with, but not limited to, the clergy and nobility. By the later Middle Ages, German burghers were being exhorted by preachers to keep (printed) Bibles in their houses and to read aloud from them regularly; preachers translated the Gospels aloud into the common language during Sunday church services, and had been doing so for some time.

Other than in England, actual bans on making or owning translations of the Bible into the vernacular were generally local and temporary, or even equivocal: the decree of the archbishop of Metz of 1199 against ‘Waldensians’ and their Bibles was confirmed by Innocent III but without expressly prohibiting Bible translations, even though that was how many theologians and churchmen understood Innocent’s letter, Cum ex iniuncto, for some time. Local and sporadic attempts to control the distribution of scriptural material among the common people during outbreaks of ‘heresy’ (in the Languedoc and the Rhineland among Cathars and Waldensians, for example) or periods of religious tension have been taken by (mainly Protestant) church historians as proof that the medieval Roman church officially opposed vernacular Bibles. Yet those same proscriptions, almost all limited in scope and intent, can in fact be read as proving the opposite: that vernacular scriptures circulated freely among lay and clerical readers alike, at least by the high Middle Ages, and that the church was concerned merely to ensure that the Bible should not be interpreted ‘incorrectly’ by less-educated and less ‘reliable’ readers (who could also be understood as ‘heretics’ for their independent reading practices and concomitant rejection of clerical authority).

Only one thing is perfectly clear about the history of Biblical exegesis in Byzantium: it needs and deserves more study. Surveys of the history of Greek-language exegesis after the patristic period have been rare, brief and characterised by a conviction that ‘in the sixth century original exegesis came to an end’. Such a statement is not simple prejudice; it is nonetheless wrong on many levels. Unfortunately, this certainty that Byzantine theologians, preachers and rhetoricians wrote no original Biblical exegesis has discouraged sustained study of not only the content but the forms, functions and historical specificity of Byzantine exegesis. This chapter is not an apologia for Byzantine exegesis, which seldom appeals to modern tastes, nor will it be a detailed survey and analysis of how Byzantine exegesis developed over time, for such a survey and analysis are not yet possible. I will argue, nevertheless, that Byzantine exegesis is historically specific and unique and deserves study from a number of perspectives.

This chapter begins with a discussion of changes in exegetical method in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, for the transformation not only of exegesis but also of most other aspects of Christian culture in the eastern Mediterranean from the third through to the eighth century is undeniable and crucial. Following that discussion are four suggestions for the future study of how Byzantines understood and commented on the Bible. First, it would be useful to devote more study to specifically Byzantine content in that apparently most unoriginal of genres, the catena. A catena (from the Latin for ‘chain’) builds a scriptural commentary by excerpting passages from earlier exegetes and linking them together – usually in the margin of the text to which they all refer, but sometimes in close proximity in other ways. In the words of a website that has attempted to place links from chapters of scripture to each ante-Nicene father who commented on it, ‘a catena is a hypertext’. So, for example, Gen. 1:1 (‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’) inspired many commentators, preachers, teachers and contemplatives.

The study of the Bible in Arabic is in its infancy. While there are literally hundreds of known manuscripts containing portions of the Bible in Arabic translation, they have up to now been of little interest either to biblical scholars or even to church historians. One nineteenth-century scholar is quoted as having said, ‘There are more Arabic versions of the Gospels than can be welcome to theologians, pressed as they are with other urgent tasks.’ Bible scholars have typically thought of the Arabic versions as being too late to be of importance for the textual criticism of the Bible, and the history of the intellectual and cultural lives of the churches in the Arabic-speaking world of Islam still awaits its modern-day Eusebius. Nevertheless, the relatively few recent studies of Arabic versions of portions of the scriptures do allow us to sketch the history of the Arabic versions in broad outline, and they have shown that the translations are a gold mine for those interested in the history of biblical interpretation, especially in the ever more important realm of the history of relations between Muslims and Christians. As we shall see below, in a number of instances the studies have shown that Arabic translations of some apocryphal and so-called ‘pseudepigraphical’ biblical works have in fact proved to be indispensable for the establishment of their texts. In its origins, however, the Bible in Arabic seems first to have been an oral scripture.

