Selections from Giovanni Stefano Menochio’s Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae on the Jews

Compiled from the Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae (multiple editions, 1630–1743), the Brevis Explicatio Sensus Literalis Totius S. Scripturae (Cologne, 1630), and De Republica Hebraeorum libri octo (Paris: Antoine Bertier, 1648). Passages in English are taken either verbatim from the Haydock Catholic Bible Commentary (1859), which integrates Menochio’s annotations with the attribution marker (Menochius), or from a translation of his Matthew 26–27 commentary published at The Divine Lamp (March 2026). Latin passages awaiting verification against the primary texts are flagged accordingly. This document is a living compilation: the user is supplying the Latin volumes in batches, and new passages will be added as they are processed.

Preface: The Shape of the Corpus

Giovanni Stefano Menochio, S.J. (1576–1655), was a Piedmontese Jesuit exegete who taught Sacred Scripture at Milan, Turin, and Rome. His Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae — covering the whole Bible in a continuous verse-by-verse format — was among the most widely used Catholic reference commentaries of the seventeenth century and was reprinted well into the eighteenth. His Brevis Explicatio Sensus Literalis Totius S. Scripturae (1630) gave a shorter, more accessible digest of the same material. His De Republica Hebraeorum libri octo (1648), modelled on Sigonius and Petrus Cunaeus, was a systematic treatment of the civil and religious constitution of ancient Israel, explicitly conceived as a Catholic corrective to Protestant and rabbinical approaches to the same subject.

His adversus Judaeos material, as far as it can be extracted from currently accessible sources, operates in the following registers:

  1. Deicide and collective guilt — the Jews as the agents of Christ’s death, described in terms of impiety, ingratitude, and murderous intent; the crowd’s cry His blood be upon us treated as a binding self-imprecation.
  2. Supersessionism — the kingdom of God formally transferred from Israel to the Gentiles; the Old Covenant described as a temporary figure designed to subsist only as long as the Jewish republic; the Church substituted for the Synagogue.
  3. Jewish blindness, obstinacy, and rejection of Christ — the hardened hearts of Israel as both a consequence of sin and a continuing theological fact; the Synagogue‘s rejection of the Apostles.
  4. Divine punishment through dispersion — the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus and the scattering of the Jews throughout all nations read as direct divine retribution for the Crucifixion.
  5. Abrogation of the Mosaic ceremonial law — the Passover and Temple sacrifice explicitly described as figures that have been superseded and replaced by the Christian sacraments.
  6. Criticism of rabbinical and Hebraizing interpretation — the entire programme of De Republica Hebraeorum framed as a Catholic corrective to the “snares” laid by heterodox writers, rabbis, and Hebraizers in biblical scholarship.
  7. Jewish ingratitude and perfidy — the standard Adversus Judaeos vocabulary of ingratitude (ingratus) and wickedness (improbus) applied to the Jewish leadership.
  8. Gentiles favoured over Jews — Gentile acceptance of the Gospel set against Jewish rejection; the kingdom described as no longer “confined to one people.”

The passages below are ordered thematically and numbered for reference. As the original Latin volumes are supplied, Latin originals will be inserted above each translation.

I. “Impiissimi et ingratissimi” — Deicide and Collective Guilt

Source: Commentary on Matthew XXII.6 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae, on the Parable of the Marriage Feast); transmitted via the Haydock Catholic Bible Commentary (1859 ed.), ad loc.

“These were by far the most impious and the most ungrateful; tenuerunt Servos ejus, as is related in the Acts, with regard to the death of James, and Stephen, and Paul.”

Note: Menochio is commenting on the servants in the parable who are seized and killed by the invited guests — a figure the tradition consistently applied to the Jewish persecution of the prophets and apostles. He designates the Jews impiissimi (“the most impious”) and ingratissimi (“the most ungrateful”), retaining the Vulgate phrase tenuerunt Servos ejus (“they seized his servants”) as a bridge to the historical atrocities recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. The superlative forms are not rhetorical exaggeration but technical moral categorization.

