Welcome back to another episode of five minutes in church history. On this episode we will be talking about a church historian.

Really, he's one of the first church historians.

This is The Bede, or as he is known sometimes as the venerable bead.

Now what is venerable? It's one of those terms that's used in Roman Catholicism.

It's applied to holy people who are not quite

Saints. So Bede is not a saint, but he's not just average, so he's venerable.

To me he's a church historian. He was born in 672 and he died in 735.

As just a young kid at the age of seven, he was placed into an Abbey and he spent the rest of his life in monasteries.

He showed promise as a very intelligent young kid. He mastered

languages very quickly. This was in a time where very few people were

educated and he knew Greek, he knew Hebrew, he knew Latin. He was very capable at teaching, at writing.

He even was good at singing and even wrote hymns.

All told, he wrote over 60 books. One of his books was entitled

A Book of Hymns in several sorts of meter. He wrote a book called A Book of Epigrams

in heroic verse. He wrote, Of the Nature of Things,

and a book of the Nature of Time. Now in that book, interestingly, he didn't invent the words AD or the abbreviation AD and how we refer to history, BC and AD,

but he used it so prominently and pushed it in that book that he's credited as the guy who gives

us this concept of AD.

Well beyond all of those 60 books that he wrote,

the one book that makes him stand out,

especially on this show of church history,

is his book on the Ecclesiastical History of England. It begins in 55 BC with Caesar's Invasion of

...