The Letter to the Galatians

By Ian Christopher Levy

This work on Galatians is the inaugural volume in a significant new commentary series, The Bible in Medieval Tradition, which seeks to reconnect today's Christians with part of the church's rich tradition of biblical interpretation.

Ian Christopher Levy has brought together six substantial commentaries on Galatians written between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries. Levy's clear, readable translations of these major texts -- previously unavailable in English -- are augmented by his in-depth introduction, which locates each author within the broad context of medieval scholarship.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Mar 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781467422406

Ian Christopher Levy

Ian Christopher Levy is associate professor of theology at Providence College and editor-translator of the BMT volume on Galatians.

Book preview

Front Cover of The Letter to the Galatians

THE BIBLE IN MEDIEVAL TRADITION

GENERAL EDITORS

H. Lawrence Bond†

Philip D. W. Krey

Thomas Ryan

The major intent of the series THE BIBLE IN MEDIEVAL TRADITION is to reacquaint the Church with its rich history of biblical interpretation and with the contemporary applicability of this history, especially for academic study, spiritual formation, preaching, discussion groups, and individual reflection. Each volume focuses on a particular biblical book or set of books and provides documentary evidence of the most significant ways in which that work was treated in the course of medieval biblical interpretation.

The series takes its shape in dialogue both with the special traditions of medieval exegesis and with the interests of contemporary readers. Each volume in the series comprises fresh translations of several commentaries. The selections are lengthy and, in most cases, have never been available in English before.

Compared to patristic material, relatively little medieval exegesis has been translated. While medieval interpretations do resemble their patristic forebears, they do not simply replicate them. Indeed, they are produced at new times and in new situations. As a result, they lend insight into the changing culture and scholarship of the Middle Ages and comprise a storehouse of the era’s theological and spiritual riches that can enhance contemporary reading of the Bible. They, therefore, merit their own consideration, to which this series is meant to contribute.

Book Title of The Letter to the Galatians

© 2011 Ian Christopher Levy

All rights reserved

Published 2011 by

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /

P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

Printed in the United States of America

17 16 15 14 13 12 11 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Letter to the Galatians / translated and edited by Ian Christopher Levy.

p. cm. — (The Bible in medieval tradition)

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN 978-0-8028-2223-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Bible. N.T. Galatians — Criticism, interpretation, etc. — History — Middle Ages, 600-1500 — Sources. I. Levy, Ian Christopher.

BS2685.52.L48 2011

227′.4060940902 — dc22

2010040507

www.eerdmans.com

In Memory of

H. Lawrence Bond (1936-2009)

Contents

Editors’ Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction

Authors and Texts

Medieval Biblical Scholarship

The Patristic Period

The Carolingian Period

The Growth of Scholasticism

High Scholasticism

Conclusion

TRANSLATIONS

1.Haimo of Auxerre: Complete Galatians

2.Bruno the Carthusian: Complete Galatians

3.Peter Lombard: Galatians 2

4.Robert of Melun: Questions on Galatians

5.Robert Grosseteste: Galatians 3

6.Nicholas of Lyra: Galatians 4

Bibliography

Editors’ Preface

The medieval period witnessed an outpouring of biblical interpretation, which included commentaries written in Latin in a wide array of styles over the course of a millennium. These commentaries are significant as successors to patristic exegesis and predecessors to Reformation exegesis, but they are important in their own right.

The major intent of this series, The Bible in Medieval Tradition, is to place newly translated medieval scriptural commentary into the hands of contemporary readers. In doing so, the series reacquaints the Church with its rich tradition of biblical interpretation. It fosters academic study, spiritual formation, preaching, discussion groups, and individual reflection. It also enables the contemporary application of this tradition. Each volume focuses on the era’s interpretation of one biblical book, or set of related books, and comprises substantial selections from representative exegetes and hermeneutical approaches. Similarly, each provides a fully documented introduction that locates the commentaries in their theological and historical contexts.

While interdisciplinary and cross-confessional interest in the Middle Ages has grown over the last century, it falls short if it does not at the same time recognize the centrality of the Bible to this period and its religious life. The Bible structured sermons, guided prayer, and inspired mystical visions. It was woven through liturgy, enacted in drama, and embodied in sculpture and other art forms. Less explicitly ecclesial works, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, were also steeped in its imagery and narrative. Because of the Bible’s importance to the period, this series, therefore, opens a window not only to its religious practices but also to its culture more broadly.

