Chapter Three
CHAPTER THREE
Do N= Peter and John were going up into the temple, and so forth. At the ninth hour, when the apostles were about to enter the temple, they first cured a lame man who had been enfeebled for a long time. Then, laboring continuously until evening, they embued many thousands of people with the word of faith,! because the teachers of the church, coming at the end of the world, also preach first to ailing Israel and afterwards to the gentile world. For they are the laborers whom the householder brought into the vineyard at the ninth and the eleventh hour.?
3:2a Andacertain man, who had been lame from his mother's womb, was being carried. Because the people of Israel were found rebellious, not only after the Lord's incarnation, but even from the earliest times when the law was given, they were as if lame from the mother's womb.
This was well prefigured by Jacob's being blessed, indeed, but lame when he wrestled with the angel, for this same people, when they prevailed'* over the Lord in his passion, was in some of [its members] blessed through faith, but in others lame through infidelity.* 3:2b Whom everyday they put at the temple gate called the beautiful. The beautiful gate of the temple is the Lord. Whoever enters through him will be saved.
Enfeebled Israel, being unable to walk to this gate, was 1. Ac 4:1-4.
2. Mt 20:5-6.
3. Gn 32:24-29.
4. Aug., De civ. dei 16, 39 (CC 48:545, 1/17).
Chapter Three brought there by the words of the law and the prophets, so that she might request help from those who were entering into the interior places of the wisdom of the faith which she was to hear. Those who place the prophecies of things to come as it were at the gate are the hearers, but Peter is the guide into the temple. To him, in virtue of his strong profession of faith, the epithet of '"'rock'' and the keys of heaven were given.° 3:6
Silver and gold I do not have, and so forth. The ancient tabernacle indeed had ritual ordinances and a sanctuary, though an earthly one, embellished with gold and silver, but the blood of the gospel, more precious than the metals of the law, springs forth because that people, who had been lying enfeebled in mind before the golden doorpost, was saved in the name of him who was crucified and [so now] enters the temple of the heavenly kingdom.?*
In any case, blessed Peter, mindful of the Lord's command which was spoken, Do not possess gold and silver,' did not hoard for himself the money which was put at the feet of the apostles, but he was wont to reserve it for the use of the poor who had lost their birthright.
3:7
And taking him by the right hand, he raised him up. The one whom he encouraged by word he also strengthened by his right hand, because the discourse of a teacher is less efficacious in the hearts of his hearers if it is not also recommended by the example of his own action.
3:8
And leaping up he stood and started walking and entered the temple with them. An excellent order of perfection is that he who had been lying down first rose an then set out on the way of virtues and thus entered the gates of the kingdom with the apostles.
5. Mt 16:16-19.
6. Heb 9:1.
7. Mt 10:9.
Chapter Three
3:10
And they were filled with wonder and ecstacy.
Exstasin means sudden fear, but another form which is used is extasis, since the mind is not maddened by sudden fear, but expanded by a kind of inspiration of revelation.®
3:11
All the people flocked to them at the portico which is called Solomon's. When Israel had been saved through the apostles, all the world flocked to the threshold of truth and of the peace-maker Solomon, of whom it was said, His dominion will be increased and there will be no end of peace.°® For he [Christ]3* is the stone broken off from the mountain, '° and in his earthly reign of faith, as he falls upon his enemy, he alone possesses a peaceful dominion throughout the earth.
3:23
And it shall be that every soul that will not listen to that prophet shall be expelled from the people. He
[Peter] teaches briefly but clearly by the testimony of the prophets and the law that the Lord is to be listened to by all the nations, and that he will surely condemn the unbelieving, but he will grant an eternal blessing to the faithful.
3:24
And all the prophets from Samuel onwards.
Although the patriarchs and saints of earlier times prophesied many things about Christ by their words and deeds, properly speaking the time of the prophets (I mean those who wrote clearly about the mystery of Christ and the church) had its beginning from Samuel, under whom the period of the kings began in Israel, and it lasted up to the deliverance from the Babylonian captivity.
3:25
And in your offspring all the families of the earth will be blessed. Christ indeed is the offspring of Abraham, and through faith in his name a blessing is pro8. Aug., Ennar. in ps. 30, 1 (CC 38:186, 1, 3/5).
