Peter Comestor and Biblical Chronology

A well-known medieval legend represented Peter Comestor, Master of the Histories, as one of three brothers, the others being Peter Lombard, author of the Four Books of Sentences, and Gratian, author of the Decretum. ¹ Their three greatest works, all produced around the middle of the 12th century within a span of little more than 30 years, were the most enduring manuals produced in the Middle Ages for teaching and learning biblical history, theology, and canon law. Peter Comestor (d. 1178) in his Historia scholastica shared the dedication of Hugh of St Victor (d. 1142) to the study of the Bible as history, seeing in this the foundation on which other meanings could be established. ² During the 12th century the great Gloss, later to be named the Glossa ordinaria, was in the making ³ and lectures on the Bible multiplied in the schools. ⁴ But Peter, along with Hugh and Andrew of St Victor (d. 1175), ⁵ was largely responsible for the ‘historical turn’ in contemporary teaching of the Bible. ⁶ In the preface to his Historia Peter wrote: ‘The reason why I took up this task was the request that my colleagues pressed upon me. When they read in the glosses about biblical history, they found that its sequence was spread widely but too briefly and with little explanation, so they made me undertake this task so that they could get back to following the truth of history.’ ⁷ However, a younger Parisian master of theology, one who knew the Historia well, Peter the Chanter, was to complain that an ad litteram interest in historical details such as places, dates, genealogies, and buildings diverted attention away from the moral teaching of the Scriptures. ⁸ Nonetheless, the Historia became firmly established as the encyclopaedic and standard reference work for biblical history. Peter Comestor looked back to a long tradition of study of the Bible as a historical source. He did not re-shape this tradition but he used it comprehensively, and the purpose of this essay is to illustrate with two examples—one from the Old Testament and one from the New—some of the ways in which Peter, in his Historia scholastica, explained biblical chronology with the aid of this tradition.

In chapter 10 of his History of the Book of Daniel Peter explains the eighth of Daniel’s visions (Dan. 9), the one in which Daniel receives the message which Gabriel brought him in the first year of the reign of Darius (Dan. 9:1). ⁹ It came while Daniel was at prayer, reflecting on the 70 years which were to pass, according to the prophet Jeremiah (25:11–12), while Jerusalem lay in ruins (Dan. 9:2). Gabriel told Daniel that after 70 shortened weeks (hebdomades abbreviatae) Israel’s iniquity will be abolished and God will allow Jerusalem to be restored and rebuilt. From then until the coming of Christ there will be seven weeks and 62 weeks but after the 62 weeks Christ will be slain and a people will come with their leader (populus cum duce suo venturo, Dan. 9:26) and destroy the city. A covenant will be made with many in a week (the 70th). Half way through this week all sacrifice will have stopped and Jerusalem will again be desolate (Dan. 9: 21–7).

Peter explains that the weeks are weeks of years, not of days; a week of seven days corresponds to seven lunar years. Thus, the 70 weeks amount to 490 years, each of 12 lunar months and thus (according to the Vulgate) ‘abbreviated,’ a lunar year being shorter than a solar year by 11 days. Bede, whom Peter both mentions and follows, had explained the 70 prophetic weeks in this way and, using regnal years, had counted them from the successful petition of Nehemiah to King Artaxerxes in the 20th year of his reign for the restoration of Jerusalem (Nehemiah, 2:1–8) to the suffering and death of the anointed prince who is Christ that took place in the 18th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar. ¹⁰ The half week (in the 70th week) before all sacrifice ceases corresponds to the years of Christ’s public ministry, beginning with his baptism and ending with his death on the Cross when the sacrifices of the Old Law came to an end and the Temple was rendered desolate. ¹¹ The destruction of the city by the Romans fell outside this period of 70 weeks, although Peter records that Tertullian included the destruction of the city within the 70 weeks and had them begin in the first year of the reign of Darius. ¹²