Similarly, biblical interpretation played a vital role in the work of medieval theologians. Among the tasks of theological masters was to deliver ordinary lectures on the Bible. Their commentaries — often edited versions of their public lectures — were the means by which many worked out their most important theological insights. Thus the Bible was the primary text for theologians and the center of the curriculum for theology students. Some, such as the authors of summae and sentence commentaries, produced systematic treatises that, while not devoted to verse-by-verse explication, nevertheless often cited biblical evidence, addressed apparent contradictions in the scriptural witness, and responded under the guidance of nuanced theories of interpretation. They were biblical theologians.

Biblical commentaries provided the largest reservoir of medieval interpretation and hermeneutics, and they took a variety of forms. Monastic perspectives shaped some, scholastic perspectives still others. Some commentaries emphasized the spiritual senses, others the literal. Some relied more heavily on scholarly tools, such as dictionaries, histories, concordances, critical texts, knowledge of languages, and Jewish commentaries. Whatever the case, medieval commentaries were a privileged and substantial locus of interpretation, and they offer us fresh insight into the Bible and their own cultural contexts.

For readers and the Church today, critical engagement with medieval exegesis counteracts the twin dangers of amnesia and nostalgia. One temptation is to study the Bible as if its interpretation had no past. This series brings the past to the present and thereby supplies the resources and memories that can enrich current reading. Medieval exegesis also bears studying because it can exemplify how not to interpret the Bible. Despite nascent critical sensibilities in some of its practitioners, it often offered fanciful etymologies and was anachronistic in its conflation of past and present. It could also demonize others. Yet, with its playful attention to words and acceptance of a multiplicity of meanings and methods, it anticipated critical theory’s turn to language today and the indeterminacy characteristic of its literary theory.

What this series sets out to accomplish requires that selections in each volume are lengthy. In most cases, these selections have never been available in English before. Compared to the amount of patristic material, comparatively little medieval exegesis has been translated. Yet, the medieval was not simply a repetition of the patristic. It differed enough in genre, content, and application to merit its own special focus, and it applied earlier church exegesis to new situations and times as well as reflected the changing culture and scholarship in the Middle Ages. The series, therefore, makes these resources more widely available, guides readers in entering into medieval exegetical texts, and enables a more informed and insightful study of the Church’s biblical heritage.

H. LAWRENCE BOND†

PHILIP D. W. KREY

THOMAS RYAN

Abbreviations

Introduction

Saint Paul’s Epistle to the churches that he founded in Galatia addressed one of the most pressing issues facing the fledgling Christian movement, namely, the continuity of salvation history. Now that the Messiah had come, what place did Jewish Law have in this new community of believers? Since Galatians was written around A.D. 50-55, at a time when Church and synagogue were not yet mutually exclusive, the role of the Torah in the life of recently converted gentile believers needed to be determined if there was to be a coherent proclamation of the Gospel. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Galatian churches, where gentile Christians were being pressured to keep the Torah even to the point of being circumcised. The conflict reflected in the Epistle to the Galatians was not between Jews and Christians, since such distinct categories did not exist at this early date. The problem was that Paul’s opponents — themselves believers in Christ — contended that the Jewish Law remained in force even for gentiles who were, after all, entering a community founded upon a Jewish Messiah. Paul, on the other hand, believed that Torah observance among gentiles ran contrary to the Gospel of salvation through faith in Christ.¹ It is important to remember in all of this, as New Testament scholar James Dunn reminds us, that earliest Christianity was not yet seen as something separate and distinct from Judaism…. The first Christians had some distinct and peculiar beliefs about Jesus; but their religion was the religion of the Jews.²

