On this day, 25 May 735, the Venerable Bede died at the monastery of Jarrow in Northumbria. Scholar, monk, biblical commentator, historian, translator, teacher, and saint, Bede became the most influential intellectual figure in early English Christianity and the first great historian of the English people.
Born around 673, Bede spent almost his entire life within the monastic communities of Wearmouth and Jarrow. Yet through books, manuscripts, liturgy, correspondence, and prayer, he inhabited worlds far beyond Northumbria: Rome, Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and above all the world of the Scriptures of Israel.
His greatest work, the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (“Ecclesiastical History of the English People”), completed in 731, did more than recount events. It helped create the idea of “the English” as a people with a providential history under God. In many ways Bede helped shape the spiritual imagination of England itself.
For the Church of England, Bede remains one of the foundational fathers of English Christianity before the divisions of the Reformation. He united learning and holiness, biblical study and pastoral care, scholarship and prayer. Anglicans, Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants alike continue to honour him as a teacher of the Church. In 1899 Pope Leo XIII declared him a Doctor of the Church, the only native of Britain to receive that title.
Yet from a Messianic Jewish perspective, Bede is especially important because of his relationship to Israel, the Jewish people, and the Hebrew Scriptures.
Modern historian Andrew Scheil has made an important observation about Anglo-Saxon England: there may have been few or no actual Jews in England during Bede’s lifetime, but there were many “textual Jews.” In other words, Jews were constantly present in the imagination of the Church through Scripture, liturgy, theology, biblical commentary, canon law, preaching, and inherited patristic traditions.
This insight is crucial for understanding Bede.
There is no secure evidence for settled Jewish communities in England during the seventh and eighth centuries. Most historians date substantial Jewish settlement in England only after the Norman Conquest of 1066. Nineteenth-century Hebrew Christian historian Moses Margoliouth attempted to argue for a much earlier Jewish presence in Britain. He pointed to Bede’s references to Paschal controversies, medieval canons forbidding Christians from participating in Jewish feasts, and later traditions concerning Jewish merchants and converts.
However, most modern historians judge Margoliouth’s evidence too weak to demonstrate established Jewish communities in Anglo-Saxon England. What Bede knew was not living rabbinic Judaism, but the Jews of Scripture, theology, liturgy, and inherited Christian interpretation.
Yet this “textual Judaism” profoundly shaped English Christianity.
Bede’s world was saturated with Israel’s Scriptures. He wrote commentaries on Ezra and Nehemiah, the Tabernacle, the Temple, Luke, Acts, Revelation, Samuel, Genesis, and many other biblical books. His imagination was formed by Jerusalem, Sinai, Zion, Temple worship, priesthood, exile, covenant, and restoration.
Scheil argues that Anglo-Saxon Christian identity was deeply constructed through engagement with biblical Israel. The English learned to imagine themselves through Israel’s story. In Bede’s writings, England itself becomes part of sacred history. The conversion of the English echoes biblical narratives of covenant, mission, repentance, kingship, pilgrimage, and divine providence.
This is one reason Bede matters so much for English identity.
Long before modern nationalism, Bede provided England with a sacred memory. The English were not simply tribes or kingdoms; they were a people under God, instructed by Scripture, gathered into worship, and called into mission. The Church in England understood itself through the language and imagery of Israel.
At the same time, this theological inheritance carried ambiguities and dangers.
Like most Christian theologians of his age, Bede inherited supersessionist assumptions from earlier Church Fathers such as Augustine of Hippo and Jerome. Israel’s institutions — Temple, sacrifices, priesthood, Jerusalem — were often interpreted as “types” fulfilled in the Church. The Jewish people frequently appeared as witnesses to Scripture who nevertheless failed to recognise Messiah.
Scheil’s analysis helps us see something important here: the absence of living Jewish communities made it easier for Christians to construct symbolic or theological “Jews” detached from real Jewish life and interpretation. Anglo-Saxon England knew Israel through texts, but rarely through encounter.
This observation has deep significance for the history of the Church of England and English Christianity more broadly.
England’s Christian identity was formed through the Scriptures of Israel, yet over centuries Christians often lost sight of the continuing covenantal life of the Jewish people themselves. The Church loved the Hebrew Bible while too often marginalising living Jews. The same traditions that preserved the Psalms, Prophets, and Torah also contributed, over time, to supersessionism and anti-Jewish attitudes.
The later history of England reveals this tension vividly.
