Abstract
Martin McNamara is the acknowledged expert on the early Irish Church’s relationship to the Bible and this book is a distillation of a lifetime of study. It aims to summarize this relationship from 550 to 850 A.D. Over the last century the identification of Irish Biblical works has grown greatly. McNamara gathers together material on such Irish and ‘Irish-affiliated’ works, dealing with both well-known and lesser-known texts and also indicating many avenues for future study. Against those who claim that ‘the early Irish Church did not produce Bible commentaries,’ this study proposes that, in fact, there were many such texts that were present in ‘monasteries, school and classrooms of Continental Europe’ (p. 1).
McNamara starts his work by introducing readers to the early Irish Bible scholars who can be identified today (both those working in Ireland itself and those based in Continental Europe). This is particularly helpful as there is as yet no useful catalogue of such authors, as exists for other British and European areas. The period saw many different examples of exegesis or treatment of biblical texts with various names, including, including ‘Expositio, Commentarius (or Commentarium), Tractatus, Ennaratio, Glossa, Eclogiae, or Pauca’ (p. 32). As literacy accompanied the Christianization of Ireland, it is of little surprise that the texts of the Bible became widely influential in the composition of both Latin and vernacular texts in the Irish context.
Given the place of monasticism in the early Irish Church, there is a clear early emphasis on different manners of interpreting the Psalms. McNamara outlines how Irish authors sometimes interpreted the Psalms ‘to bring out the meaning of the original text’ (p. 93). Other examples follow the Antiochene tradition that sees the prophecy of Christ being limited to four Psalms (Pss. 2, 8, 44 and 109 according to the Vulgate numbering). Other authors understand the Psalms as prophesying the life of Christ and yet others understand them as having a Davidic interpretation that principally deals with King David as the recognized author of the Psalms. He gives special attention to the oldest Irish Psalter, the early seventh-century Cathach manuscript ascribed to St Columcille/Columba and currently in the Royal Irish Academy. Other chapters are dedicated to Apponius’s Commentary on the Canticle of Canticles and Josephus Scottus’s Abbreviatio commentarii Hieronymi in Isaiam. Chapter nine on the background to Irish Gospel Texts is a particularly helpful synthesis of the current scholarship on this important aspect of the Bible in the early Irish Church, an area that McNamara himself has published on extensively.
Interesting relationships between the Irish material and similar material from a wider European context is explored. At times, Ireland seems to be fully within the international flow of biblical scholarship and on occasion the Irish material seems to be at the origin of traditions that find their way into the wider international interpretation of the Bible. While it is helpful to consider the Irish material in its insular particularity, it is perhaps more important to see the Irish Church as part of a wider Christian world. In addition to students of the early Irish Church, students of Western Christendom’s relationship with the Bible in the second half of the first millennium will benefit from considering the material outline in this volume.
In 1972 McNamara wrote an article entitled ‘A Plea for Hiberno-Latin Biblical Studies’ in the pages of this journal (ITQ 39 (1972): pp. 337–53). Here he indicated ‘the extent of the known Irish material on biblical exegesis.’ Then he called for scholars to work so that ‘this entire body of exegetical material be speedily made available, first in preliminary publications and after in critical editions’ (p. 211). This book, published almost 50 years later, is a testament to a life fruitfully dedicated to this subject. Much work has been published, much remains to be researched. Yet no future student of this subject can afford to ignore this monograph with its most helpful bibliography, indexes and appendixes which admirably lay out the state of current research.