This Epistle is a tour de force in which the Galatians are at once admonished and encouraged, chastised for their foolishness, and praised for their kindness. The Epistle’s readers are given wonderful insights into Paul’s own life, one marked by humble repentance and unshaken confidence in the message that he has received directly from the Lord Jesus Christ. More than this, however, the Apostle presents a consistent narrative of salvation history extending from the first human being of faith, Abraham, to the giving of the Mosaic Law, and finally to the advent of Jesus Christ in the fulfillment of God’s redemptive purpose. All of this points to one central fact: faith in God, specifically God’s unique action in Christ, is the means to salvation — not the observation of legal precepts. By rooting the life of faith in Abraham, the father of the Jews, Paul locates the unifying principle of salvation history and thereby finds a place for gentiles among the people of God. The believer no longer lives by the Torah but in the Spirit. The new life in Jesus Christ is a life led in the Spirit, transforming all those who enter into this new relationship with God. New Testament scholar Bruce Longenecker observes that in Galatians Paul examines the Christian life from both a temporal and a qualitative perspective. With regard to the temporal, Paul looks at God’s eschatological acts together with God’s interaction with Israel over the centuries so as to draw a distinction between the then and the now. On the qualitative level, Paul proves that the Christian life is characterized by conformity to Christ such that selfless love becomes the hallmark of the new life in Christ. Longenecker rightly notes that this qualitative dimension of conformity to the crucified Christ proves to be the foundation that holds the letter together.³

Not surprisingly, therefore, two consistent themes come to the fore throughout the history of commentary on Galatians: the continuity of salvation history that finds its fulfillment in Jesus Christ, and the transformative power of grace that is borne out in the life of the believer. The patristic and medieval commentators share a common confidence that with the dawning of the new epoch inaugurated by Christ, those who place their faith in him will find the freedom to love God and neighbor in ways hitherto impossible. These commentators, as we shall see, are remarkably attuned to the personal ramifications of the cosmic shift that has taken place as a result of the unique and decisive action of God in Jesus Christ.

In some ways medieval Christians were far removed from the concerns that the Apostle Paul had to grapple with in the first century. The keeping of Jewish Law had long ceased to be an issue within gentile Christendom. But none of this is to say that these Christians had therefore lost interest in the sweep of salvation history; quite the opposite is true. The Franks considered themselves to be the new Israel, and compared their kings to David and their bishops to Samuel. Indeed, medieval coronation rites across the western Middle Ages were replete with the imagery and texts of the Psalms; kings were not merely crowned, but anointed as God’s holy ones.⁴ In this continuity was a sense of fulfillment, that the history of the Jews had been a prelude to the formation of a Christian people. Jewish history remained sacred not so much for what it was in itself, but for what it foreshadowed. It all pointed to Christ and to his body, the Church. With the coming of Christ the old had passed away and the new had broken in; the shadow of truth had given way to the truth in its full revelation. The central point to remember in all of this, however, is that for medieval Christians there was only one truth all along: once veiled and now disclosed. This sense of the unity of truth, the singleness of faith, allowed them to bridge the two testaments. Their faith was the manifest version of what the patriarchs and prophets dimly beheld centuries earlier.

This line of thinking was manifested in medieval sacramentology such that ancient Jewish rites prescribed by the Law were viewed as symbols that pointed toward the great Christian sacraments instituted by Jesus Christ.⁵ In medieval parlance one would say that the Old Law of works had finally yielded to the New Law of grace, the very grace now available to Christians in the Church’s own sacraments. But if Jesus Christ is the substance of faith and grace for all times, then the ancient patriarchs must have realized that the legal rites of their own day were only temporary and thus placed their trust in the grace that could come only through Christ. In other words, the only difference between faithful Jews and their Christian counterparts was that of timing. The first group looked forward to Christ, and the second group looked back to him. All of this is to say that medieval Christians could not have conceived of themselves as doing anything new; they were not only heirs to an ancient past but also players in an eternal drama whose protagonist had never changed. Jesus Christ the Word stood at the center of sacred history and thus formed the substance of all faith from age to age. Nowhere is this view more evident than in medieval expositions of Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, where the commentators could grapple with the great questions of Law and Gospel, grace and works, and of what it means to live a new life in the Spirit.

