Nicholas of Lyra’s Postilla super totam Bibliam

I don’t know about yours, but my Sunday afternoons tend to be double- or triple-booked, so I missed this lecture about an important 14th-century Franciscan scholar's commentary on the entire Bible and his profound debt to precedent Jewish exegesis:

Wrestling with Rashi

Deeana Copeland Klepper

Sunday, August 26 at 3 pm

Asher Library, Spertus College

Chicago, llinois

As the lecture notice states, the most popular Christian Bible commentary in late medieval and early modern Europe was Nicholas of Lyra's Postilla Litteralis Super Totam Bibliam, a vast work that incorporated Jewish interpretation, especially that of Rashi, into commentary on the Hebrew Bible. (According to the notice, Nicholas also made use of Rashi in interpreting the New Testament, which may be true, but not something I’ve seen documented.)

To paraphrase a preview article by Martina Sheehan, 600 years ago, a Franciscan scholar from a small town in Normandy crouched over his Bible and peeled away a millennium’s worth of questionable interpretation in hopes of arriving at a truer, more literal understanding of God’s word.

I paraphrase rather than quote Sheehan, because she claims that Nicholas had a fundamentalist approach to Bible study, a manifest absurdity. If Nicholas was a fundamentalist, then so was Rashi, and please, give me more of that old-time religion.

Sheehan is right when she notes that Nicholas’s approach to the study of the Bible would change Christianity forever. De Lyra's commentary contributed to the rediscovery of the sensus litteralis of the Bible among Christians in the high Middle Ages, an indispensable foundation of Luther, Zwingli, Bucer, and Calvin’s 16th-century Reformation efforts. As the famous ditty goes:

Si Lyra non lyrasset, Lutherus non saltasset.

The occasion of Klepper’s lecture: the Asher Library and Newberry Library's joint acquisition of a rare 1481 edition of the Postilla, a thick leatherbound tome containing de Lyra’s commentary and literal interpretation along with illustrative diagrams of details of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. As Paul Saenger, the Newberry’s curator of rare books, emphasizes, the illustrations are based on the 11th-century Jewish scholar Rashi’s drawings, many of which have been lost in the Hebrew manuscript tradition. Very cool.

For images, go here. Here is the relevant page from the Newberry Library's site. For more samples of Nicholas’s work, go here, here, and here.

Klepper is well-qualified to broach the topic. A picture is worth a thousand words, so here goes.

She has just published a volume entitled The Insight of Unbelievers: Nicholas of Lyra and Christian Reading of Jewish Text in the Later Middle Ages (Jewish Culture and Context Series; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). For more information, go here. Note also her essay entitled, “Nicholas of Lyra and Franciscan Interest in Hebrew Scholarship,” in Nicholas of Lyra: The Senses of Scripture (ed. Philip Krey and Lesley Smith; Leiden: Brill, 2000) 289-311.

Comments

[Tony Siew]

Dear John,

Thanks very much for this post. I will look up Klepper's book. As much as I dislike labels be it "fundamentalist" or others, but if it means that one seriously interprets the Bible to know God's will and understand it, and that one goes about doing it (being obedient), then I am also all for that "old-time religion."