ABSTRACT

It was an enormous privilege to have the work of Joachim of Fiore and the scriptural interpretation which he initiated introduced to me by Marjorie Reeves. A lifetime’s research and delight in this underestimated medieval scriptural scholar infused a series of wide-ranging tutorials in which Marjorie Reeves, with an enviable lucidity and the economy of presentation, expounded the Figurae,1 and explained the distinctiveness of Joachim to me. Reeves’s tuition pointed me towards writers of whom I had never even heard, such as Peter John Olivi, yet whose names have since become a familiar part of the apocalyptic story that I have been exploring in recent years. is reminiscence is the context of this essay. Marjorie Reeves enabled me to glimpse why Joachim of Fiore deserves to be placed with the ‘greats’ in the history of Christian theology. is is because in Joachim’s work there is a reading of the Christian tradition which manages to encapsulate things about that tradition which are missed by them and their successors, whether Protestant or Catholic. Joachim therefore oers an understanding of the heart of New Testament theology which few had grasped.2