It is important at this point to acknowledge that negative treatments of Jews and Judaism do appear in patristic and medieval Galatians commentaries. Much of this is the result of misconceptions regarding Jewish religious practice. However, only in the last few decades has modern New Testament scholarship vigorously addressed distortions of first-century Torah observance that made it appear far more legalistic and anxiety-provoking than it really was.⁶ Furthermore, some Christian biblical commentators did interact positively with Jewish scholars, especially in northern France during the twelfth century. They were eager to learn more about the Hebrew language and rabbinic exegesis.⁷ Unfortunately, such positive exchanges will have to be balanced with the fact that the Talmud was ordered burned in Paris in 1242 on the grounds that this collection of rabbinic teachings constituted a deviation from what the Church deemed appropriate forms of Jewish belief and practice.⁸

There is simply no getting around the fact that most medieval Christian commentators believed that Judaism had run its course; it belonged to the old age. No doubt it had its value inasmuch as the people and events of the Old Testament had borne witness to the coming of Christ, and there were indeed many faithful Jews in those days who would find their eventual salvation in Jesus Christ. Yet it was in these terms that Judaism was regarded as a prologue to the fulfillment of salvation history. Now that salvation had been realized once and for all with the dawning of the age of grace, the Jewish religion no longer seemed to serve any productive purpose. There was, therefore, a sense of triumphalism among the Christian exegetes, who could tolerate the presence of Jews in the midst of a Christian society but did not recognize the legitimacy of their supposedly outmoded belief system. Even this limited toleration began to break down in the later Middle Ages, however, as Jews were expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1306, and from Spain in 1492.⁹ The irony is that as exegetical methods became increasingly refined and the need for Hebrew language skills more clearly recognized, Christian scholars had no Jewish neighbors to whom they could turn.

Medieval commentaries on Galatians reveal how later generations could be caught up in the Apostle’s powerful rhetoric and be led to draw the anachronistic conclusion that Paul had pitted Christianity against Judaism, and so should later generations. They also reveal the interpretive strategies of medieval commentators on Galatians, which is an epistle that highlights the tension of Jewish Law and faith in Christ. It does appear at times, though, that they failed to recognize that Paul’s adversaries in matters of Torah observance were themselves fellow Jewish Christians. Hence there was a tendency to portray the situation as though Paul were doing battle against Jewish opponents of the Christian faith, when in reality this was a struggle over self-identity within the fledgling Christian community. For all that, however, the medieval Christian commentaries do not reveal their authors to be consumed with animus toward their Jewish contemporaries, whom they usually did not know. Instead, their sometimes facile and distorted presentations of Judaism are blithely passed on in an effort to draw a sharper antithesis for Christians between flesh and spirit, fear and love, works and grace.

The point is that these Galatians commentaries were written not simply to increase the readers’ knowledge of Christian history and doctrine, but even more to enhance their Christian faith and piety. That the commentaries all exhibit genuine pastoral concerns should not surprise us. They were written by monks and friars, by deacons and bishops, all of whom were committed in one form or another to the care of souls (cura animarum). The commentaries emphasize that the fruit of grace and faith in Christ transforms the life of the believer here and now. Christians live under the New Law of grace and are expected to actualize this present reality in lives marked by the power of love. Coming to grips with the concerns of the first-century church in Galatia, therefore, allowed medieval Christians to unravel the riddle of history and thereby gain a greater understanding of themselves.

Authors and Texts

This volume considers the works of six authors in an effort to represent the broad sweep of the medieval commentary tradition on the Epistle to the Galatians. At this point something should be said about the selection process itself. First of all, these are all major authors who effectively represent their respective epochs, from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries. The material that follows will examine the larger developments and the place of these authors within the tradition, thereby allowing us to observe how each age builds on the last even as it contributes something of its own to succeeding generations. These six works were also chosen because they have never been translated into English or any other modern language.¹⁰ The goal is to provide modern students and scholars ready access to medieval works that might otherwise have gone unread by those who are not specialists in the field.

In addition to providing six hitherto untranslated works, this volume also offers an appraisal of the larger sweep of Galatians commentaries. This Introduction takes up four major periods: Patristic, Carolingian, Early Scholastic, and High Scholastic. Throughout I have sought to locate recurring themes that appear to form the backbone of the commentary tradition as well as the inevitable changes that occur as a result of new methods and ideas. In order to achieve this, I have not relied solely on my own reading of the texts but have drawn on the insightful, often ground-breaking, work of many twentieth-century scholars: Artur Landgraf, Palémon Glorieux, Ceslaus Spicq, Margaret Gibson, Beryl Smalley, and Karlfried Froehlich, to name just a few. Like Bernard of Chartres, I stand on the shoulders of giants.