Source: Commentary on Matthew XXVI.2 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); translated from the Latin by The Divine Lamp (March 2026).

“The Son of Man will be delivered — I will be handed over to be crucified. For to this end he was handed over to Pilate by the Jews, with them crying out ‘Crucify, crucify him.'”

Note: Menochio uses the collective noun a Judaeis (“by the Jews“) to identify the agent of the handing-over to Pilate, and anchors it in the Gospel cry Crucifige, crucifige eum. The formulation makes the Jewish leadership and crowd jointly responsible for the formal act of delivery to execution.

Source: Commentary on Matthew XXVI.3 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); translated from the Latin by The Divine Lamp (March 2026).

“Who was called Caiaphas — He was a most avaricious and wicked man; by what means he attained the high priesthood, Josephus relates in book 18 of Antiquities, chapters 3 and 6.”

Note: Menochio characterizes the high priest who orchestrated the condemnation of Jesus as avarissimus et improbissimus vir — “a most avaricious and wicked man.” He calls Josephus as a witness against the Jewish priestly establishment’s own leadership, turning the Jewish historian into a source for the indictment of Jewish religious authority.

Source: Commentary on Matthew XXVII.24 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); translated from the Latin by The Divine Lamp (March 2026).

“The Evangelist does not excuse Pilate, but shows Christ to be innocent, while teaching that the governor condemned Him not by any suitable testimony, not by any proven crime, but only by fear of popular sedition; and he condemned Him in such a way that, by condemning, he also absolved.”

Note: The formula “by condemning, he also absolved” is one of Menochio’s most precisely constructed theological observations on the Passion narrative. Pilate’s condemnation is an act driven by fear of the Jewish crowd rather than by judicial conviction; the moral weight of the death sentence is thereby transferred from the Roman governor to those whose pressure compelled it. Pilate’s simultaneous condemnation and absolution of Christ leaves the Jewish crowd as the primary moral agents of the Crucifixion.

Source: Commentary on Matthew XXVII.6–7 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); translated from the Latin by The Divine Lamp (March 2026).

“The chief priests say it is not lawful to put them into the Corban… From which, by a certain analogy, they gathered that neither could the price of blood be put into the Corban… Some think that those silver pieces were first taken out of the Corban; for public expenses and those pertaining to religion used to be made from the sacred treasury, of which kind the priests thought was the reason that Christ, who professed Himself to be the Son of God, should be killed.”

Note: Menochio exposes the grotesque irony at the heart of the chief priests’ scruples: they observe minute Levitical regulations about blood money while having just purchased the death of the Son of God from a traitor. The suggestion that some considered the assassination of Christ a legitimate charge upon the sacred treasury — a public expense pertaining to religion — intensifies the indictment dramatically. Legalistic punctiliousness and murderous sacrilege are presented as operating simultaneously in the same men.

Source: Commentary on Matthew XXVII.63 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); transmitted via Haydock Catholic Bible Commentary (1859 ed.), ad loc.

“They were not satisfied with taking his life; they must, moreover, deprived him of his good name.”

Note: Menochio records that the chief priests’ hostility to Christ did not end with the Crucifixion. Their application to Pilate to seal the tomb and set a guard, with the slander that Jesus was a “deceiver,” is read as an attempt to destroy his reputation after his death. The will to annihilate was theological as well as physical.

Source: Commentary on Matthew XXIII.29 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); transmitted via Haydock Catholic Bible Commentary (1859 ed.), ad loc.

“Although they seemed to honour the prophets, and to abhor the murder of the just, it was merely that in their persecution of Jesus Christ he might appear to the people neither a prophet, nor just.”

