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Chapter  Wrestling with Rashi: Nicholas of Lyra’s Quodlibetal Questions and Anti-Jewish Polemic By the early fourteenth century, when Nicholas of Lyra disputed his questions on ‘‘whether the Jews knew Jesus of Nazareth to be the messiah promised to them’’ and ‘‘whether from Scriptures received by the Jews it is possible to prove effectively that our savior was both God and man,’’ the parameters of such questions had already been well established.1 Nicholas of Lyra may not have been familiar with the range of specific thirteenthcentury questions on the topic, but he certainly would have been familiar with the general concerns. Like those thirteenth-century scholars, Nicholas acknowledged the challenge that Jewish unbelief presented to Christian interpretations of Old Testament texts and was intent on guarding those prophecies that had long served as ‘‘proof’’ of Christ’s advent. And Nicholas , too, employed an epistemological framework in his exploration of the problem, considering the process of cognition as he addressed unbelief. The particular epistemological ideas in play were different in Nicholas’s day, as he was active a generation after figures like Peter Olivi and Peter of Trabes, but the discussion of cognition and noetics was no less vital. Nicholas arrived in Paris in , around the same time that Duns Scotus , the most important new voice on cognition and natural theology, arrived from Oxford. Though they stood on opposite sides of the controversy between pope and king that sent Scotus into a brief exile in , the two men lived together at the Franciscan convent until Scotus left for Cologne in , and Nicholas could scarcely have avoided being influenced in some way by the ‘‘subtle doctor’s’’ thought.2 Katherine Tachau has emphasized the impact of Scotus’s ideas on contemporaries, remarking that ‘‘at his death, Scotus left behind at each studium students and colleagues who, if they did not agree with all that he taught, recognized clearly and found heuristically fruitful the new framework he had given to many issues.’’3 Nicho- Wrestling with Rashi  las was interested enough in epistemological questions to have assembled an abridged edition of Henry of Ghent’s quodlibeta, preserved in several manuscripts including one from the Bibliothèque Mazarine with an explicit indicating that the collection was ‘‘arranged by Brother Nicholas of Lyra, Franciscan master of Paris.’’4 Nicholas’s interest in epistemology emerged elsewhere in his own work as well, notably in a question placed into his commentary on Daniel :, where he discussed the nature of prophetic cognition.5 When Nicholas set the problem of prophecy and Jewish unbelief in epistemological terms, he reflected an environment in which theories of knowledge were profoundly important. Unlike the Franciscan authors of previous questions on proving the Advent through Jewish or prophetic texts, Nicholas did not stake a major claim in the ongoing discussion of epistemology. He was above all a student of the Bible who, by the time he determined these questions, had already developed an approach to literal exegesis that depended upon the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic commentary, especially Rashi’s, in the interpretation of Christian Scripture. Although Nicholas was necessarily familiar with and had opinions on the pressing theological issues of his day, the Hebraism and investment in Jewish exegesis that helped establish his reputation were most important in defining the character of his work and set his treatment of these questions apart from earlier models. Nicholas used the quodlibetal disputation as an opportunity to address Jewish error through an interplay of exegesis and polemic—an approach that he continued for decades afterward and that enabled him to make extensive use of Jewish commentaries without, for the most part, being charged with Judaizing. Of course the intersection of exegesis and polemic was ages old in both Christian and Jewish circles, but Nicholas’s situation was distinctive in that he made more thoroughgoing use of medieval rabbinic commentary than any Christian contemporary and that he did so at a time when ‘‘modern’’ Jewish opinions were increasingly suspect and Jewish books were being censored and burned.6 That the only three questions to survive from Nicholas’s quodlibetal disputation involved exegesis suggests that contemporaries were also most interested in Nicholas’s contributions in this area.7 The two questions on knowing Christ and his nature through Jewish Scripture were clearly disputed in the same quodlibet: they appear alongside each other in Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana MS Vat. lat.  with a direct reference in the first to the second. Discussing the texts by which...

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