From the earliest days of the Church, Christians have approached the Sacred Scriptures not as an isolated text to be deciphered by private ingenuity, but as a living inheritance entrusted to the community founded by Christ. The Bible was received within the Church before it was ever defined by the Church; it was proclaimed in the liturgy before it was analyzed in the schools; it was prayed, sung, and preached before it was subjected to the tools of philology or historical criticism. This organic relationship between Scripture and the ecclesial body is the soil from which the Christian exegetical tradition of the Fathers and Medieval Masters grew. To understand that tradition is to understand how the Church has listened to the voice of her divine Bridegroom across the centuries, discerning in the sacred page the mysteries of salvation and the pattern of Christian life.