The three subchapters illustrate, how the authors from the Medieval period down to the fifth century have heavily relied on Eusebius of Caesarea’s Church history to writing their own beginnings of Christianity. In addition, they drew heavily on pseudonymous material outside the New Testament canon which they largely ignored. Driven by the challenges of their own times and in answering questions of their own days they developed the beginnings of Christianity from Frankish and late Roman perspectives. In these, vernacular, Greek and Roman cultural elements were deeply inter-related and re-projected into earlier times, while Christianity became regarded as the filter through which to perceive and judge the past.

To a reader familiar with the Hebrew text, both the action of the raven and the interpretation are challenging. The Hebrew text reads va’yetze yatzov vashov, which is standardly translated ‘he went to and fro’ until the waters receded. The first bird, that is, can find no place to land but travels around and around. This leads to some delightful and bizarre midrashim. In bSandhedrin 108b, a conversation is imagined between the raven and Noah in which the raven rejects the task offered with a knock-down argument. He must be hated by God and by Noah, the raven argues, to have been selected for the mission, because, since they are unclean animals, there are only two ravens in the ark. If he died from heat or cold, therefore, the species of ravens would be wiped out. He adds that he suspects Noah of wanting to get rid of him so that he can have sex with the raven’s wife! (Noah retorts angrily that since he has observed the prohibition of sex on the ark with his own wife he is scarcely likely to have sex with a raven.) Hence, however, the fearful raven will only fly round and round the ark. Midrash Rabbah Bereshit imagines a different conversation – the idea of a conversation comes from an etymological play on the Hebrew verbs. Noah asserts blithely that the raven can be sent because as an unclean animal he is no good for food or for a sacrifice, only to be reminded by God that ravens would feed Elijah in the desert (Kings 1.17.6) – a paradigmatic demonstration of how the narrative of the Talmud is informed by God’s omniscient (always already) time.

Between a hundred and two hundred manuscripts connected with Brittany, written in the ninth and tenth centuries, can be identified by their script, contents and Old Breton glosses; they survived the Viking age by being taken to Francia or England, and open a window on the sources and external contacts of Bretons’ scholarly culture. The manuscripts contain a wide variety of Latin texts, biblical, legal, grammatical, technical and historical. One of the most important subsets consists of manuscripts of the Irish canon law compilation, Collectio Canonum Hibernensis: it is unclear whether the text was obtained from Ireland or via Irish-influenced centres on the Continent, but the ability of Breton scribes to access both the extant versions in full, together with some of their source-texts, implies contact with the milieu of the original compilers. Glosses show that even texts that were widely available on the Continent, like grammars and the scientific writings of Bede, reached Bretons through Irish contacts. Some manuscripts reveal collaboration between annotators writing in Irish, Welsh and Breton, providing a context for the sharing of hagiographical information discussed in the previous chapter. The occasional sharing of rare texts allows us to pinpoint a few centres where such encounters may have taken place, among them are Reichenau and Echternach. The survival of Breton manuscripts in England suggests that Breton scholarship played a considerable part in the reconstruction of the English Church in the tenth century, after the Viking age.