For clarification of the ordering of 70 weeks into a period of seven weeks followed by one of 62, Peter turns to the Hebraei who in bringing together a smaller numeral and a larger one placed the smaller one first whereas Peter’s readers would place the larger number first. The one remaining week, the 70th, may be divided between Vespasian and Hadrian because, Peter writes, Vespasian and Titus ‘made peace with the Jews’ for three and a half years and Aelius Hadrian did likewise for another three and a half years when Jerusalem was again destroyed before being rebuilt as Aelia. ¹³ The Hebrews counted 172 Olympiads (Olympiads being four-year periods commencing in 776 BCE) from the first year of Darius’s reign to the final suppression of Jerusalem under Hadrian. But, Peter writes, they did not do this carefully (non magnopere curantes) as they made the total not 688 but 696 years or 99 Hebrew weeks plus three years. ¹⁴ The Gloss mentions 174 Olympiads which amount to 696 years.

Most of this Peter found in the Gloss. ¹⁵ The Gloss presents the text of the Vulgate and adds numerous interlinear and marginal glosses. The marginal glosses are not infrequently long and substantial extracts based upon or taken, with acknowledgement, from previous biblical commentaries and other works. Other marginal glosses which are not attributed to a named author may include material provided by the compilers of the Gloss themselves. Peter does not reproduce the Vulgate text in full. He makes selections and, as he does so, he picks freely from the interlinear and marginal glosses found in the Gloss, copying material that he wants to keep while also re-working and shortening it, adding some comments himself and producing in the process an unbroken exposition in place of disjointed jottings and notes. His enumeration of the abbreviated weeks, where we find the first of two mentions in this chapter of Bede’s name, is based on some 26 lines in the Gloss which are based on Bede (Beda in libro de natura rerum). ¹⁶ A little later, when Peter juxtaposes what Bede and Africanus say about how the 70 weeks will end, he reproduces in summary form a longer unattributed Nota, also 26 lines long, which is found in the Gloss. ¹⁷ And when he moves on to Tertullian he once again summarizes, but does not reproduce verbatim, a passage he finds in the Gloss attributed to Tertullian in libro contra iudeos. ¹⁸ Rainer Berndt has meticulously listed ten passages where Peter has tacitly drawn upon the commentary on Daniel written earlier (c. 1155–62) by Andrew of St Victor but the two parallels he has found in this chapter are very faint. ¹⁹ Peter’s handling of Daniel’s eighth vision with its complex chronology thus appears to be almost entirely informed by what he lifted from the Gloss and then re-arranged.

My second example of Peter’s representation of Biblical chronology is taken from his Historia evangelica—the part of the Historica scholastica that is devoted to the Gospels. This example shows how Peter could break away from the Gloss. He was teaching from 1159 until his retirement in 1178, becoming chancellor of Notre Dame in 1168 following Peter Lombard’s election as bishop of Paris. His lectures on each of the Gospels survive—the first to do so from Paris—in the form of unprinted reportationes. ²⁰ These are based on the Gloss which by the mid-12th century covered almost the whole Bible. The content of the lectures overlaps with the Historia which was finished in 1169–73. However, the lectures, like the Gloss but unlike the Historia, engage closely with mystical and allegorical interpretation. The Historia, on the other hand, gives more focused attention than do the lectures to the literal sense which is, however, by no means neglected in the latter. I shall consider Peter’s handling in his Historia of the chronology of Christ’s life and work on earth and on its significance in the unfolding of universal history as well as his unravelling of differences of interpretation. These matters do not loom large in the Gloss.

