Recent translations of the Venerable Bede's biblical commentaries have made possible studies that not long ago were unthinkable for this new generation of scholars, which can boast much less Latin fluency than previous generations could. (Yet few of these earlier scholars were likely so fluent that they could read Bede's Latin corpus as quickly as we now can read those same works in English translation.) Conor O'Brien's Bede's Temple is a fine exemplar of this new scholarship. Drawing on such recent translations of Bede's works as Arthur Holder's On the Temple and On the Tabernacle, and Scott DeGregorio's On Ezra and Nehemiah, to name just a few examples, and sources in the original Latin (most probably from the CETEDOC Library of Christian Latin Texts), O'Brien has produced a veritable cornucopia of Bede's many references to the Jerusalem temple and classified them according to the various metaphorical senses that Bede affixed to this structure during his nearly forty years of scholarly writing. The result is a book in which five of its eight chapters address, respectively, a different temple metaphor: Bede's temple as history (chapter 3), as cosmos (chapter 4), as the Body of Christ (chapter 5), as Church (chapter 6), and as individual (chapter 7).

To be fair, O'Brien does much more here than merely sort and catalogue Bede's use of temple metaphors. Perhaps the most unfortunate thing about this volume is its title, which conveys the impression of a book marred by limited scope. Yet to the contrary, O'Brien presents Bede's temple image here as a sort of prism through which his readers might behold the broader panorama of this English monk's thought and spirituality, as well as his historical context. More than that, the chapters’ various arguments, along with a fulsome bibliography, serve as an excellent general introduction to the current state of Bede scholarship.

O'Brien does not boldly set forth an overarching thesis. He does, however, express certain characteristic convictions that he finds worth revisiting several times and that confer a sense of unity upon the whole. Among the most important of these is O'Brien's conviction that Bede's preoccupation with the temple was not merely his own, but reflected the lively communal interest of his fellow monks at Wearmouth-Jarrow—an interest evidenced in part by that community's early eighth-century production of the Codex Amiatinus with its bifolium containing the image of the tabernacle described in Exodus. Such a conviction usefully counters earlier views of Bede as a solitary genius whose outlook was shaped almost exclusively by his preoccupation with the Church Fathers, whose works he admittedly did cherish.

One can quibble with certain points here, including certain poor and ungrammatical translations of Bede's Latin (e.g. pp. 186 and 195n90), but they do nothing to obscure the generally informative and insightful nature of O'Brien's work, which surely should be one of the first volumes an aspiring scholar of Bede's exegesis should read.