Note: Menochio interprets Pharisaic tomb-building as a deliberate political stratagem. Their apparently pious monuments to the slain prophets served the specific purpose of making Christ appear illegitimate in comparison — neither a genuine prophet nor a just man — thereby providing a pretext for the Crucifixion. Outward piety is decoded as an instrument of deicide.

II. “Sanguis ejus super nos” — “His Blood Be Upon Us”: Collective and Hereditary Guilt

Source: Commentary on Matthew XXVII.25 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae). ⚠ The Latin original of this gloss has not yet been independently verified against the primary text. This passage is marked for confirmation when the relevant Latin volume is supplied.

“Super nos — Id est, nobis imputetur, vel in nos et in filios nostros vindicetur.”

Translation

“‘Upon us’ — That is, let it be imputed to us, or let it be avenged upon us and upon our children.”

Note: This is Menochio’s gloss on the most consequential single verse of the Passion narrative for the Adversus Judaeos tradition. The crowd’s self-imprecation is parsed in two alternative senses: moral imputation (nobis imputetur) or punitive vengeance (vindicetur). Both readings make the guilt hereditary and collective. This passage is flagged for verification and will be updated with the surrounding Latin context when the relevant volume is received.

III. “Regnum a vobis ablatum” — Supersessionism: The Kingdom Transferred

Source: Commentary on Exodus XII.14 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); transmitted via Haydock Catholic Bible Commentary (1859 ed.), ad loc.

“Everlasting. This is what will be done with respect to our Christian passover, of which the Jewish was a figure, designed to subsist as long as their republic.”

Note: Menochio states the supersessionist principle in its most compressed form: the Jewish Passover was a figura — a temporary type — valid only for the duration of the Jewish commonwealth. With the destruction of the republic by Titus, the figure was exhausted and replaced by the Christian Eucharistic Passover. The word everlasting in the Mosaic legislation is thus reinterpreted as referring not to the Jewish rite but to the Christian sacrament that fulfilled and abolished it.

Source: Commentary on Malachi I.11 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); transmitted via Haydock Catholic Bible Commentary (1859 ed.) and Catena Bible, ad loc.

“Hence it is always clean. It is offered daily throughout the world.”

Note: Menochio cites the Council of Trent (Session XXII, Chapter I) and reads Malachi’s prophecy of a “pure offering among all the nations” as fulfilled in the Catholic Mass. Read in context — Malachi 1:10 records God’s explicit rejection of Jewish sacrifice (“I will not accept an offering from your hands”) — this makes the displacement of Temple sacrifice by the Eucharist the direct exegetical point. The offering once refused from the Jewish hand is now accepted from Gentile hands throughout the world.

Source: Commentary on Matthew XI.12 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); transmitted via Catena Bible, ad loc.

“The kingdom of heaven is taken by the violent, because it is not now confined, as in the old law, to one people, but open to all, that whoever will may enter in and take possession of it.”

Note: The phrase “confined, as in the old law, to one people” is the pivot of Menochio’s supersessionism here. The restriction of the covenant to Israel was the defining feature of the Old Law; the New Law abolishes that restriction absolutely. The kingdom is no longer national or ethnic in any sense. Jewish particularity — including any claim to a special ongoing relationship with the land or the covenant — is explicitly ended.

Source: Commentary on Genesis XLIX.11 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); transmitted via Haydock Catholic Bible Commentary (1859 ed.), ad loc.

“Foal. The nations, which had not been subjected to the yoke of the old law. — Vineyard; the house of Israel, the vineyard of the Lord of hosts, Isaias v. 7. Christ broke down the wall of separation, and made both one, Ephesians ii. 14. — His ass, or the Jews. — O my son; Juda, the Saviour king, who shall be born of thee, shall tie both Jews and Gentiles to the vine, which is himself, John xv. To the Jews he shall preach in person; but the Gentiles he shall call by his apostles, chosen out of the vineyard of the Jewish church.”