Obvious but scanty starting points are found in the opening narratives of Jesus’ birth and infancy in Luke’s Gospel. At 3:1–3 and 23 Luke writes that John the Baptist began baptising penitents in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, and these included Jesus who was then, according to Peter, 13 days into his 30th year, ²¹ having been born in the 42nd year of the long reign of Augustus Caesar. ²² Other ‘parallel’ dates which Peter, like Bede, gives briefly for Christ’s birth are: the 30th year of Herod’s reign, the 3rd year of the 193rd Olympiad, and the 752nd year from the foundation of Rome. ²³ That Christ’s birth also took place on a Sunday night at the kalends of January, Peter writes, may be established from a computistic table (tabula computi). Here, as Hubert Silvestre noticed, Peter summarizes tacitly a short passage in the De divinis officiis of Rupert of Deutz, a monk of St Lawrence outside Liège who wrote the work between 1109 and 1112. ²⁴ But there are uncertainties about the length of Augustus’s reign which render it difficult to state in which year of the reign Jesus was born. ²⁵ Further difficulties are presented by the number of years that had passed since Adam—5,196 or 5,199—and since Abraham—2,012 years according to the Septuagint but far fewer according to the Hebrew Old Testament. ²⁶ In Chapter 30 Peter writes that at the time when John began baptising and preaching redemption—in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—5,225 years had elapsed since Adam according to the Septuagint, but 4,000 according to Jerome’s translation of the hebraica veritas. ²⁷ The 16th year of Tiberius’s reign was the 81st jubilee year when, according to some, with the replacement of circumcision by baptism, the sixth age or chiliad commenced and the fifth came to an end. ²⁸ Some see the incarnation as the turning point when ancient ways of counting years—for example in Olympiads—were replaced by a new numbering. ²⁹ Yet others make the passion of Christ the turning point for the commencement of both the sixth age and of the seventh age of rest (septimam quiescentium). ³⁰

In chapter 33 Peter claims that at the time of his baptism Jesus was just 13 days into the start of his 30th year. ³¹ He states that one year later on the same day as his baptism Jesus changed water into wine, that at the Passover in the following year—the 32nd—John was beheaded, and that at the next Passover—the 33rd year—Jesus himself suffered death. Thus Jesus lived for a total of 32 full years and for part of a 33rd year—deemed a half year—between his nativity and passion. However, Peter records that John Chrysostom, in his tenth Homily, had written that Jesus had completed his 30th year when he was baptised, an opinion which results in a life of 33 full years and part of a 34th that runs from the nativity to the passion. ³² Some clarification of the 13 extra days and of the part- or half-year from the nativity to the passion is provided later in chapter 37 where opinions are given. One opinion is that the turning of water into wine at the marriage feast at Cana occurred near the first Passover following Jesus’ baptism. ³³ But church custom stands in the way of this and holds that the coming of the Magi, the baptism of Jesus, and the changing of water into wine, all occurred at the Epiphany—the 13th day—although in different years, namely the first, the 30th or the 31st, and the next. ³⁴ Peter cites in support part of a sermon by bishop Maximus beginning Cum plura nobis, fratres, and observes that older books show that each of these events is an illustratio, an epiphany, of Christ. ³⁵ But there are two opinions (duplex opinio) held by catholic teachers about the historical sequence, and the Gospels begin to diverge in their accounts of Jesus’ life when he calls his first disciples. Writers in the unum ex quattuor tradition, those who merge the four Gospel accounts into a single, largely harmonized narrative, follow Ammonius of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Theophilus, the seventh bishop of Antioch. ³⁶ These agree that Jesus’ fasting in the wilderness preceded his public preaching, his calling of disciples, and his sermon on the mount. The changing of water into wine followed these events, as the disciples were present at Cana. ³⁷ However, Peter writes that the more usual and the better opinion is that after the miracle of the water and wine Jesus secretly called his disciples and secretly preached but, once John was put in prison, he began to preach publicly. This sequence is the one Peter prefers but without prejudice, he adds, to the alternative. ³⁸

Unlike Peter in the Historia, the Gloss, which provides commentary upon each Gospel separately, provides very little information about the chronology of Christ’s life. It does note when Jesus went up to Jerusalem—once before John was put in prison, and a second time before his passion—but this does not lead to a broader historical discussion. Instead, we read that the Passover is a time for turning away from vice to virtue. ³⁹ When the miracle of the five loaves and two fish occurred is of no interest to compilers of the Gloss: the boy with the loaves and fish is Moses, the five loaves are the five books of the Mosaic Law, and the two fish are the Prophets and the Psalms or the royal and sacerdotal aspects of government. ⁴⁰ The Gloss prefers spiritual, allegorical, and moral interpretation.

