Nicholas of Lyra

Nicholas was born about 1270 at Lyre, a village in Normandy. He joined the Franciscans at Verneuil around 1300, studied at Paris, and became a master of theology there in 1309. He held one of the Franciscan chairs at the university, served as provincial of the order in France, and was named an executor of the will of the queen of France. He died at Paris on 23 October 1349.

He knew Hebrew, well, and better than almost anyone else in the Latin church of his century. Where he learned it is not recorded. An old story that he was born a Jew has no evidence behind it and is generally rejected.

What he did with it was decisive. Medieval exegesis had drifted heavily toward allegory: a passage could mean four things at once, and the literal sense was usually the least interesting of the four. Nicholas argued the opposite. The literal sense is the foundation, he wrote, and any spiritual meaning that does not rest on the literal sense is unsound. Then he went and did the work: reading the Hebrew, comparing the Vulgate against it, and correcting the Latin where he judged it wrong.

And he read the Jewish commentators, principally Rashi, Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes, the greatest of medieval Jewish exegetes. Nicholas quotes him constantly, sometimes agreeing, sometimes disputing, always engaging. That a Franciscan master at Paris in the fourteenth century built his commentary partly out of a rabbi's work is remarkable, and it is why his readings of the Old Testament have a texture nobody else's had.

The result was the Postilla litteralis super totam Bibliam, a literal commentary on the entire Bible, finished about 1331, followed by a shorter moral commentary. It became the most widely used commentary in Europe. It was printed within a few years of the invention of printing and went through edition after edition, usually bound together with the Glossa ordinaria, so that a printed Latin Bible of 1500 came with the Gloss and Lyra around the text.

He also wrote two treatises directed at Jewish readers, arguing for the messiahship of Jesus from the Hebrew Scriptures. They are polemical works of their period.

His influence on the Reformation was direct. Luther used him heavily in the lectures on Psalms and Romans out of which his theology came, and the sixteenth-century tag records it: Si Lyra non lyrasset, Lutherus non saltasset, if Lyra had not played, Luther would not have danced. It was coined by opponents as a complaint. It is also true.

Sources: Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla litteralis super totam Bibliam; Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. VI; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).