Looked at from the human side the Christian religion was established at first, and made permanent in history afterwards, by means of two institutions--the Church and the Bible. The Church came before the Bible, for the simple reason that life must exist before there can be any description of it, but the Bible was indispensable to the true development of the Church. The witness borne by the Apostles to the Life, Death and Resurrection of their Lord was the appointed human means of creating the Church: "the Life was manifested," said they, "and we have seen and bear witness and declare unto you the Life, the Eternal Life." So far as men received this witness and believed, the Church of God became a great fact and took its place in history. Then came the question of its perpetuation and permanent direction. Even Apostles could not always live and bear their testimony, and if that testimony were committed solely to the keeping of mere tradition it would be changed and weakened as it passed from lip to lip. Thus arose the need for the Bible as well as the Church. By way of repeating and perpetuating the witness of the Apostles the Church spreads the Bible, and in return the Bible builds up the Church, presenting false developments, guarding against erroneous byepaths, and bringing Christian life and practice ever and again to the test of a divine standard. In short, the Bible is for the men of all the centuries what the personal witness of the Apostles was to the men of the first--the proclamation of the great creative acts of God for man's salvation.
And to be effective it must be, as at Pentecost, a proclamation to every man in his own language wherein he was born. Both the personal testimony and the written word, both the missionary and the Bible must speak to men in their own tongue. This was felt from the first in the Christianisation of our own land. When in the spring of 597 A.D. Augustine and his forty companions came from Rome as missionaries and landed on the coast of Kent, it was through their Frankish interpreters they made known to King and people the purpose of their coming. And as they needed an interpreter so did the Bible they brought with them, for that Bible was the Latin Vulgate of Jerome, to all intents and purposes a sealed book to our Saxon forefathers. Thus arose the need and also the fact of an English Bible, the rise and development of which it is the purpose of these pages to narrate.
The political constitution under which we live, it has often been said, was not made but grew, that it is what it is as the outcome of a process of development, the result of many a struggle with adverse forces, and so has become in itself the record as it is the result of the historic past. Now that which is true of the English constitution is true also of the English Bible. It has arrived at its present form through many successive stages of growth, and each of these stages presents its own features of historic interest, and its own record of self-sacrificing zeal and devotion.
As we might expect it is not easy to speak both with certainty and fulness as to the beginnings of our English Bible in Anglo-Saxon times. For they belong to a dim and distant past and there are but scanty records to light us on our way. More than that they had their rise in days of invasion and wild confusion, days when the Danes, in successive raids which recur with melancholy monotony through a whole generation, ravaged the land from east to west and from north to south. They not only desolated the Midland shires and stormed and looted the cities of the West, but also plundered the monasteries of Northumbria, those homes of learning, the manuscripts they found there being of small account in the eyes of these rovers from across the sea. There was also another agency at work almost equally disastrous to the cause of sacred learning. Within less than seventy years of the landing of Augustine, as Bede tells us, the terrible plague of 664 A.D. raged with especial severity in the monasteries both of men and women. At Lindisfarne, at Ely, at Wearmouth and Jarrow, at Carlisle, at Barking, and at Lastingham in the North Riding of York, this pestilence carried off nearly all the inmates. The effect of this on Scripture learning could not but be most disastrous.
Yet, after all, it is to this very period that scholars have assigned the first rude beginnings of what may perhaps be called a Saxon version of the Scriptures, simple metrical paraphrases, rather than ordered translation. These were the work of Caedmon, the monk of Whitby, whose date lies between 658 and 680 A.D., and whose active period may be assigned to about 670 A.D. He has been called the first Saxon poet, though he cannot now be credited with all that was once claimed for him. A clue discovered by a German professor in 1857, being followed up, led to other discoveries, with the result that now, by the general consent of scholars, many poems formerly attributed to Caedmon are reclaimed for his fellow-Northumbrian, Cynewulf, who belonged to the century after him. Still it was Caedmon who began to set forth Scripture paraphrases in the Saxon tongue. All we know of his personal history we get from a single chapter of Bede's Ecclesiastical History (iv. 24), where he is described as an unlearned man of great piety and humility who had received by divine grace such a gift of sacred poetry that he was able after short meditation to render into English verse whatever passage was translated to him out of the Latin Scriptures. This unlettered peasant, being taken as a monk into the monastery at Whitby, under the rule of the Abbess Hilda, was there instructed in the history of the Old and New Testaments, with the result that what was translated to him out of the Vulgate he reproduced from time to time in beautiful and touching verse: "so that his teachers were glad to become his hearers." We are told that he sang of the creation of the world and the origin of mankind, of the departure of Israel from Egypt and their entrance into Canaan, and also of many other parts of the older Scriptures. It is said that he also paraphrased portions of the New Testament, singing of the Lord's incarnation, passion, resurrection and ascension; of the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the teaching of the Apostles of our Lord. So far as these metrical versions of the Scriptures are known to us we owe that knowledge to a tenth century manuscript in the Bodleian, bequeathed to that library by the Earl of Arundel. The first part of this manuscript is in one handwriting, and contains paraphrases of portions of the books of Genesis, Exodus and Daniel; the second part consists of three poems, the first relating to the Fall of the Angels and the Temptation of Man--a daring and original product of his genius which has led to his being described as "the Milton of our forefathers." These paraphrases being in the native tongue of the people were learnt and sung by them and thus became their sole source of Bible knowledge. Bede, who told us about Caedmon, relates also that he himself translated the Creed and the Lord's Prayer into the Saxon tongue; and we cannot forget the pathetic story of his dictating to a scribe, in the last hours of his life, a translation of the closing chapter of the Gospel of John.