Origins and early translations

Biblical texts translated into Arabic first circulated orally among Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians in pre-Islamic times. The Arabic Qurʾān, in its canonical form a product of the mid- to late seventh century ce at the earliest, presents the earliest textual evidence for the circulation of the Bible in Arabic. The Qurʾān paraphrases biblical narratives, refers to biblical personae by name, alludes to and comments on biblical verses, but does not exactly quote from the biblical text, with the exception of one or two possible instances (e.g., Ps. 37:29 in Qurʾān 21:105).

From the twelfth century through to the period of the Protestant Reformation, western Christian authors produced a great library of texts focusing on the relationship between human beings and God, offering insights to and paths for the spiritual life of the believer. Many of these were visionary texts, directly revealed to the author; some were formally theological and thus more properly could be called (using a word that medieval authors did not use in the way we do) ‘mysticism’. When twentieth-century scholars finally came to terms with this literature as part of the legacy of Christian thought, they basically agreed on two things: first, that the corpus (which had been largely neglected in favour of works of systematic theology) was an important part of the development of Christian theology, and second, that an encompassing term that could aptly describe a variety of these texts with a minimum of anachronism is ‘spirituality’ or ‘spiritual literature’.

Besides the fact that western Christian spiritual literature and the tradition of biblical exegesis are literary genres that have been relatively neglected by historians of Christianity, spirituality and exegesis have much in common. For one thing, spiritual literature relies on received traditions of biblical interpretation for fundamental keys to living a Christian life. In fact, many works of medieval biblical exegesis can be read as spiritual guides. This chapter will begin by discussing some of the most important examples of such ‘spiritual exegesis’, and then conclude with a look at how the traditions of biblical exegesis influenced a broader selection of spiritual literature.

Knowledge of the Bible in the eastern church among the laity was predominantly gained through art rather than text, though the readings in the liturgy were of course an oral source of its contents. Despite some enthusiastic scholarly claims that literacy was higher in the East than in the West, there is no good reason to imagine that more that 10 per cent of the population could read the Bible text for themselves. Even for the literate and the priesthood, the most desirable manuscripts with the sacred text were those enhanced by illuminations. Such illustrated books rarely contained the complete Bible; one of the very few known illustrated examples is the tenth-century Bible of Leo Sakellarios, which contains one frontispiece picture for each chapter (surrounded by verses written by the lay commissioner). This book, now in the Vatican Library (BAV, Reg. gr. 1), consists today of only the first volume (Genesis–Psalms) out of two, and is the largest known Byzantine manuscript (410 × 270 mm). Normally illustrated manuscripts consisted of individual books or collected books (such as Octateuchs, psalters, Job, gospelbooks or lectionaries).

By the year 600 Byzantium had emerged as the leading Christian society in the Mediterranean, with Constantinople predominant as the capital city, New Rome, of the eastern Roman empire. With the rise of Islam in the seventh century, Byzantine territories in the eastern Mediterranean were suddenly much reduced, and confrontation with the Umayyad rulers based in Damascus and in control of the Holy Land was as much a cultural as a political challenge. Both faiths developed their own distinctive forms of art, and the identifying feature of the eastern church came to be seen as the icon, whereas Islam cultivated the display of the holy word of the Qurʾān. The aim of this chapter is to trace the emergence of the icon, and to track its development. This will involve a brief flashback to the origins of Christian art in the East as a way of contextualising Byzantine Iconoclasm, which controlled the character of artistic production from around 730 up to 843. Thereafter the Triumph of Orthodoxy, which was declared in 843 and commemorated annually on the first Sunday in Lent, meant the acceleration of the use of art in the church, and the creation in due course of a sacred environment which was in great part constructed by the charismatic role of the icon in church decoration.

Introduction

The Bible was the supreme point of reference, the principal source of narrative imagery for artists working in the public sphere throughout the early Middle Ages, in the extended Mediterranean basin and across transalpine Europe. Public art, from its exposure to the elements, to the wear and tear of use and to the vagaries of changing fashion, is perhaps more vulnerable and liable to damage, replacement or total destruction than is art from the private sphere. Nevertheless, in a fragmentary state and inevitably sometimes with unbridgeable gaps in the evidence, a considerable sample of public imagery referencing the Bible survives from the period.

