Book of Jonah

===Medieval commentary tradition===
[[File:Hymnal, Jonah outside the city of Nineveh, Walters Manuscript W.547, fol. 47r.jpg|thumb|"Jonah outside the city of Nineveh" (1678), from an Armenian hymnal]]
The ''Ordinary Gloss'', or {{lang|la|[[Glossa Ordinaria]]}}, was the most important Christian commentary on the Bible in the later Middle Ages. Ryan McDermott comments that "The Gloss on Jonah relies almost exclusively on Jerome's commentary on Jonah ({{circa|396}}), so its Latin often has a tone of urbane classicism. But the Gloss also chops up, compresses, and rearranges Jerome with a carnivalesque glee and scholastic directness that renders the Latin authentically medieval."<ref>Ryan McDermott, trans., "The Ordinary Gloss on Jonah," PMLA 128.2 (2013): 424–38.</ref> "The Ordinary Gloss on Jonah" has been translated into English and printed in a format that emulates the first printing of the Gloss.<ref>{{cite journal|url=http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/18871/|title=The Ordinary Gloss on Jonah|journal=PMLA |date=March 2013 |volume=128 |issue=2 |pages=424–438 |last1=McDermott |first1=R. }}</ref>

The relationship between Jonah and his fellow Jews is ambivalent, and complicated by the Gloss's tendency to read Jonah as an allegorical prefiguration of Jesus Christ. While some glosses in isolation seem crudely supersessionist ("The foreskin believes while the circumcision remains unfaithful"), the prevailing allegorical tendency is to attribute Jonah's recalcitrance to his abiding love for his own people and his insistence that God's promises to Israel not be overridden by a lenient policy toward the Ninevites. For the glossator, Jonah's pro-Israel motivations correspond to Christ's demurral in the Garden of Gethsemane ("My Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me")<ref>{{bibleverse|Matthew|26:39}}</ref> and the Gospel of Matthew's and Paul's insistence that "salvation is from the Jews" (John 4:22). While in the Gloss the plot of Jonah prefigures how God will extend salvation to the nations, it also makes abundantly clear—as some medieval commentaries on the Gospel of John do not—that Jonah and Jesus are Jews, and that they make decisions of salvation-historical consequence as Jews.{{opinion|date=February 2022}}