Annotation CXXV

”Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” — Matthew 27:46

Whether Christ was struck by the lance before he was dead.

Chrysostom, homily 89 on Matthew, after the exposition of these words, subjoins the following words of Matthew in this manner: “‘For they thought,’ he says, ‘that Elijah was being called by him; and they at once gave him vinegar to drink; but another, coming near, with a lance

opened his side.’ Then, having set forth the explanation of these words, he again subjoins from the same Evangelist: ‘But Jesus, crying with a great voice, gave up the spirit.’” A certain uncertain [anonymous] scholiast of Cornelius Agrippa abuses this reading of Chrysostom for the confirmation of a detestable error, which the same Cornelius left written in the book On the Vanity of Sciences, chapter 100 — affirming that Matthew the Evangelist erred, when he said that Christ was struck by the lance before he expired, against the authority of John, who related that he was pierced with the lance after death. Wishing to defend this vanity of Agrippa, that scholiast builds [the claim], from the adduced reading of Chrysostom, that the present passage stood thus in the codices of Matthew, and that Chrysostom read and expounded it in this manner. But since this reading is nowhere found in Matthew — neither in the exemplars of the Greeks, nor of the Latins — nor did any of the ancient expositors make any mention of this matter, it must be admitted that these words, together with the exposition of Chrysostom, were transposed by the carelessness of copyists; especially since the author himself, in this very place, asserts that the side of Christ, [when] entirely dead, was wounded; and repeats this same [thing] in homily 84 on John, explaining that [text], “One of the soldiers with a lance opened his side.” I suspect that Agrippa — most zealous for heretical dogmas — took the occasion of this rash assertion not from the Gospel of Matthew, where no mention of this matter exists, but from the ravings of Peter John the Minorite [Olivi]; who — as Guido, bishop of Elne, is witness in the book Against Heresies — first published this error with foolish zeal. For he, when he was expounding the Passion and death of Christ in a public sermon, feigned that Christ, while still living, was wounded by the lance — that, by the amplification of Christ’s sufferings, he might stir up the people more and more to mercy and weeping. And since he afterward persevered in obstinately defending this opinion, he was at last condemned in the Council of Vienne. The condemnation of this error stands in the first book of the Clementine sanctions, title 1.