The translations are arranged in chronological order, beginning with that of Haimo of Auxerre in the middle of the ninth century; his work is followed by that of Bruno the Carthusian at the end of the eleventh; then Peter Lombard and Robert of Melun in the middle of the twelfth century; Robert Grosseteste in the early thirteenth; and Nicholas of Lyra in the early fourteenth century. The Galatians commentaries of Haimo and Bruno are presented in their entirety. In order to keep this volume at a manageable size, I found it impossible to offer complete translations of all the selected commentaries. The selection from Peter Lombard’s commentary is the whole of chapter 2; that from Robert Grosseteste the whole of chapter 3; and that from Nicholas of Lyra the whole of chapter 4. Choosing these three separate chapters gives readers solid and representative selections with minimum overlap. Robert of Melun’s work is different from the others since it is not a commentary as such but rather a collection of scholastic questions pertaining to the text. These relatively brief questions on Galatians are given in their entirety.

The short sketch of the six authors that follows presents the rationale for their inclusion in this volume. The greater part of this Introduction, however, will provide the reader a detailed and contextualized analysis of these authors and their works.

Haimo of Auxerre, a ninth-century French monk, is an outstanding example of the scholarly advances made in the Carolingian age.¹¹ His work also exercised a considerable influence in later centuries. Rather than being commonplace compilations of patristic sources, Haimo’s commentaries are sophisticated pieces that exhibit a high degree of theological and methodological sophistication.

Bruno the Carthusian, best known as the father of Carthusian monasticism, had earlier been one of the leading scholastics of his age and headed the cathedral school of Reims in the late eleventh century.¹² As we shall see below, his work was marked by the advent of logical analysis, which was becoming prevalent in medieval theology and exegesis. Thus, he is an apt example of that fruitful transition period in which the task of writing biblical commentaries passed from the monastery to the lecture hall.

Peter Lombard, one of the premier scholastic theologians of the twelfth century, needs less introduction. Anyone with a passing interest in medieval theology will know him for his great work of systematic theology, the Sentences, in which he carefully anthologized the most fundamental aspects of Christian doctrine. It was a staple in the study of theology well into the sixteenth century. Theologians from Saint Bonaventure to Martin Luther commented on Lombard’s Sentences. But Peter was also a highly regarded biblical exegete who produced widely read commentaries on the Psalms and the Pauline Epistles.¹³

Robert of Melun, likewise a theologian of the mid–twelfth century, was influenced by the teaching of the brilliant Peter Abelard, and his work here reflects that. As noted above, Robert did not write a commentary as such, but rather a series of scholastic questions on selected portions of the Pauline Epistles.¹⁴ His questions on Galatians have been included in this volume because they are prime examples of scholastic interest in theological problems, or quaestiones, embedded in the biblical text, which were then analyzed apart from the text in which they originally arose.

Robert Grosseteste, a theologian at Oxford University and later bishop of Lincoln in 1235, has long been regarded as one of the most original medieval thinkers; his works range from science and theology to ecclesiastical affairs.¹⁵ His commentary on Galatians, which has only recently been edited, provides profitable insights not only into the mind of this polymath but also into the commenting of the biblical moral school, exemplified in such early-thirteenth-century figures as his fellow Englishman, Stephen Langton. These were commentators who hearkened back to the style of the Victorine school and were dedicated to the role of biblical exegesis in fostering an affective piety.¹⁶

The last of the commentaries takes us into the fourteenth century and the work of one of the greatest and most influential of the medieval biblical commentators, Nicholas of Lyra.¹⁷ A Franciscan theologian, Lyra commented on the entire Bible with a special emphasis on the literal sense of the text. This is not to say that he eschewed spiritual meanings, but rather that he approached them cautiously.

