Andrew's Old Testament scholarship is founded essentially on Jerome, on his Vulgate and on the learning available in his Old Testament commentaries. Andrew's grasp of Hebrew should not be exaggerated and such evidence as there is suggests that he did not know Greek. He conversed with Jews in French and may have had an elementary knowledge of Hebrew, but he was principally dependent on Jerome's Vulgate for his access to the Hebrew Bible.

He was a scholar of independent mind who expressed exegetical views which clashed with patristic exegesis in general and Jerome in particular. He is interesting and significant not because of the excellence of his fundamental biblical scholarship, whether as a Hebraist or a textual critic, but because of the novelty of his exegetical stance in the theological setting of the twelfth century, and because of the lively manner in which he expressed it. His concentration on the ‘literal’ sense of the Old Testament and the historical contexts which provide frameworks for it has a certain prophetic quality. There are intimations of issues whose outlines would appear more clearly in the future as critical biblical scholarship emerged. Already Andrew by his uncompromising pursuit of the ‘literal’ sense had pushed into the foreground an exegesis of the Old Testament which does not have a Christian content. In virtue of this he is an important figure in connection with the history of the Hebrew Bible in the Christian Church.

A biographical sketch

It is not known precisely when Andrew entered the Abbey of St Victor, but there is a statement by Boston of Bury that he was a canon of St Victor and a pupil of ‘Master Hugh’.