Like so many theologians, Peter Lombard’s writings originated in his classroom teaching.

Peter Lombard taught theology in the cathedral school of Notre Dame which evidently became The Four Sentences. Gregg Allison notes that The Four Sentences became “a standard textbook of theology until the time of Reformation.”[1] McGrath agreed when he wrote: The first major theological textbook of western theology is Peter Lombard’s Four Books of the Sentences, compiled at the University of Paris during the twelfth century, probably during the years 1155–8. In essence, the work is a collection of quotations (or “sentences”), drawn from patristic writers in general, and Augustine in particular.[2] Lombard later became a bishop in Paris in 1159.