Bede

Life

Bede was born in 672 or 673 in the kingdom of Northumbria in northeastern England. Nothing is known of his parents. At the age of seven he was entrusted to the monastery of St. Peter at Wearmouth, founded by Benedict Biscop. He later moved to the nearby monastery at Jarrow, where he spent the rest of his life. He is said to have become a deacon (a cleric who assists the priest) at nineteen and to have been ordained to the priesthood at thirty. Most of what is known about his life comes from his own account in the final chapter of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People and from a letter written by a disciple who was present at his death. He died at Jarrow in 735, and his remains were moved to Durham Cathedral in 1020.

Ministry and Work

Bede spent his life in the monastery in prayer, study, teaching, and writing. He wrote in Latin on nearly every field of learning of his day, including biblical commentary, grammar, poetic meter, natural science, astronomy, chronology, history, and hagiography.

His principal work, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Latin: Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum), was completed around 731. In five books it covers the political and ecclesiastical history of the island of Britain from the time of Julius Caesar to Bede's own day, and it is regarded as a key source for the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons. The opening sections compile the writings of earlier authors, but the main body, covering the period after 596, is considered to be based on his own examination of documents and other sources. The work was later translated into Old English.

In his chronological work The Reckoning of Time, he addressed the problem of calculating the date of Easter. His writings are credited with bringing into wide use the Anno Domini system of dating, which counts years from the birth of Christ. He is also said to have worked to translate Latin Christian texts and portions of the Bible into the English of his day.

The title Venerabilis ("one worthy of veneration"), rendered in Korean as jonja or gagyeongja, was already being applied to him at church councils by around the ninth century. It is a traditional honorific, distinct from the title "Venerable" that today designates a stage in the Catholic canonization process. In 1899 Pope Leo XIII proclaimed him a Doctor of the Church; he is the only native of Britain to hold that title. He is commemorated as a saint by the Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran churches, and his feast day in the Western church is May 25.

Influence on the Korean Church

Bede has no direct connection with the Korean church; he has been introduced mainly through translations and the church press. In Korean his name is rendered both as Bideu and Beda. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People was published in Korean in 2011 in a translation by Lee Dong-il and Lee Dong-chun under the title Yeonggungminui Gyohoesa (Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation), as part of the National Research Foundation of Korea's series of translations of scholarly classics. The denominational newspaper Kidok Shinmun, in a series on figures from church history, called him "the Venerable Bede" and presented him as a figure who emphasized translating the Bible into the vernacular. Most Korean Protestant denominations, which do not practice the veneration of saints or observe saints' days, treat him less as a saint than as a pre-Reformation biblical scholar and church historian.

Assessment

Bede is regarded as a leading scholar of the early medieval church and as the starting point of English historical writing. Kidok Shinmun held that he influenced the movement for vernacular Bible translation later championed by John Wycliffe, Martin Luther, and others, but this is the newspaper's own interpretation. Some writers also describe him as the first to use the terms BC and AD, but scholars and encyclopedias generally emphasize instead that this dating system spread widely through his writings.

One criticism of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People is that it contains many miracle stories that are difficult to verify objectively. According to a Korean study, the work records fifty-one miracles, most of them concentrated in its later portion, Books 3 through 5. Other research, however, argues that Bede distinguished miracles from merely marvelous tales and carefully selected material suited to the purpose of his work. The same study also notes that not a single miracle story is attached to Wilfrid, a prominent bishop of the time.