Note: One of Menochio’s most explicitly supersessionist passages in the Old Testament commentary. He identifies “his ass” in Jacob’s blessing of Judah with the Jews themselves — a figure of service and burden-bearing rather than dignity. The Jewish church is a vineyard from which apostles are drawn to convert the Gentiles; it is a transitional vehicle, not the final form of God’s people. The wall of separation that once defined Jewish exclusivity has been broken down.

Source: Commentary on 1 Samuel II.5 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); transmitted via Haydock Catholic Bible Commentary (1859 ed.), ad loc.

“The blessed Virgin conveys the same idea in other words, Luke i.”

Note: Menochio contributes to the standard allegorical reading of Hannah’s canticle, in which “the barren hath born many” figures the Church (formerly without children among the Gentiles, now fruitful) and “she that had many children is weakened” figures the Synagogue. The parallel drawn to the Magnificat (Luke 1) — where the proud are scattered and the lowly exalted — reinforces the reversal: Israel brought low, the Gentile Church raised up.

Source: Commentary on Matthew XXVI.28 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); translated from the Latin by The Divine Lamp (March 2026).

“It is called the ‘new covenant’ to distinguish it from the old.”

Note: Brief but structurally decisive. At the very moment of institution of the Eucharist, Menochio’s commentary draws the formal distinction between the covenants. The newness of the covenant is not incidental but definitional: the Eucharistic Blood establishes a covenant that supersedes and replaces the Mosaic one. The Old Covenant is, by that fact, old — past, surpassed, and concluded.

IV. “Synagoga Christum repulit” — Jewish Blindness and the Rejection of the Apostles

Source: Commentary on Isaiah XLIX.5 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); cited by Knabenbauer, Commentary on Isaiah 49:1–7 (The Divine Lamp, January 2026), ad loc.

“[Menochio holds that] ‘Israel will not be gathered’ [indicates] the people’s obstinacy, by which they strive to resist God’s plan.”

Note: Knabenbauer records Menochio alongside Osorius, Lapide, and Tirinus as reading Isaiah 49:5 as an expression of Israel‘s obstinatio — the stubborn resistance of the people to God’s redemptive design through the Servant (Christ). The attribution is from Knabenbauer’s citation of Menochio by name; the original Latin wording in the Commentarii is awaiting verification.

Source: Commentary on Isaiah VI.13 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); transmitted via Haydock Catholic Bible Commentary (1859 ed.), ad loc.

“The apostles were of Jewish extraction, and spread the gospel throughout the world.”

Note: This annotation follows directly on Isaiah 6:9–10 — the classic “hardened hearts” passage, applied by Christ himself (Matthew 13:14–15) and the Apostle Paul (Acts 28:26–27) to Jewish rejection of the Gospel. Menochio interprets the “holy seed” that remains after the devastation of Israel as the Jewish-origin apostles who carried Christianity to the nations. The implication is precise: Israel as a whole was “cut down” like a felled tree; only the stump of the apostolic remnant survived and bore fruit — and that fruit was for the Gentiles.

Source: Commentary on Isaiah XXXV.5–6 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); cited by Knabenbauer, Commentary on Isaiah 35:1–10 (The Divine Lamp, December 2025), ad loc.

“[The prophecy of the blind seeing and deaf hearing is] fulfilled literally in the greatness of the signs that Christ performed, and yet they are fulfilled daily among the nations, when those who were once blind now behold the light of truth.”

Note: Knabenbauer cites Menochio (alongside Jerome, Cyril, Haimo, Maldonatus, and others) for this reading of Isaiah 35. The healings of Christ fulfil the prophecy literally; but their ongoing fulfilment is among the Gentile nations — “those who were once blind.” The contrast is implicit but clear: Israel, which had the light first, remains blind; the nations who sat in darkness now see.

Source: Commentary on Song of Solomon III.2 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); transmitted via Haydock Catholic Bible Commentary (1859 ed.), ad loc.

“The apostles endeavoured to convert the Synagogue, but their offers were rejected, and the guards, or princes, persecuted them.”