A word should be said about the editions used for the translations as well as the translation process itself. The Latin texts of Haimo, Bruno, and Peter Lombard are those provided in the Patrologia Latina (PL). The PL is not a critical edition, although it is usually based on early modern printed editions. To date there are no critical editions of these authors’ biblical commentaries, which survive in numerous manuscripts spanning several centuries. The translation of Lyra was made from an early printed edition of his Postilla Litteralis (Strassburg, 1492). It consists of concise comments in rather abbreviated Latin surrounding the biblical text. Only the works of Robert of Melun and Robert Grosseteste have been critically edited; hence those editions have been used. The former was edited in 1938 by Raymond Martin within a multivolume collection, and the latter in 1995 by James McEvoy for the series Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Mediaevalis (vol. 130).

Medieval Biblical Scholarship

Before tackling the history of Pauline commenting itself, I will offer a few remarks concerning the medieval approach to Scripture. Medieval biblical commenting, however exacting and sophisticated its methods, was undertaken from the perspective of faith and sought to promote faith through a deeper understanding of the Bible. Living in a rich symbolic world, medieval exegetes could make connections between words and events that are much less comprehensible to modern scholars trained in historical-critical methods. This is largely due to the fact that throughout the Middle Ages the Bible was regarded as a uniquely inspired and infallible book written by a divine author. As such, medieval commentators plumbed the depths of Scripture for further insight into the Catholic faith. Patristic and medieval commentators were not without historical sensibilities; they recognized that the human authors of Scripture wrote in ways befitting their education, language, and culture. Yet the commentators still believed that they themselves inhabited a world very similar to that of Scripture, one that was infused with the supernatural. No great interpretative divide opened up between the commentator and the text. If the Apostle Paul and the Gospel writers lived in a world of miracles and signs, angels and demons, so did their medieval readers. Moreover, they believed that the events recorded in Scripture often functioned as symbols pointing to future events and greater spiritual truths that could be unlocked under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.¹⁸

In the later Middle Ages commentators increasingly valued the letter of Scripture as itself informed by the Holy Spirit and thus replete with different meanings. Because Scripture was ultimately anchored in a divine author, the meaning of the text was not confined to what the human author may have comprehended at the time it was written. Holy Scripture, for the medieval commentators, continued to speak afresh precisely because its principal author, the Holy Spirit, is very much alive. There was a sense in which the text is never really closed, its meaning never fixed, since the divine author is continually inspiring readers and disclosing as yet undiscovered truths. The meaning of the text will be found in the interaction, the dialogue, between the Holy Spirit and the reader. Actually, this view of the active relationship between text and reader should prove congenial to much current literary criticism that places great importance on the role of the reader as a participant in the construction of a text’s meaning.¹⁹

Further on, we will examine medieval theories of the literal and spiritual senses of the biblical text, but a word should be said here about their relevance to the modern reader. The historical-critical method has been a great boon to biblical studies, for it has given us a much greater understanding of the origins of texts with their underlying cultural and linguistic traditions. Yet this same method can also be overly confident in its own ability to explain the true meaning of the text based solely upon the historical situation (Sitz im Leben) to the exclusion of any deeper symbolism. Modern readers who reject the insights of their patristic and medieval predecessors risk closing themselves to meaning that historical-critical research alone may not be able to uncover. There is nothing naïve in the medieval belief that a text can have more than one meaning and that Holy Scripture, therefore, conveys sacred truth at different levels of perception. Recovering this medieval sense of the fecundity of the biblical text should facilitate a deeper appreciation among today’s Christians for the continuity revealed in the divine mystery as it expresses itself across time. Indeed, one is reminded of the great twentieth-century Catholic theologian, Henri de Lubac, who warned against ‘modern’ self-sufficiency, which induces our contemporaries to attribute to themselves a better understanding than their forebears, simply because they were born after them.²⁰

