Historians of early Christianity have never given more than passing attention to the graphic depictions of the genealogy of Christ are found in nearly 20 Spanish, Gascon and Italian manuscripts (list) which date as far back as the 10th century [*]A group from the Meuse region will be discussed separately..
On the simplest level, these tables, running over several pages, could be described as an elaborate "family tree", with Adam and Eve as the root node and Jesus Christ as their most remote child. The document, if it is headed at all, is generally entitled Genealogia ab Adam usque ad Christum per ordines linearum [*]Cf. Cassiodorus's advocacy of stemmatic illustrations using the linealis descriptio..
Closer examination shows that it is more than just a stemma. It also contains a timeline of the sort used by Late Antique Christian writers [*]In particular Theophilus, Julius Africanus and Eusebius. See Gelzer, Heinrich. Sextus Julius Africanus und die byzantinische Chronographie. Leipzig, Teubner/Hinrichs, 1880-1898 in an attempt to establish the date of Creation, and sometimes also of the Second Coming of Christ. The document expresses exegetical views that attempt to reconcile internal contradictions in scripture.
In its classic version, the document contains the names of about 580 Old Testament persons, each enclosed in a circle or roundel. This great stemma is several orders of magnitude larger than the lawyers' stemma mentioned by Isidore or the logical stemma as used by Cassiodorus. The great stemma is commonly found as front matter to medieval bibles and to the Commentary on the Apocalypse, a book written by the Spanish monk Beatus in the year 776.
Contemporary studies [*]Neuss, Williams, Zaluska, Klapisch-Zuber. suggest the stemma is in fact much older than that: a relic of Late Antiquity designed by one or more unknown authors at a time before the Vulgate version of the Old Testament (compiled by Jerome 390-405 AD) had gained wide currency.
The fact that the great stemma has escaped widespread scholarly attention can be put down to the seeming impossibility of attaching an author or date to it. It contains only a few dozen words of theological text, clearly belonging to a current that magnifies the role of Mary, the mother of Christ. It seems to have escaped any recommendation or criticism by early Christian writers, making its place in Christian history difficult to assess.
This stemma was so prized as a stock book illustration in Spain that it continued to be used to enrich fine manuscripts for perhaps 500 or 600 years after it was first devised, usually preserving apocryphal persons and archaic forms of Old Testament names and acquiring an accumulation of errors.
Some 20 medieval copies of the great stemma are documented, but it is conceivable that this Genealogy of Christ was reproduced dozens more times. It appears to be closely related to a lesser stemma found in four medieval bibles. The great stemma may have served as model for the even more popular Genealogy of Christ by Peter of Poitiers. Echoes of its design are found more than 1,000 years after its first authorship in engravings supervised by John Speed for the Geneva Bible in English in 1611[*]Speed..
Although the great stemma is said to be a "genealogy of Christ", this genealogy type is technically not the common "ascent tree", where the youngest person (Christ) is the focus and an ever-widening array of ancestors is shown, but a "descent tree", which is to say that its ramifications spring from the ancestors and multiply to their children and grandchildren. In this sense, it is could be more accurately called a "genealogy of Adam".
Its root, Adam the first man, is not shown at centre top as a modern reader might expect, but in the left top corner, so that the stemma ramifies both rightwards and downwards. The progress rightwards is at the macro level, matching a largely lost timeline through the eras from Adam to Christ, while the downwards unfurling is at a micro level, one generation at a time.
The graphical conventions used in the great stemma are stable enough that the artist-copyists were able to selectively depart from them without descending into nonsense. With the main axes clearly established, the direction of expansion can exceptionally curl back leftwards where the artist is short of space to accommodate a very large number of roundels. The roundels are generally joined by short lines, but where space is lacking in some of the extant copies, two roundels simply touch one another to signify that they connect. In other cases, the wiring can become complex: on the first page of the Millán stemma, long connectors snake and cross one another rather like a complex freeway map to exploit all the available page space.
