Were we to take the title set for our study in any narrow sense, a single sentence would cover it completely: there is no relationship at all between Erasmus and the medieval biblical tradition. Read, for example, Miss Beryl Smalley's excellent book on The study of the Bible in the middle ages, after collating everything that Erasmus wrote on the Bible: we have the impression that Erasmus simply knew nothing whatever about all that Miss Smalley has taken for her subject-matter. Hugh of Saint-Cher and Nicholas of Lyra get only a cursory mention in the Apology to his New Testament. Though the name is not mentioned, he is probably referring to the Glossa—and that with some acerbity—in one page of the Ratio in which he denounces wrong quotations of the Fathers. And that is about all. So far as biblical studies are concerned, Erasmus's knowledge of the middle ages is pretty well limited to the dialectical use made by the later schoolmen of truncated texts, wrenched from their contexts. He acknowledges—rather distantly—Thomas Aquina's exegetical principles; but so far as traditional exegesis is concerned he applies himself closely only to the Fathers, to Jerome especially, and then more and more to the Greek Fathers. His interest very soon fixed on textual criticism of the Bible, in particular of the New Testament, as it had been re-established (rather than simply revived) by Lorenzo Valla, under the influence of Jerome and the Origen of the Hexapla. Then, on this basis, he set himself to give new life to meditation on the divine word, and the preaching of it.

THE GOTHIC BIBLE

One of the fascinations of the study of the Gothic bible is that it is almost the only literary monument of a race which played so great a part in laying the foundations on which modern Europe eventually arose.

The historian Jordanes relates a popular tradition of about the middle of the sixth century according to which the Goths, leaving Scandza, i.e. the southern part of the Scandinavian peninsula, with a king at their head, arrived by sea at the Vistula delta. One of their branches, the Gepidae who established themselves there a little later, gave the name of Gepidoios to the islands situated at the river mouth. The Goths conquered and dispersed the inhabitants of the coast and also subdued the Vandals who were already established there; and according to Tacitus (Germania 43) and Ptolemy (Geographia 3. 5.20), they remained on the lower Vistula until the middle of the second century A.D.

A new migration took the Goths by stages across the Pripet marshes towards the steppes of the Ukraine and as far as the Black Sea, where their presence is noted in 238. They are then found in Moesia and in Thrace, in contact, and often at war, with the Romans. Finally, certain Goths established themselves within the borders of the empire, north of the Danube and in Dacia (257), while others became mercenaries in the Roman army.

TO GREGORY THE GREAT

The ways in which the Bible was interpreted by the Church of the first six centuries had already been partly determined by the Christian communities of the apostolic age itself. From the earliest stage to which the tradition of the Church can be traced, the Scriptures of the Old Testament had been interpreted as a book about Christ. The decisive act of God in human history had taken place; the Gospel events stood as the central and focal point of God's dealings with mankind. The promises to Israel, and the long chain of events in which, according to the Scriptures, these promises were worked out in divine judgements and in saving acts of mercy and deliverance, had reached their fulfilment in the life, death and Resurrection of Christ. This fulfilment could only be apprehended as such in the light of the ancient promises and the entire course of Israel's history, as this had been interpreted in the prophetic-historical tradition of the Old Testament. Conversely, the Scriptures could be rightly understood only when they were seen in the new perspective of the age of fulfilment which had now dawned. God had so acted in Christ that the focal point of history, which gave meaning to the whole process, no longer lay in the remote past, in the deliverance from Egypt, the Sinai Covenant and the entry into the Promised Land. A greater exodus had taken place, a new covenant had been established, and the promised age of the Spirit, the last days foretold by the prophets, had now begun.

PREHISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN BOOK: PAPYRUS AND PARCHMENT

The discoveries of the present century have completely revolutionized our ideas of the early Christian book and its ancestry. Handbooks written thirty years ago, or even less, are now largely obsolete, and it is only today that it is becoming possible to envisage the basic problems which have still to be solved. This advance in knowledge has been all the more dramatic because no early Christian writer has anything to tell us about the way in which Christian, or indeed any, books were written and circulated. Nor are pagan writers of the contemporary Graeco-Roman world much more informative: in common with the general paucity of technological literature, no treatise on ancient book-production has come down to us, and we have had to glean what knowledge we could from casual references and allusions, often incomplete or ambiguous.

Now, however, the picture is altered to the extent that finds of papyri, predominantly in Egypt, have provided us with hundreds of specimens of works of literature produced during the period in which Christian literature was born: and, still more recently, the astonishing discoveries in the deserts of Palestine have revealed numerous examples of the types of books and writing materials with which the earliest members of the Church would have been familiar and which they would have used themselves in daily life.

Three distinct types of writing material, papyrus, parchment, and wooden tablets, contributed, though in very different ways, to the formation of the Christian book, and all were in common use in Palestine and most of the Near East during the first century A.D. The first which we shall consider is papyrus.