Traditions of illustrating the Old and the New Testaments had existed throughout the Roman world from at least the late second century ce and had become firmly established in the Mediterranean theatre by the fifth century. Individual scenes and narrative sequences had been devised and deployed by artists working for Christian patrons for a range of contexts, funerary, ecclesiastical and secular – the galleries and cubiculi of the catacombs on the outskirts of Rome, sarcophagi, the walls, fittings and fabrics of churches, liturgical vessels, as well as the personal jewellery and clothing of Christians in everyday life. In Rome, probably by the mid-fifth century, at Old St Peter’s, sequences from the two Testaments, starting with the creation and finishing with the mission of the apostles and the establishment of the church, faced each other on the walls of the nave; at the Lateran basilica also, the two Testaments were opposed, but this time antithetically, with typologically matched episodes set against each other down the length of the nave. Similarly in the third great early five-aisled basilica in Rome, S Paolo fuori le mura, an Old Testament sequence from the creation to Jacob on the south wall of the nave faced forty-two episodes from the life of St Paul, drawn from Acts, culminating in a single conceit from Revelation, the twenty-four elders adoring Christ, over the arch to the transept; and a generation later, in S Maria Maggiore, in the 430s, the mosaics of the nave comprised a selection of narratives from the Old Testament, episodes from the acts of four major patriarchs, before and under the Law, Abraham, Jacob, Moses and Joshua, while an idiosyncratic cycle of episodes from Christ's infancy covered the apsidal arch, drawing on apocryphal tradition as well as on the Pentateuch.

Introduction

The tenth and eleventh centuries do not deserve the neglect that has been their lot. Recent historiography – whether emphasising the theme of steady transformation or interested rather in the idea of a decisive rupture around the year 1000 – has brilliantly illuminated the movements that were in progress throughout this period. These affected not only the major kingdoms of France, Germany and England, but the whole group of western societies which we have come to designate ‘Latin Christianity’, in contrast with Byzantine and eastern Christianity. Between about 900 and 1100, this area can in fact be reduced to the kingdoms of Germany and Italy, a few oases in the Iberian peninsular fighting for Christian reconquest and the kingdoms of France and England. The small Scandinavian kingdoms, culturally dependent on England, had hardly emerged, while in the east of Europe a dividing line appeared, signalling a gradual separation between Latin and Greek zones of influence. The leaders of the Frankish countries had established their domination at the end of the eighth century and in the ninth century at the expense of the Byzantine empire, first appropriating for themselves and then cultivating the symbolic power of both ancient and Christian Rome, and dipping enthusiastically into the Judaeo-Christian Bible for the federal themes of a shared ideology. The wind changed in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The dream of a shared culture subservient to strong authority disappeared, giving way to regional cultures, disconnected from power, which relied more than before on the liberal arts of the quadrivium and trivium, and were less concerned with the communal benefit of biblical models than with their moral and spiritual function. However, there was a change of direction in the second half of the eleventh century: it announced that a process of restructuring was under way, inaugurating a profound transformation in the way the Bible was used throughout the West.

The story of the Jewish transmission of Greek Bible versions has never been fully told. An acute shortage of source materials, not only by comparison with the very rich Christian manuscript tradition but in absolute terms, can only be part of the explanation for this relative silence, since some of the sources in question have been known for a long time (at least since the later nineteenth century). The convergence of certain governing attitudes in the historiography of both Christianity and Judaism must also be held partly responsible.

Older scholarship

It has long been held a commonplace that the Greek-speaking, primarily Alexandrian, Jewish cultural milieu out of which the Greek translations of the Hebrew scriptures first arose effectively came to an end early in the second Christian century. General works on the Greek Bible, while freely admitting that – with the exception of one or two (such as the Wisdom of Solomon) that were originally composed in Greek – the books constituting the Christian Old Testament in Greek (collectively designated in Christian usage as ‘the Septuagint’) were translated by Jews for Jewish use, have tended until recently to assert that from the early second century they were abandoned by the Jews and subsequently became the exclusive possession of the Christian church. This abandonment is often associated specifically with their adoption by the church, and more particularly with their use by Christians in polemic against Judaism.