Bède lecteur de Tyconius dans l’Expositio Apocalypseos
Abstract
When Bede composed the earliest of his commentaries on the Scriptures, the Expositio Apocalypseos (CCSL CXXI A), he quoted his principal source, Tyconius, who wrote the Book of Rules, a handbook of biblical hermeneutics, and the Commentary on the Book of Revelation, today lost. Although Augustine commented on the limited usefulness of the rules in his De Doctrina Christiana (III, XXX, 42 – XXXVII, 56), the introductory epistle defends the relevance of its hermeneutical principles. The ten explicit references to Tyconius in the Expositio are mainly related to an ecclesiastical interpretation of the text that Bede did not necessarily share, but that he thought worth mentioning. The donatist’s two works provided the monk of Jarrow with a method of exegesis and an allegorical interpretation of the Book of Revelation at the moment when he was beginning his own exegetical work.