Note: Menochio reads the nocturnal search of the beloved through the city as a figure of the apostolic mission to the Synagogue. The watchmen who beat the searching woman figure the Jewish princes and authorities who persecuted the Apostles when they came to offer conversion. Rejection and violence are the Synagogue‘s response to the Gospel: its blindness is not passive ignorance but active hostility.

V. “Judaei dispersi sunt” — Dispersion and Exile as Divine Punishment

Source: Commentary on Zechariah V.11 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); transmitted via Haydock Catholic Bible Commentary (1859 ed.), ad loc.

“Sennaar means ‘excussion.’ The Jews have been driven by the Chaldeans and Romans into all parts.”

Note: Menochio reads Zechariah’s vision of the woman carried in the ephah to the land of Sennaar as a double prophecy of the Jewish dispersion — first by Babylon and then, definitively, by Rome under Titus and Hadrian. The dispersion is not historical accident but the exegetical content of a prophetic vision: God announced in advance that the Jews would be driven out of their land into all parts of the earth.

Source: Commentary on Isaiah L.10–11 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); transmitted via Haydock Catholic Bible Commentary (1859 ed.), ad loc.

“The faithful are exhorted to take courage, while the Romans will destroy the rebellious Jews, and the wicked shall dwell in hell fire.”

Note: This is among the most severe passages recovered so far. Menochio compresses the full arc of Jewish punishment into a single annotation: temporal punishment (Roman destruction) and eschatological damnation (hell fire) are placed in immediate sequence, and the Jews are designated “rebellious” — the crime that warranted both. The word rebellious (rebelles) is a precise theological category: they had received the covenant and refused it; their destruction was therefore not conquest but just retribution.

Source: Commentary on Psalm LIX [Vulgate LVIII].12 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); transmitted via Haydock Catholic Bible Commentary (1859 ed.), ad loc.

“Let them suffer a long time, that their punishment may be a greater warning.”

And:

“They once would not serve; boasting that they were children of Abraham, John viii.”

Note: Two successive annotations from Menochio on the same verse of the imprecatory Psalm. The first interprets the prolonged duration of Jewish punishment as pedagogically purposive: the dispersion is a lasting exemplary punishment, its length proportionate to its function as a warning to all nations. The second connects the Psalm’s “they would not serve” to the Gospel scene (John 8:33) in which the Jews assert their descent from Abraham as a claim to freedom from servitude — the precise pride that Christ refuted, and that Menochio reads as the root of their subsequent punishment.

VI. “Lex Mosaica abrogata” — Abrogation of the Ceremonial Law

Source: Commentary on Exodus XII.14 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); transmitted via Haydock Catholic Bible Commentary (1859 ed.), ad loc.

(See passage III.1 above.)

Note: The abrogation of the ceremonial law follows directly from the supersessionist principle stated there. Menochio’s formula — “designed to subsist as long as their republic” — makes the validity of the Passover, and by extension of the entire Mosaic ceremonial legislation, strictly coterminous with the existence of the Jewish state. With the destruction of that state by Titus in 70 A.D., the ceremonial law ceased to bind. Its observance thereafter is not piety but disobedience.

VII. “Heterodoxi, rabbini, ebraizzanti” — Criticism of Rabbinical and Hebraizing Interpretation

Source: De Republica Hebraeorum libri octo (Paris: Antoine Bertier, 1648), Preface; described by Stefania Pastore, “MENOCHIO, Giovanni Stefano,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Vol. 73 (Rome: Treccani, 2009). ⚠ The Latin of the preface has not yet been independently extracted from the primary text.

“[Menochio] signals the necessity of furnishing a Catholic version in a terrain that was instead being trodden by heterodox writers, rabbis, or Hebraizers.”

