Seminar: “Exegesis at the Edge: Methods and Approaches in the Biblical Scholarship of the Venerable Bede”
John Gallagher (Mellon Fellow, PIMS)
The Venerable Bede (c. 673–735) was the most accomplished biblical scholar of the early medieval Insular world. Although partly involved in creating Codex Amiatinus – the earliest complete text of the canonical Latin Vulgate Bible – Bede was cosmopolitan in his approach to scriptural textual traditions: his commentaries often promoted alternative and contradictory biblical versions, leading to a highly original and distinctive exegesis. The fourfold taxonomy of scriptural exegesis is central to how we understand the biblical scholarship of the period. However, Bede’s biblical commentaries frequently exhibit alternative analytical methods or complicate how we understand these modes to operate. This paper will introduce Bede’s life, his intellectual context, and his catalogue of works before outlining some aspects of the toolkit he used to tackle textual difficulties in the scriptural texts. The talk will introduce a larger research project that explores Bede’s innovative interpretative strategies and sheds new light on how the period’s foremost exegete approached the difficult task of biblical commentary.