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Voices and influences

Bede

He wrote England's first history from inside a Northumbrian monastery, and taught the world to count years from the birth of Christ.

Summary

This site quotes Bede 510 times across 28 books, and lists 0 works.

  • Lived died 735.
  • Quoted here most in Mark: 118 of 510.
Bede. Painted by Michael Wolgemut workshop. The file is marked public domain. This site's record does not give the artist's death year, which is what settles the painting's own rights. The file record

Bede

Lived
died 735
Tradition
Patristic

5 of 510 quotations

Own words

Quoted at 50 words or fewer, because Bede's works are in copyright.

Clothed in flesh, [Christ] descended into the water as "an angel of great counsel," that is, as a herald of the Father's will to Jewish people. By his deeds and his teaching he moved sinners, so that he would be killed—he who, by his bodily …

Homilies on the Gospels 1:23, 735

Isaiah 9:6 For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government will be upon His shoulders. And He will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. BSB

The windows of the temple are the holy teachers and all the spiritual people in the church to whom when in divine ecstasy it is granted more specially than to the others to see the hidden mysteries of heaven. And when they reveal publicly to …

Of the Temple of Solomon 1.7.1, 735

1 Kings 6:4 He also had narrow windows framed high in the temple. BSB

King Cyrus also brought forth the vessels of the temple of the Lord, etc. Nebuchadnezzar took the vessels of the Lord from Jerusalem, as any unclean spirit, snatching certain of the faithful from the Church, deprives them of the joy of internal peace. Moreover, he …

Commentary on Ezra and Nehemiah, 735

Ezra 1:7 King Cyrus also brought out the articles belonging to the house of the LORD that Nebuchadnezzar had carried away from Jerusalem and placed in the temple of his gods. BSB

After these things were completed, etc. The guilt of this transgression is also clearly described and reproved by prophetic authority in the prophet Malachi; because evidently those who returned from Babylonian captivity, both princes and priests and Levites, as well as the rest of the …

Commentary on Ezra and Nehemiah, 735

Ezra 9:1 After these things had been accomplished, the leaders approached me and said, “The people of Israel, including the priests and Levites, have not kept themselves separate from the surrounding peoples whose abominations are like those of the Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians, and Amorites. BSB

"And poverty will come upon you like a traveler," etc. For poverty and misery are the ultimate punishment, in which the damned deserve nothing of wealth: they will come like a traveler, because unforeseen and sudden; like an armed man, because they cannot be conquered …

Commentary on Proverbs, 735

Proverbs 6:11 and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and need like a bandit. BSB

Influence, on the record

The life, in order

The life told as one accountfrom this site's record

Bede was born about 673 on land belonging to the twin monastery of Wearmouth and Jarrow, in Northumbria. He was handed over to the monks at the age of seven. He never really left. In the last paragraph of his great history he wrote that he had spent his whole life in that monastery, giving his attention to studying the Scriptures, and that amid the observance of the Rule and the daily task of singing in church, it had always been his delight to learn, to teach, or to write. He was ordained deacon at nineteen and priest at thirty. He travelled almost nowhere — a trip to Lindisfarne, a trip to York. The great sweep of his work was done from a library and a scriptorium at the northern edge of the known world. That library was the point. Benedict Biscop, who founded the monastery, had made five journeys to Rome and hauled back books. Bede therefore had access to a collection unlike anything else in northern Europe, and he used every volume of it. He wrote around sixty works. Most of them are biblical commentaries — Genesis, Samuel, Kings, Ezra and Nehemiah, Proverbs, the Song of Songs, Mark, Luke, Acts, the catholic epistles, Revelation — plus homilies, saints' lives, works on grammar, metre, orthography, and the natural world. Two of them changed things permanently. The first is The Reckoning of Time, a technical book about the calendar, the tides, the moon, and the dating of Easter. In it he laid out the anno Domini system — counting years forward from the incarnation — and used it consistently. The idea came from Dionysius Exiguus two centuries earlier, but it was Bede who put it to work in a book everyone read, and that is why the year has the number it has. The second is the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished in 731. It is the reason we know anything about Anglo-Saxon England: Augustine's landing in Kent, Edwin's conversion and the sparrow flying through the lighted hall, the Synod of Whitby, Caedmon the cowherd who was given a song in the night, Cuthbert on his island. Bede named his sources, distinguished what he had verified from what he had only heard, and wrote a preface asking readers to correct him. That is a historian's conscience, four hundred years before anyone else in Europe was showing one. He died on 25 May 735, dictating the last sentence of a translation of John's Gospel into English. His pupil Cuthbert wrote the account: the boy taking dictation said the sentence was finished, and Bede said, It is well, you have spoken truth — it is finished. Sources: Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People and The Reckoning of Time; Cuthbert, Letter on the Death of Bede; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. IV; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).

