ABSTRACT
Of the books of the medieval Christian Old Testament, none has a more intimate and complex relationship to the gospels than the Book of Psalms. This chapter investigates a few ways in which this relationship was explored in literal commentaries by two great mendicant exegetes, Thomas Aquinas and Nicholas of Lyra. The gospels are prose narratives of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, while the psalms are a collection of Hebrew songs of various genres, composed over a period of nearly half a millennium, centuries before the gospels were recorded. The hermeneutical relationship between the psalms and the gospels should reveal something about the "production of Christian culture" in the Middle Ages, since it gives an opportunity to see how medieval Christians read the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible as Christians and as scholars.