There is a need, therefore, to strike a proper balance that neither retreats into the irrecoverable world of the twelfth century nor brushes it off as so much ancient dust. One finds a thoughtful solution in a statement issued by the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1993. On the one hand, one must reject as unauthentic every interpretation alien to the meaning expressed by the human authors in their written text. To admit the possibility of such alien meanings would be equivalent to cutting off the biblical message from its root, which is the Word of God in its historical communication. On the other hand, there are reasons … for not taking ‘alien’ in so strict a sense as to exclude all possibility of higher fulfillment. The paschal event, the death and resurrection of Jesus, has established a radically new historical context, which sheds fresh light upon the ancient texts and causes them to undergo a change in meaning. For the faithful, a sense of continuity between the Old and the New Testaments emerges when one trusts that the Holy Spirit, principal author of the Bible, can guide human authors in the choice of expressions in such a way that the latter will express a truth the fullest depths of which the authors themselves do not perceive. Here, then, we have what the commission calls the fuller sense (sensus plenior), defined as a deeper meaning of the text, intended by God but not clearly expressed by the human author.²¹ Along these same lines, the Protestant biblical scholar Brevard Childs has argued that allegory or typology, when properly understood and practiced, remains an essential part of Christian interpretation.²²

If one embraces this view, then the medieval commentators will be seen to offer much to the modern reader. They brought with them their faith in the Nicene Creed; belief in the triune God informed their exegesis. Biblical texts could therefore speak to the mystery of the Trinity and the Incarnation even if the human authors of these texts would not have perceived the full breadth of what they were communicating. Hence, while it is anachronistic to attribute to the Apostle Paul explicit knowledge of doctrines that were defined by the Church some three hundred years after his death, there is nothing illegitimate, from the perspective of the fuller sense, about later generations drawing out the fuller implications of his words from the vantage point of later doctrinal developments. Because the medieval commentators addressed the biblical texts through this sort of faithful retrospection, they made the reading of Scripture a more accessible and relevant event for believers in the present. This can surely benefit Christian readers of Scripture in the twenty-first century as it did in the twelfth century.

Conscious of their successes, therefore, we should also be frank when assessing the methodological shortcomings endemic to medieval biblical exegesis. The medieval commentators worked under certain limitations that, while granting their writings a unique character, are no longer tenable. For instance, in contrast to contemporary biblical commentators who write in a modern language about ancient Hebrew and Greek texts that they dissect in painstaking detail, medieval exegetes enjoyed some measure of hermeneutical immediacy because of the basic linguistic fact that they commented in Latin on a Latin biblical text. The language of their own thought, which had been formed by the Latin of the Church and its liturgy, was itself shaped by the Latin of what came to be known as the Vulgate Bible. This was a Latin translation of the Bible undertaken by Saint Jerome at the end of the fourth century at the request of Pope Damasus in which the saint revised earlier Latin editions that were often marred by textual corruptions.²³

This is not to discount those scholars, especially among the mendicant orders, who made an effort to attain at least a rudimentary knowledge of the biblical languages and historical background. Yet even where genuine linguistic prowess was brought to bear by exegetes such as Robert Grosseteste and Nicholas of Lyra — both translated in this volume — medieval commentary remained very much a Latin enterprise. The use of Greek and Hebrew lexicons might be employed to facilitate a more accurate reading of Scripture’s literal sense, but the readership still required exegesis suited for the Latin biblical text that they read in the library and heard during the Mass. The medieval approach to Scripture may be irretrievable. Indeed, few today would seriously entertain a complete return to the medieval method; the equivalent would entail writing a commentary in English based upon the 1609 King James Version of the Bible. But, as we shall see, writing in Latin about a Latin text allows for an almost seamless relationship, an easier flow from text to comment, which helps to break down the wall between the biblical author and his medieval reader. To the extent that it is possible, I have tried to capture this in English.

Another central difference between the medieval and modern commentator concerns the stability of the biblical text itself. Modern scholars work from a critical edition of the Greek or Hebrew text and consider the numerous textual variations in the ancient sources. Here in the age of modern printing one can be confident that the latest Stuttgart edition is the same everywhere. This was not the case in the Middle Ages where hand-copied Latin bibles were made from other hand-copied bibles extending across the centuries. The medieval authors were certainly aware of textual corruptions, and made a concerted effort to correct biblical manuscripts where they could, but they lacked the control of textual production that modern scholars take for granted.²⁴

One should not be surprised, therefore, if the Galatians text in this volume varies in places from author to author. Also because their biblical text is Latin, it will not always translate into English as the Greek Bible would. The medieval authors were working from a translation that had to express the Greek to the best of the ability of a third- or fourth-century translator (whether Jerome or someone else). It is for this reason that I have translated the Latin biblical text as it is given in the commentary itself, not according to some modern version. To appreciate these