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Doubting John?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 June 2016
Abstract
This essay focuses on the figure of John the Baptist in prison and the question he sent his disciples to ask Christ: was he ‘the one who is to come’ (Matthew 11: 2–3)? Having observed how the Fathers strove to distance John from the perils of doubt in their readings of this passage, it traces the way their arguments were picked up by twelfth- and thirteenth-century biblical exegetes and then by authors of anti-heretical dispute texts in urban Italy, where the Baptist was a popular patron saint. So as to give force to their own counter-arguments, learned polemicists, clerical and lay, made much of heretics’ hostility to John, powerfully ventriloquizing a doubting, sceptical standpoint. One counter-argument was to assign any doubts to John's disciples, for whose benefit he therefore sent to ask for confirmation of the means of Christ's return, neatly moving doubt from questions of faith to epistemology. Such ideas may have seeped beyond the bounds of a university-trained elite, as is perhaps visible in a fourteenth-century fresco representing John in prison engaging with anxious disciples. But place, audience and genre determined where doubt was energetically debated and where it was more usually avoided, as in sermons for the laity on the feast of a popular saint.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History , Volume 52: DOUBTING CHRISTIANITY: THE CHURCH AND DOUBT , June 2016 , pp. 17 - 48
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2016
Footnotes
I am very grateful to John Arnold and Mark Elliott, who kindly read and commented on earlier drafts, as also to my co-editors and the anonymous reviewers.
References
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41 Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew 36.
42 ‘[S]ed quis eorum recordationis suae, quis rerum ipsarum hic ordinem teneat, non apparet’ (‘but it is not clear which of them gives the order of his own memories, and which keeps to the [historical] order of the things themselves’): Augustine, De consensu evangelistarum 2.31.78.
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45 Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem prophetam 1.1, line 95 (CChr.SL 142).
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63 Summa contra haereticos ascribed to Praepositinus of Cremona, ed. Garvin and Corbett, 32.
64 Ibid.
65 ‘[H]oc ipsum non solum novae, sed veteres ecclesiarum picturae testantur, quae ab ipsa primitiva Ecclesia causae primordium asserunt’: PL 217, cols 403–4.
66 Giacomo Grimaldi produced a very incomplete image of the cycle, so it is impossible to ascertain whether it included a clothed resurrected Christ.
67 Drawing in Vatican City, BAV, Barb. lat. 2732, Grimaldi, ‘Instrumenta Autentica’ 1612, for which see Van Dijk, Ann, ‘Jerusalem, Antioch, Rome and Constantinople: The Peter Cycle in the Oratory of Pope John VII (705–707)’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 55 (2001), 305–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar, fig. 3.
68 PL 217, col. 401.
69 Manifestatio haeresis catharorum quam fecit Bonacursus, transl. in Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York, 1969), 170–3, at 172; for the Latin, see PL 204, col. 776. See also da Milano, Ilarino, ‘La “Manifestatio heresis catarorum”’, Aevum 12 (1938), 281–333Google Scholar; Manselli, Raoul, ‘Per la storia dell'eresia’, Bullettino dell'Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medioevo e Archivio Muratoriano 67 (1955), 189–211Google Scholar, which includes an edition of a different version, Paris, BN, MS lat. 14927.
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72 Emphasis mine.
73 Ibid.
74 ‘Nec sequitur, interrogavit, ergo dubitavit. Instantia: Christus interrogavit dicens: Cuius est hoc numisma (cf. Matt 22: 29)? “Ergo dubitavit”, non est verum’: ibid. 37–8.
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76 Ibid. xii–xiii.
77 Ibid. 85.
78 Ibid.
79 See, for example, the Cistercian Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogus miraculorum, ed. N. Nösges and H. Schneider, Fontes Christiani 86/1–5 (Turnhout, 2009), distinctio 5, ‘De daemonibus’, written in the early thirteenth century and discussed in Merlo, Grado Giovanni, ‘“Membra Diaboli”. Demoni ed eretici medievali’, Nuova rivista storica 72 (1988), 583–98Google Scholar.
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81 Ibid. 87.
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86 Andreas Florentinus, Summa contra hereticos (MGH Quellen 23).
87 Moneta of Cremona, Adversus catharos et valdenses libri quinque 3.1 (ed. Thomas Augustinus Ricchini [Rome, 1743], 229–30).
88 Andreas Florentinus, Summa (MGH Quellen 23, 31).
89 Reynolds, ‘Social Mentalities’, 40.
90 Ibid. 35.
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92 One reason Golinelli explicitly omitted them from his study was the possibility of alternative readings: Golinelli, Il Medioevo degli increduli, 15.