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St Bede's Hall
42 St Giles
Oxford
OX1 3LW

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The Venerable Bede (673 AD - 735 AD)

St Bede - also known as the Venerable Bede - was a Benedictine monk at the Northumbrian monastery of Saint Peter and St Paul at Monkwearmouth-Jarrow.
 
He is widely regarded as the greatest of all the Anglo-Saxon scholars and wrote around forty books mainly dealing with theology and history.

 His most famous work, which is a key source for the understanding of early British history and the arrival of Christianity, is 'Historia Ecclestiastica Gentis Anglorum' or 'The Ecclesiastical History of the English People' which was completed in 731 AD. It is the first work of history in which the AD system of dating is used.

St Bede was  recognised as Doctor of the Church in Rome by Pope Leo XIII in 1889. He is the only man from Great Britain to achieve this designation.

Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience, February 18, 2009, St. Peter's Square

"Sacred Scripture was the constant source of Bede's theological reflection. After a critical study of the text (a copy of the monumental Codex Amiatinus of the Vulgate on which Bede worked has come down to us), he comments on the Bible, interpreting it in a Christological key, that is, combining two things: on the one hand he listens to exactly what the text says, he really seeks to hear and understand the text itself; on the other, he is convinced that the key to understanding Sacred Scripture as the one word of God is Christ, and with Christ, in his light, one understands the Old and New Testaments as "one" Sacred Scripture. The events of the Old and New Testaments go together, they are the way to Christ, although expressed in different signs and institutions (this is what he calls the concordia sacramentorum)."