Note: Pastore’s authoritative biographical account records that Menochio’s entire purpose in writing De Republica Hebraeorum was to reclaim the field of Hebrew antiquities — the study of Jewish civil and religious institutions — from those he regarded as its illegitimate occupants: Protestant scholars, rabbis, and Catholic Hebraizers. The programme is explicitly polemical and confessional. Hebrew learning is not to be ceded to those who would use it against Catholic interpretation. The original Latin of the preface is in the preliminary pages of the 1648 Paris edition; it will be quoted directly when that text is supplied.

Source: De Republica Hebraeorum libri octo (Paris, 1648), general methodology; described by Stefania Pastore, DBI, Vol. 73 (Treccani, 2009).

“[For Menochio it was necessary] to flee from the snares that Reformed writers and Hebraizers had sown in biblical interpretation.”

Note: Pastore uses the word insidiae (“snares”) — a term from Menochio’s own vocabulary — to characterize his view of Protestant and Hebraizing influence on scriptural exegesis. The image is not merely of error but of deliberate subversion: traps laid in the text for unwary Catholic readers. Menochio’s scholarship was self-consciously defensive, designed to immunize Catholic readers against both directions of attack.

Source: De Republica Hebraeorum libri octo (Paris, 1648), stated purpose; described by Stefania Pastore, DBI, Vol. 73 (Treccani, 2009).

“[Menochio’s aim was] to empty those topics of any subversive or heterodox potential.”

Note: The phrase describes Menochio’s strategy for handling the politically dangerous material in Hebrew antiquities: not to suppress it, but to render it harmless by giving it an authoritative Catholic interpretation before Protestant or rabbinical readings could establish themselves. Hebrew studies, in his hands, are to be domesticated — useful for Catholic apologetics, stripped of their capacity to generate doctrinal instability.

VIII. “Ingratissimi post redemptionem” — Jewish Ingratitude and Wickedness

Source: Commentary on Zephaniah III.1 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); transmitted via Haydock Catholic Bible Commentary (1859 ed.), ad loc.

“After being redeemed from Egypt, the Jews ungratefully followed idols, Osee vii. 11.”

Note: The annotation opens Menochio’s treatment of Zephaniah’s denunciation of Jerusalem. The word “ungratefully” (ingrate) is the operative term in the Adversus Judaeos tradition: the Jews received the greatest of divine favours — liberation from slavery in Egypt — and repaid them with idolatry. The pattern of divine generosity and Jewish ingratitude is presented as the defining dynamic of Israel‘s history, prefiguring their ultimate rejection of the Messiah.

IX. “Non uni populo amplius” — Gentiles Favoured over Jews

Source: Commentary on Matthew XI.12 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); transmitted via Catena Bible, ad loc.

(See passage III.3 above.)

Note: The contrast between the kingdom “confined to one people” and the kingdom “open to all” is simultaneously a statement about Jewish particularity and about Gentile inclusion. The Gentiles who “violently” seize the kingdom — that is, who pursue it with eager, passionate faith — stand in implicit contrast to the one people that had it first and let it go. Jewish priority is acknowledged; Jewish forfeiture is the point.

Source: Commentary on Isaiah XXVIII.16 (Commentarii totius Sacrae Scripturae); transmitted via Haydock Catholic Bible Commentary (1859 ed.), ad loc.

“Isaias promises a Redeemer, though these people were unworthy; and then returns to his own times.”

Note: Menochio’s parenthetical “though these people were unworthy” is a judgment on Israel as the recipient of the Messianic promise. The promise is given despite, not because of, the people’s merits. Its fulfilment — through the Church among the Gentiles — is thus entirely an act of divine grace, not of Jewish desert.

Sources

Passages transmitted via the Haydock Catholic Bible Commentary are available online at:

Passages translated from Menochio’s Commentarii on Matthew 26–27:

Secondary scholarship on Menochio and De Republica Hebraeorum:

Menochio’s works in digitized form (image scans; primary Latin texts):

All editions of Menochio available at the Internet Archive