From Anglo-Saxon times there have come down to us versions of the Psalter, the Four Gospels and the Pentateuch. The Psalter is thought to have been translated about the end of the seventh century or the beginning of the eighth, and to be the work of Aldhelm, Bishop of Sherborne sometime before 709 A.D. This version survives in a single MS. preserved in the National Library in Paris, Psalms i.-li. being rendered in prose, the remainder in verse. There have been three reprints in modern times of this complete Psalter.
Next to this comes the important question of the Four Gospels existing in Anglo-Saxon, Northumbrian and Old Mercian versions. Professor Skeat is of opinion that there was but one Anglo-Saxon version and that five out of the six MSS. of the Gospels now left to us, though written in different places, are intimately connected with each other, and derived from that original, now lost. The six referred to are (1) the Corpus MS. preserved in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; (2) the Cambridge MS. presented to the University Library by Archbishop Parker in 1574; (3) the Bodley MS. in the Bodleian Library; of this there is an exact duplicate in the British Museum, both agreeing closely with the Corpus MS.; (4) the Cotton MS. written early in the 11th century. This suffered serious injury in the fire which in 1731 partially destroyed the Cotton Library, then deposited at Ashburnham House, Westminster. (5) The Hatton MS. in the Bodleian, which gives the Gospels in the following order Mark, Luke, Matthew, John; (6) the Royal MS. now in the Royal Library in the British Museum. The handwriting of this copy is bold, hasty and rough, while that of the Hatton MS., which seems to have been copied from it, is in an exceedingly uniform, upright and clear hand. The Cotton MS. again, exhibits the text in its earliest, and the Hatton MS. in its latest form.
Besides these six Anglo-Saxon versions of the Four Gospels, two Anglo-Saxon Glosses to the Latin text have come down to us--the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Rushworth Gospels. It may be explained that a gloss differs from a translation in that it construes the text word for word, between the lines, without much regard to the grammatical arrangement. It simply supplies a clue to the meaning of the words of the original separately. The Lindisfarne Gospels, also known as the Durham Book, is one of the most valued treasures in our national collection, being one of the Cotton MSS. in the British Museum. It consists of 258 leaves of thick vellum, and contains the Four Gospels in Latin with an interlinear Northumbrian gloss. The Latin text was written in the island of Lindisfarne by Eadfrith the bishop, about 700 A.D. in honour of his predecessor St Cuthbert, and so is sometimes known as St Cuthbert's Gospels. The interlinear gloss in the Northumberland dialect is probably more than two centuries later, and was the work of a monk named Aldred. This MS. is elaborately ornamented with paintings of the Evangelists; and with full-page cruciform designs, borders and initial letters, in the style introduced from Ireland. It was kept at Lindisfarne, the Holy Isle of Northumberland, until the Danish invasion of Northumbria, when it was carried away for safety. It afterwards remained for a long time at Durham, and then was restored to the Priory of Lindisfarne, where it was preserved until the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Purchased by Sir Robert Cotton in the 17th century, it passed through him to the keeping of the British Museum.
The Rushworth Gospels was so named because presented to the Bodleian Library by John Rushworth of Lincoln's Inn, who was deputy clerk to the House of Commons during the Long Parliament. It was originally copied from the Vulgate by Mac Regol, an Irish priest, about 820 A.D. The interlinear gloss was added about a century later by two men, a scribe named Owun and Farman a priest of Harewood on the river Wharfe. It may be mentioned that the gloss in this MS., but throughout the first Gospel only, is in the Old Mercian dialect, and therefore of peculiar interest as giving us an example of a dialect, of which the specimens are extremely scarce, and yet which is closely related to the modern literary language.
It may be well at this point to emphasise the fact that the time when the Psalter and the Four Gospels were given to the people in their own Saxon tongue was the 7th century--the century described as the time of greatest advance previous to the Norman Conquest. Between the coming of Augustine in 597 A.D. and the conversion of the people of Sussex under Wilfrid in 686 A.D. lies the long spiritual campaign for the conversion of the entire people from heathenism to Christianity. It was the century of Paulinus, of the great and good missionary bishop Aidan, who founded the monastery of Lindisfarne; and of Cuthhert who fills so large a space in the memories of the people of England, especially of northern England, the region where Christianity won some of its greatest victories. It was the century, too, in which the great churchman, Theodore of Tarsus, came to this island where, as we are told, he made his copious stores of learning, both sacred and secular, available for the people. We read of the multitude of disciples who flocked to his daily lectures and of the knowledge, along with that of the sacred Scriptures, which he imparted to his hearers. "Nor in fact," we are told, "were there ever happier times since the days when the English first landed in Britain ... the desires of men were strongly directed towards the new-found joys of the heavenly kingdom; and all who desired to be instructed in the sacred Scriptures had teachers near at hand who could impart to them that knowledge."
