Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 179:713 (Jan 2022)
Article: The Ordinary Gloss To Philemon: Introduction And Translation
Author: Samuel J. Klumpenhouwer

BSac 179:713 (January-March 2022) p. 75

The Ordinary Gloss To Philemon: Introduction And Translation

Samuel J. Klumpenhouwer

Samuel J. Klumpenhouwer teaches liberal arts at Saint Theresa Catholic School, Sugar Land, Texas. He holds a PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto and specializes in the development of theology, canon law, and the ecclesiastical institutions of medieval Europe. He recently published the first translation of the Glossa Ordinaria on Genesis.

Abstract

This article introduces the medieval Ordinary Gloss and offers the first English translation of the Gloss to Philemon. The Gloss, a type of study Bible and the most popular edition of the Bible from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, contains the Vulgate surrounded by interlinear and marginal glosses. Medieval formatting techniques allowed the reader to move back and forth from the biblical text to the Gloss. This translation of Philemon, in its original layout, grants English readers their first access to the wealth of patristic and medieval exegesis contained therein. 

From the twelfth to the sixteenth century, the most popular edition of the Bible was the Ordinary Gloss (Glossa ordinaria). This edition of the Latin Vulgate Bible, surrounded by interlinear and marginal commentary, originated in the school of Laon in the twelfth century.1 Although the height of its production and influence was in the thirteenth century, its use continued long thereafter, studied by theologians ranging from Thomas Aquinas to Martin Luther. While the early modern period still held it in great esteem, the text has since fallen into disuse and today is hardly known outside the halls of academia.

BSac 179:713 (January-March 2022) p. 76

The term “gloss” derives from the Greek γλῶσσα, meaning “tongue” or “language.” Some early modern editors of the Ordinary Gloss asserted that to read the Bible without the Gloss was to read a book that could not speak or whose language one could not understand.2 Today the Bible is still commonly studied alongside commentary, a tradition dating back to the earliest years of the church. The Ordinary Gloss presents both commentary and biblical text on the same page, much like today’s study Bibles. Indeed, the Ordinary Gloss can be considered the first study Bible, four centuries before the Geneva Study Bible (1557–1560) and nearly eight centuries before the Scofield Reference Bible (1909). Unlike the latter two, however, the Ordinary Gloss was prohibitively expensive. A complete Glossed Bible could fill over twenty handwritten volumes, and even monastic librarie...