510 quotations across 28 books

Where this voice is quoted

Genesis 4:2Commentary on Genesis (Hexaemeron) (735)

Later she gave birth to Cain’s brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, while Cain was a tiller of the soil.

Again, she bore his brother Abel. Abel is interpreted as grief or miserable, by which name from the earliest age was foreshadowed the condition of his lamentable untimely death.

Genesis 4:14Commentary on Genesis (Hexaemeron) (735)

Behold, this day You have driven me from the face of the earth, and from Your face I will be hidden; I will be a fugitive and a wanderer on…

Therefore, everyone who finds me will kill me. Since from the trembling of the body and the fury of the trembling one, or from the instability of the wanderer and fugitive, he understands him to be one who deserves to be killed.

Genesis 4:24Commentary on Genesis (Hexaemeron) (735)

If Cain is avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy-sevenfold.”

Sevenfold vengeance shall be taken for Cain, but for Lamech seventy-sevenfold. Sevenfold vengeance was taken for Cain, as he bore the penalties of fratricide and envy as a wandering fugitive up to the seventh generation.

Genesis 5:18Homilies on the Gospels 2.15 (735)

When Jared was 162 years old, he became the father of Enoch.

Enoch, in that he was engendered seventh in the line of descent from Adam, prefigured that the Lord would be conceived and born not in the usual way of mortal nature but by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Genesis 7:10Commentary on Genesis (Hexaemeron) (735)

And after seven days the floodwaters came upon the earth.

And when seven days had passed, the waters of the flood inundated the earth. The seventh day signifies the Sabbath, that is, the rest of future life.

Genesis 11:26Commentary on Genesis (Hexaemeron) (735)

When Terah was 70 years old, he became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran.

And Terah lived seventy years, and he begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran. The seventy interpreters in this generation alone do not differ at all from the Hebrew truth.

Genesis 13:18Commentary on Genesis (Hexaemeron) (735)

So Abram moved his tent and went to live near the Oaks of Mamre at Hebron, where he built an altar to the LORD.

Moving therefore Abram his tent, he came and dwelt by the valley of Mamre, which is in Hebron. Hebron is a city situated about twenty-two miles south of Jerusalem, which in the times of Moses was called Arbe or Kiriath-Arba, that is, the city of…

Genesis 14:6Commentary on Genesis (Hexaemeron) (735)

and the Horites in the area of Mount Seir, as far as El-paran, which is near the desert.

And the Horites in the mountains of Seir. Indeed, these mountains, along with the neighboring regions, were possessed by the sons of Esau, who was also called Seir, because he was hairy, after the Horites were expelled.

Genesis 17:3Commentary on Genesis (Hexaemeron) (735)

Then Abram fell facedown, and God said to him,

Abram fell face down. We read that in the earlier places of sacred history, holy men invoked the Lord, offered him sacrifices of praise, and lived innocently in his sight, but none had fallen face down before the Lord before Abram.

Genesis 21:3Commentary on Genesis (Hexaemeron) (735)

And Abraham gave the name Isaac to the son Sarah bore to him.

And Abraham called the name of his son whom Sarah bore to him Isaac. Isaac is interpreted as Laughter or Joy, which very name is fitting for all the faithful, to whom among other goods of the heavenly inheritance, their Redeemer promises by saying: "Again…