In chapters 147–88 Peter considers the sequence of the events of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection. ⁴¹ It is not altogether easy to follow the course of Peter’s discussion of the Last Supper. Peter weaves into this other details such as the room, conversation, clothing, food, transubstantiation, the behaviour of Judas, the time of his exit, and the ways in which these events are remembered in the church’s liturgy. Like the Gloss Peter takes issue with the Greeks who say wrongly that Jesus, knowing that he would suffer, brought forward the paschal meal to the evening before the 14th day of the moon following the spring equinox, to a time, that is, when leavened bread could still be eaten. But if it is true that Jesus ate the paschal meal, he ate lamb, as the Law prescribed, and azymes too. ⁴² Some say, following John (13:5), that Christ dined with his disciples and washed their feet on the 13th day, the fourth feria. But the practice of the church, in the washing of feet before the parasceve—the day of preparation for the Sabbath—is opposed to this. Once again Peter has recourse to a tabula computi: this shows that on the sixth feria the moon was in its 15th day. ⁴³

The time when the crucifixion took place is briefly discussed by Peter. ⁴⁴ When Pilate brought Jesus out to confront the Jews, it was, according to John (19:13–15), about (quasi) the sixth hour of the sixth day. But Mark reports (15: 25) that Jesus was crucified at the third hour. Peter here follows the Gloss: Mark refers to the hour when the Jews ‘crucified him with their tongues.’ ⁴⁵ Peter places Jesus’ death at some time between the third and the sixth hour, for Mass is usually celebrated by the church between the third and the sixth hour and, if in the morning, Terce should be sung beforehand. ⁴⁶

Peter follows tradition in denying that the darkness which fell at the end of the sixth hour and covered the whole earth was a solar eclipse. ⁴⁷ He adds that, according to Dionysius Areopagita, the darkness was also experienced at Athens where philosophers could not explain it. ⁴⁸ However, Origen seems to say that the darkness fell only over the land of Judaea since it is not mentioned in the histories of other peoples. ⁴⁹ After Jesus’ death and burial, Jewish priests and Pharisees went to Pilate to ask for a guard to be placed at the sepulchre to prevent theft of the body. According to Matthew 27: 62 this was on ‘the next day, which followed the day of preparation,’ which would seem to indicate the Sabbath. ⁵⁰ The Gloss does not question whether this occurred on the Sabbath ⁵¹ but Peter reports that ‘Remigius’ explains that this took place after the preparation of the Sabbath had begun, that is, after the first vigil of the night but still on the sixth day. ⁵²

Differences between the Gospels regarding the visits made by the women to the tomb and regarding the time when the resurrection occurred had been discussed for centuries. ⁵³ One of the problems arose from imprecision in the use of the word uesper which can mean the evening of a day coming to its close, the evening and the night of the same day, or the start of the following day. According to Matthew 28:1, the women approached the tomb ‘in the end of the sabbath, when it began to dawn towards the first day of the week’ (vespere … sabbati, quae lucescit in prima sabbati). Mark (16:1–2 and 9) writes more fully: ‘when the sabbath was past …very early in the morning, the first day of the week, (the women) come to the sepulchre, the sun being now risen … But he, rising early the first day of the week, appeared first to Mary Magdalen’ (cum transisset sabbatum …valde mane una sabbatorum, veniunt ad monumentum, orto iam sole … surgens autem mane, prima sabbati apparuit primo Mariae Magdalene). ⁵⁴ However, John (20: 1) writes that Mary Magdalene came ‘on the first day of the week … early, when it was yet dark’ (una … sabbati … mane, cum adhuc tenebrae essent). ⁵⁵ Peter refers to Augustine’s De consensu evangelistarum where the word vesper (found in Matthew) is said to stand in for nox, a case of a part meaning a whole. To us vesper usually means the period before nightfall but here it is used to indicate the night that breaks into dawn on the first day of the week (vespere … sabbati, quae lucescit in prima sabbati), this day being Sunday (Dominica), ⁵⁶ the night being both of the sabbath and of the Sunday. ⁵⁷ Augustine’s reference to synecdoche in De consensu evangelistarum, that is, to the use of a less comprehensive term in place of a more comprehensive one, is a means of explaining how Jesus was dead for three days and three nights: these comprise the day and the night of Passover eve, all the Sabbath, and the night—the same night—which precedes the day which was Sunday (Dominica). Since the Resurrection, Peter adds, it has become the rule to make any day begin on the night before. ⁵⁸