Unfortunately the flood tide of that century was followed by the ebb tide of the next. There is no mistaking the fact that in the period between the death of the Venerable Bede in 735 A.D. and the birth of King Alfred in 848 A.D. the intellect and heart of England had suffered a sad relapse into ignorance and barbarism. There was a general decline of civilisation and learning, the light becoming obscured by the superstitions and impious fabrications which began to prevail.
Various causes may be assigned for so disastrous a decline. Under the ravages of the great plague many of the East Saxons relapsed for a time into idolatry; again, later there was a further outbreak from which Bede's own monastery of Jarrow suffered severely, the pestilence carrying off all the monks who could read or preach or sing the antiphons. It was also a time of discord and revolution in the government. In the course of that century fifteen kings of Northumbria swayed the sceptre, and of these, five were deposed, five murdered, and two voluntarily abdicated the throne. Then too there were the persistent inroads of the Danes followed by the destruction of the monasteries and of the MSS. they contained. A monk of Peterborough pathetically relates that when Inguar and Ubba came to his abbey "they burned and brake, slew abbot and monks, and so dealt with what they found there, which was erewhile full rich, that they brought it to nothing." But worst of all there followed a general debasement of morals. One serious sign of this was the founding by wealthy laymen of pseudo-monasteries, unholy convents, in which freed from the restraints of law they lived their lives of licentious ease, and under the pretence of a religious life, evaded the duties of the public service. Such was the state of things when King Alfred came to the throne in 871. It is not surprising that in such a time of reaction the work of Bible translation made no advance beyond the version of the Psalter and of the Lindisfarne Gospels of the century before. We have now to notice that the next step forward was taken by King Alfred himself. To his enlightened mind it was an unspeakable sorrow that the nation had so seriously sunk backward. He says: "Formerly men came from beyond our borders, seeking wisdom in our own land; now, if we are to have it at all, we must look for it abroad. So great was the decay of learning among Englishmen that there were very few on this side Humber, and I ween not many north of it, who could understand the ritual, or translate a letter from Latin into English. No, I cannot remember one such, south of the Thames, when I came to the throne."
King Alfred did not, as some men do, content himself with mourning the degeneracy of the days. He resolutely set out to bring about a better time. He aimed at the creation of a native literature and for this purpose sought the aid of learned ecclesiastics beyond his own borders. From Wales he invited Asser, his future biographer; from Mercia he imported Plegmund and Werferth; from Omer came Grimbald, and from the lands near the mouth of the Elbe came John the Old Saxon, whose ancestors were heathen, but who was himself a learned ecclesiastic. With the aid of these men he enriched his people with translations of some of the great works which Rome had given to the world. He himself translated Gregory's Regula Pastoralis, setting forth the character, duties and special temptations of the Christian pastor. He describes the mode of translation "sometimes word for word, and sometimes meaning for meaning, as I learned the sense." Bede's Ecclesiastical History also was translated from Latin into Saxon, either by Alfred's own hand or under his supervision. But what we are most concerned with now is the fact that he translated for his people certain chapters from the Old Testament and a passage from the New. In publishing his Laws, called "Alfred's Dooms," he appended to them almost the whole of four chapters of the book of Exodus (xx.--xxiii.) containing the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic code of civil law in all its archaic simplicity. Following this came a reference to the mission of "the Lord's Son, our God, who is Jesus Christ, who came into the world, not to destroy the law but to fulfil it, and to increase it with all good things." Then came a description of the Council of Jerusalem as given in the fifteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles and a rehearsal of its decrees. The acts of this Council end with the Golden Rule as inserted in Codex Bezae--"And that which ye will that other men should not do to you, do ye not to other men." He then proceeds to set before his people what he considers the source of all legislation, the divine ordinances given amidst the thunders of Sinai, and shows how that law was modified by the teaching of Christ.
Before leaving the Anglo-Saxon period of our history mention must be made of one other work which belongs to it, a metrical version of the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua, partly translated and partly epitomised by Aelfric Abbot of Peterborough in 1004, and Archbishop of York in 1023. It is sometimes known as "Aelfric's Heptateuch" and it has been suggested that it is probably part only of a much larger work, inasmuch as there are translations of the Books of Kings, Esther, Job, Judith, the Maccabees and of the Four Gospels in existence which appear to be of the same date, and are supposed to be from the same pen. A copy of Aelfric's version in the British Museum is illustrated with numerous drawings in body-colour and outline lightly tinted. It is in vellum, in folio, and is an early 11th century MS. The story of Joseph is given with illustrations depicting his entertainment of his brethren in Egypt, and the putting of the cup into Benjamin s sack. So far did Bible versions and Bible reading go in Anglo-Saxon days before the Norman conquerors reached our shores.