After 1066, Jewish communities arrived in England under Norman rule. By the thirteenth century the Crown established the Domus Conversorum in Chancery Lane, a “House of Converts” for Jews who had become Christians. The institution later became connected with the Master of the Rolls and eventually the site of today’s Maughan Library at King’s College London. The Domus reminds us that by the medieval period England was no longer imagining Jews only through texts; it was now legislating, converting, taxing, protecting, segregating, and eventually expelling real Jewish communities.
For Messianic Jews and post-supersessionist Christians, Bede therefore stands both as inspiration and warning.
He reminds us that English Christianity was nourished at its roots by the Scriptures of Israel. The God worshipped by Bede was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Psalms he sang were the songs of Israel. The Temple he interpreted belonged to the Jewish people. The Messiah he proclaimed was a Jew.
Yet Bede also reminds us how easily Christians can speak about Jews without listening to Jewish voices.
The task facing the Christians today is not to abandon Bede, but to complete what was missing in his world: to read Israel’s Scriptures together with the living Jewish people, and to rediscover the Jewishness of Yeshua and the earliest ekklesia.
One of Bede’s last recorded acts was translating the Gospel of John into Old English for his students. As death approached, he reportedly continued dictating Scripture and prayers until his final breath. According to his disciple Cuthbert, his final words were a doxology:
“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.”
His life united scholarship and sanctity, memory and mission, learning and prayer.
Bede reminds us that the Church in England was born reading Israel’s Scriptures; our task today is to read them again with Israel’s continuing covenantal life in view.
Prayer
אָבִֽינוּ שֶׁבַּשָּׁמַֽיִם,
תּוֹדָה לְךָ עַל חַיָּיו וּפָעֳלוֹ שֶׁל בֵּדָה הַנִּכְבָּד,
אֲשֶׁר אָהַב אֶת כִּתְבֵי הַקֹּדֶשׁ וְלִמֵּד אֶת עַמְּךָ לְחַפֵּשׂ חָכְמָה וּקְדֻשָּׁה.
לַמֵּד אוֹתָֽנוּ לְכַבֵּד אֶת שָׁרְשֵׁי אֱמוּנָתֵֽנוּ בְּיִשְׂרָאֵל,
וְלִשְׁמֹֽעַ מֵחָדָשׁ אֶת קוֹלָם שֶׁל עַמְּךָ יִשְׂרָאֵל בְּתוֹךְ סִפּוּר גְּאֻלָּתֶֽךָ.
הָסֵר מֵאִתָּֽנוּ גַּאֲוָה וְעִוָּרוֹן,
וְתֵן לָֽנוּ אַהֲבַת אֱמֶת לַיְּהוּדִים וְלַנּוֹצְרִים כְּאֶחָד.
יְהִי רָצוֹן שֶׁנִּרְדֹּף צֶדֶק, שָׁלוֹם וּפִיּוּס בַּמָּשִׁיחַ יֵשׁוּעַ. אָמֵן.
Avinu shebashamayim,
Todah lecha al chayav u-po‘olo shel Bedeh ha-nikhbad,
asher ahav et Kitvei ha-Kodesh ve-limed et amcha lachapes chokhmah u-kedushah.
Lamed otanu lechabed et shoresh emunateinu be-Yisra’el,
ve-lishmoa מחדש et kolam shel amcha Yisra’el betokh sipur ge’ulatekha.
Haser me-itanu ga’avah ve-ivaron,
ve-ten lanu ahavat emet la-Yehudim ve-la-Notzrim ke-echad.
Yehi ratzon she-nirdof tzedek, shalom ve-fiyus be-Mashiach Yeshua. Amen.
Our Father in heaven,
we thank You for the life and work of the Venerable Bede,
who loved the Holy Scriptures and taught Your people to seek wisdom and holiness.
Teach us to honour the roots of our faith in Israel,
and to hear anew the voice of Your people Israel within the story of redemption.
Remove from us pride and blindness,
and grant us true love for Jews and Christians alike.
May we pursue justice, peace, and reconciliation in Messiah Yeshua. Amen.
Further Reading
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, trans. Leo Sherley-Price, rev. R. E. Latham, ed. D. H. Farmer (London: Penguin, 1990).
Bede, On Ezra and Nehemiah, trans. Scott DeGregorio (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006).
Brown, George Hardin, Bede the Venerable (Boston: Twayne, 1987).
Ward, Benedicta, The Venerable Bede (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1998).
Scheil, Andrew P., The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004).
Cohen, Jeremy, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
Nirenberg, David, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).
Soulen, R. Kendall, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996).
Scheil, Andrew P., The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), reviewed by Lisa Lampert-Weissig, The Medieval Review, 06.01.07 (2006), available at The Medieval Review article
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr/article/view/16067?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Gameson, Richard, ed., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 1: c. 400–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