The connectors themselves are ambivalent. In the upper reaches of the great stemma, they signify either marriage or a series of father-son relationships, but at lower levels a succession of brothers or even a series of judges is often entrained along a single vertical or zig-zagging line. No confusion is caused by this, because each roundel contains the Latin name of both its occupant and his father.
Some scholars argue that the great stemma's violations of its own axial rules imply a lack of sophistication, or that the author lacked the wit to place similar generations at a similar height on the page, to fork the connecting lines consistently, or to differentiate the various relationships (wives, sons or none) with colour coding or special connectors.
Those defects may in fact be damage done by copyists to the archetypal stemma. But even if they are not, that criticism takes no account of a preference that writers have always had for what might be called a "loose" document type.
We have perhaps stronger memories of the "loose" spelling common up to the 19th century even among writers with sophisticated orthographic training, or with the preference in the late 20th century for "loose" hypertext markup language (HTML) despite the strictures of people who wanted to impose "strict" markup. In all these cases, authors perceive over-strictness as a distraction from their mission of writing for clarity and immediacy.
The original practical use of the great stemma is not entirely clear. It is definitely not a mnemonic device, as has sometimes been claimed. A complex stemma reduces content to a logical minimum and is devoid of any accompanying markers that might help the visual memory. Genealogies are far easier to learn in the form of narratives or lists. Even copying the great stemma from a book to a blank page was difficult to do accurately, as the numerous errors in our copies prove.
Like a detailed electrical wiring diagram, a stemma is unsuitable as a device for inputting information to the human memory. A stemma is not an aid to input but more a mechanism for mental output. It could be termed an "external storage device", where a complex analysis can be saved for ready reference. As Cassiodorus might have said, a stemma may either format the mind to learn from the verbal explanation that follows, or allow one to test later what has been memorized, but it cannot replace the classroom discourse.
If the author of the great stemma did intend to create such a monument of visual analysis, his successors soon subverted that purpose. They built more and more errors into the great stemma and left its names in outdated Latin or corrupted forms that were unfindable in the Vulgate Latin Bible. As a work of reference it became not only confusing but unusable, and still it kept on being reproduced. Why?
In its day, the great stemma would have appeared to many as an masterly scientific reformulation of scripture. Unlike difficult text or easy pictorial illuminations, it would have impressed many readers as an intellectually rigorous distillation into 14 or fewer pages of the story of the incarnation and salvation. A user was not required to read it from start to finish, but simply to appreciate it as a whole, fixing an eye on the well-known root persons - Adam, Noah, Abraham and David - while sampling the exotic names from just a few randomly chosen roundels.
The corner illustrations in some editions and the panels of text between the roundels were somewhat like pictures and captions today, inviting the reader to focus on them, then simply fly over the rest of the content.
We are far from knowing when the great stemma was compiled, or by whom, or even if the original language was Latin or Greek, but it seems beyond doubt that a single, now-lost model circulating in Spain accounts for its wide distribution there. There is no evidence that the great stemma was new in the 9th century, and a great deal of circumstantial evidence that it was already very old by then, including the extensive errors that arose through copying and recopying and the great stemma's affinity with the work of early Christian writers.
The compelling evidence that the great stemma probably dates back to Late Antiquity is that its original text closely resembles the Latin used in the various translations of scripture which preceded the work of Jerome. Working between 390 and 405 AD with a papal mandate, Jerome re-translated Old Testament. The new Latin version, ultimately to be known as the Vulgate, became the western church's authoritative text.
This does not mean the great stemma was drawn up before the time of Jerome, since the older Latin versions, known collectively as the Vetus Latina, did remain in use for decades longer. But it does suggest that the author was either not aware of efforts to impose the Vulgate as a western standard or consciously resisted them.
The great stemma's left-to-right orientation has suggested to some that it was originally drawn in one piece, on a scroll to be unrolled from left to right, and only later split into 14 or fewer discrete codex pages. The migration of a few errors between pages does indeed suggest mistakes might have been made while the great stemma was still all in one piece.
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