As for the time of the resurrection itself Peter briefly slips into a scholastic style for classroom discussion of a quaestio: … quaeri solet … Huius quaestionis duplex est solutio … aut enim … aut …. Such a style was very familiar to him as a teacher; usually it is not found in his Historia. But he writes here that a question is usually asked about this because the auctores say different things. ⁵⁹ Jerome, at least in his commentary on Matthew, had maintained that Christ rose in the middle of the night, ⁶⁰ Ambrose late in the night following the Sabbath, ⁶¹ Augustine at dawn on Sunday. ⁶²

Peter offers two solutions. We can reject Mark who writes that Jesus rose ‘early the first day of the week’ (16: 9) but before the women came with spices ‘when the Sabbath was past … very early in the morning (valde mane) … the sun being now risen’ (16: 1–2). This final chapter (capitulum) is missing, Peter tells us, from almost all Greek copies of Mark. Or we should accept both Matthew, who tells us (or so Peter writes) when Christ rose (‘the end of the Sabbath,’ vespere … sabbati) and Mark. ⁶³ Ambrose, Peter continues, writes at the end of his exposition of Luke that Christ rose, ‘not on the evening of the day but on the evening of the night’ (Non vesperascente die, sed noctis vespere) and in the Greek version of Luke the word that is used is not ‘evening’ (vespere) but ‘late’ (sero). He rose, that is, not in the evening but in the depth of the night. ⁶⁴ Augustine writes that Christ rose at daybreak (diluculo), and authority agrees: Christ was dead for 40 hours—four hours on Passover eve and 36 hours during two nights and a day—and he stayed on earth for as many days before his ascension into heaven. The church seems to agree with this, with the resurrection having taken place at dawn, for it celebrates the resurrection in the morning with the Office of Lauds. ⁶⁵ Just as Peter considered the fact that Mass is usually celebrated between the third and the sixth hour as giving support to the belief that the crucifixion took place during this time, so here the fact that the Office of Lauds takes place in the morning is an indication that the resurrection took place at dawn. Liturgical practice is thus one of Peter’s criteria for choosing between different interpretations of events. His references to liturgical practice may reflect his responsibilities for the training of priests. ⁶⁶

In his interpretation of Daniel’s eighth vision Peter relies on the Gloss. This is not the only source used by Peter for study of other books of the Old Testament; elsewhere he also used other materials, including the Sentences of Peter Lombard as well as commentaries by Andrew of St Victor. ⁶⁷ But his absorption with the sequence and timing of the events of Christ’s life and work as they are told in the New Testament takes him beyond the Gloss which shows less interest in this. As Peter wrote in his introduction to the Historia, glosses have done little to explain history. ⁶⁸ His own glosses on the Gloss on the Gospels did attract attention from succeeding masters such as Peter the Chanter, between 1187 and 1197, and Hugh of St Cher c. 1230, but his glosses did not enjoy a wide circulation such as was achieved by the Gloss. ⁶⁹ His persistence, however, even restlessness, in pursuing historical enquiries helps to explain why his Historia enjoyed such a wide circulation and for so long into the future. The Gloss too circulated widely but the Historia met a need that was not satisfied by it nor by Peter’s own glosses on the Gospels.