Appearing at the head of Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29 (II), The Passion of Jesus Christ opens the book in commemoration of the Passion, given as a moral lesson with brief asides. This long poem paraphrases and blends the gospel narrative shared in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The poet’s intent is to preach a proper understanding of Jesus’s life. The “lutele tale” (line 1) he will tell, he says, is not of Charlemagne and his twelve peers, but rather of Christ’s suffering, and implicitly, too, the events touching the lives of the apostles. He begins by calling the Passion a stirring adventure of more significance than a popular tale could ever hold. The narrative of Christ’s suffering is offered as more properly edifying, kingly, and victorious than are tales of a worldly emperor.

After a short prologue, the poet sketches Christ’s main life events — birth, baptism, temptation by Satan, and ministry — paraphrasing brief bits of gospel. The narrative then proceeds according to Matthew 26–27, Mark 14–15, Luke 22–23, and John 13, 18–19. The key events, economically recounted, are the Last Supper, Judas’s betrayal of Jesus, Jesus seized by the Jews, Peter’s acts and denials, Jesus’s trial before Pilate, and the Crucifixion. The Resurrection is paraphrased in a last section under its own rubric. Borrowing mainly from John 20, but also from Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and Acts 2, the poet depicts Mary Magdalene at the tomb, Christ’s appearance before her, Christ’s coming among the apostles, and Christ’s Ascension to heaven. The Passion concludes with a prayer for the writer and those “bothe yonge and olde” of his “ordre” (lines 699–700). The prayer in combination with the moralizing glosses implies that the author was a friar, a canon, or a monk.

Directed at an audience “in English” (as the incipit stresses) and projecting a popular narrative style, the Passion’s religious directives reinforce the absolute importance of confession — an annual imperative decreed for all Christians in England after the reforms enacted by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) — a standard theme for an evangelizing preacher and working confessor. Some strategic repetitions emphasize that Judas, in betraying Jesus, acted like Satan when he tempted Christ, and that Satan, in wanting folks to sin, acts like the envious Jews who conspired to kill Jesus. Fear of death is normal — indeed, Jesus felt it — but with God’s Passion and confession as shields, one need fear neither death nor the pains of hell. A countervailing message of God’s love is shown to exist in the Passion narrative, which makes the doctrinal theme of this long scriptural paraphrase congruent with the softened strains of Friar Thomas of Hales in Love Rune or the poet of A Homily on Sooth Love (arts. 19, 26).

Passion is written in a Southwestern dialect in agreement with the provenance of Jesus 29. The Gospels and Acts are probably the direct source for Passion, but other well-disseminated analogues may have been known by the poet, in particular, The Gospel of Nicodemus and Herman de Valenciennes’s La Passioun Nostre Seignour (ca. 1188–1195). The former presents, as biblical apocrypha, the trial before Pilate and the Crucifixion in legalistic detail; the latter paraphrases the Gospels in Anglo-Norman laisses, while dramatically heightening, contrasting, and psychologizing the tortured emotions of Judas and Peter. Both works survive in thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman copies in another trilingual West Midland miscellany: MS Harley 2253 (CHMS, 1:208–359). The varied contents of Jesus 29 include two more biblical paraphrases: The Woman of Samaria (art. 5) and the Anglo-Norman Tobias (Reinsch, ed., “La vie de Tobie”). Another Jesus 29 text has an incipit that states its English language: Antiphon of Saint Thomas the Martyr in English (art. 17).

Enlarged, decorated capitals and rubrics demarcate the Passion’s three sections: Prologue (lines 1–20), Christ’s Passion (lines 21–552), Christ’s Resurrection (lines 553–706). Smaller yet somewhat enlarged colored initials indicate stanza-like groupings of couplets. Most are four, six, or eight lines in length, and many are longer. This edition groups lines according to the positioning of the colored initials.

[Fols. 144r–155r. NIMEV 1441. DIMEV 2431. Muir, MWME, 2:393–94, 544 [33]. Quire: 1. Meter: 706 septenary lines (seven stresses per line) with caesuras, in rhymed couplets, with some quatrains and sestets, aa(aa)(aa)7. Layout: Long lines with medial and end punctuation. Decorated, much enlarged initials appear after rubrics at major transition points (lines 1, 21, 553). Edition: Morris, pp. 37–57. Seventeenth-century transcription, lines 1–85: Oxford, BodL, MS Ashmole 1449, pp. 163–66, by Welsh antiquary Edward Lluyd, Assistant Keeper (1683–1689) and Keeper (1691–1709) of the Ashmoleian Museum, Oxford (Hill-History, p. 203n1; and Hill-Part2, p. 276).]