Early Latin Commentaries on the Apocalypse

Abstract

Many who have studied the Handbook recognize Irish characteristics in it and identify it as a Hiberno-Latin text. 12 Bischoff notices that the Handbook's interpretation of the ten days in Rev 2:10 as the ten senses of the soul and body corresponds with comments in an Irish Commentary on Luke and another Irish text. 13Robert McNally argues that the Handbook's comment on Rev 1:11 bears a relationship to a passage in the Irish Liber de numeris. 14Grazia Rapisarda, who edited the Handbook in 1967, leans toward Bischoff's view that the Handbook displays Irish features, as does Joseph Kelly, who catalogues it among early medieval Hiberno-Latin commentaries. 15Gryson notes that some of the biblical variants in the Handbook correspond with biblical readings in the Irish Book of Armagh and a manuscript of Bede's Exposition of the Apocalypse at Durham, which suggests a similar insular tradition. 16 Other features confirming an Irish connection include the Handbook's distinction between historia and sensus (on 1:13, 4:4, 14:20, and 21:15) that appears in other early medieval Hiberno-Latin exegetical works and the Handbook's use of Pelagius (on 1:1). 17In addition, many of the comments in the Handbook are similar to those in the Hiberno-Latin Apocalypse commentary in the Reference Bible, which according to Gryson reflects a shared Irish milieu rather than direct dependence between the two. 18

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