Ons 9:7.
10. Dn 2:45
Chapter Three mised to all the families of the earth, namely Jews and gentiles. However, the apostle soothed the minds of the Jews in order to make them more well-disposed to believing by saying that, out of the whole world, the Savior chose to visit and bless them first:
3:26
To you first, he says, God raised up his Son. Here it must be borne in mind that the one whom he calls the offspring of Abraham!! is at the same time the son of God because of the two natures of the one Christ. Thus they should not believe either that Christ is only a man, or that there is one son of man and one son of God. This is the trap of heresy in which the mad Manes and Nestorius were misled.** 11. See com. on 3:25.
NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE
1. 'Prevailed': praevalens. Bede's choice of this word was probably based on its use in reference to Jacob in Gn 32:28. After having been lamed by his angelic or divine wrestling opponent,
Jacob was victorious, and the blessing which he received was the change of his name to Israel: 'because you have been strong against God, you shall prevail (praevalebis) against men.' Bede's comment aptly illustrates the way in which his interpretation is often governed by the resonances of particular words, for the allusion to the story of Jacob's wrestling and the metaphoric identification of Jacob-Israel with the lame beggar as a representative of 'lame,' i.e. rebellious, Israel is apparently triggered not so much by resemblances between the two stories as by the words 'lame,'
'blessed,' and 'prevail.' Although the wording of this comment is Bede's own, he derived the essential interpretation, including the wordplay, from Augustine's City of God (see note in the text).
2. Bede's elaborate comparison between the bloody sacrificial rites of the old Law and Christ's sacrifice of his own blood is inspired by Heb 9-10. The link in Bede's concordance exegesis would seem to be the notion of 'entering the temple.' In Ac 3:8 the lame beggar, having been healed by Peter and John, 'entered the temple with them'; in Heb 9:11-12 Christ 'entered once for all through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made by hands. .., nor again by virtue of blood of goats and calves, but by virtue of his own blood, into the holy places, having obtained eternal redemption.' Further, Bede enriches his metaphor by exploiting a double meaning of emicare, which my translation 'springs forth' cannot capture. Applied to liquids, emicare means 'spurt forth,' which is appropriate to the subject 'blood' and its comparison, the bloody rites of the old law. When applied to fire or light, however, emicare can mean 'flash with reflected light,' and this meaning refers us back to the gold and silver which adorned the sanctuary of the temple (see Heb 9: 1-4), and which Bede's phrase 'golden doorposts' takes as the basis for the epithet 'beautiful' of the gate of the temple at which the lame beggar lay. Peter's statement, therefore, 'Silver and gold I do not have,' is interpreted as follows: The old law had the temple
Notes to Chapter Three which glittered (emicat) with silver and gold, and that Peter does not have, but what he does have to give is the 'blood of the gospel,' which spurts forth (emicat) salvation for the enfeebled in mind, represented by the lame beggar.
3. At this point Bede apparently changes the reference from Solomon to Christ, 'who is himself our peace' (Ep 2:14), and by concordance exegesis Bede makes an association, based on the idea of a falling stone, between 'the stone broken off from the mountain' in Nebuchadnezzar's dream (Dn 2:45) and Jesus' apocalyptic saying in Mt 21:42—44, 'The stone which the builders rejected has become the corner stone.
.upon whomever it falls, it will grind him to powder.'
4. Manes, the third-century founder of the gnostic sect called Manichaeism, supposedly distinguished between the aeon Jesus, a subsistent personification of the force of light in the world, and the historical Jesus of Nazareth, whom Manes repudiated as the son of.a poor widow, crucified by the Jews and thus justly punished for interfering in the work of the aeon Jesus (The Catholic
Encyclopedia 9, 594). Nestorius, who died c. 451, gave his name to the Nestorian heresy. He affirmed the union of the two natures of Christ, but he refused to attribute to the divine nature the human acts and sufferings of Christ, and he likewise refused to call Mary the mother of God, since that would be to say that the divine nature had been born of a woman. Nestorius was condemned at the Council of Ephesus (431), but some modern theologians have been inclined to reestablish his orthodoxy (New
Catholic Encyclopedia 10, 346-347).