Introduction 1. VERNACULAR SCRIPTURE IN ANGLO-SAXON TIMES But no ANGLO-SAXON literature precedes by centuries of years the layman's possession of vernacular Scripture. literature of so much excellence and extending over so long a period of national life surpasses that of the AngloSaxons in its dependence upon Scripture, liturgy, and hagiography. Learning and literary authorship were then almost exclusively ecclesiastical. That there was something we cannot know how much-in these conditions that must at times have brought the scholar near to a conception of the desirability of supplying the people with Scripture in the native tongue is attested by the account of Bede's endeavor to translate the Gospel of St. John, by surviving texts glossed in the vernacular, by a notable translation of the Psalms, by Ælfric's translations of other portions of the Old Testament, and especially by the West-Saxon Gospels.1 On the other hand, a knowledge of the conditions of popular education must have arrested such speculation, and relegated the possible use of vernacular Scripture to an exclusive clergy.2 1 The most complete and trustworthy account of the Anglo-Saxon versions, paraphrases, and glosses of Scripture will be found in Professor Cook's Introduction to Biblical Quotations (for the full title, see below, P. 114). 2 Ælfric feared the misuse of vernacular Scripture in the hands of ignorant priests and of the laity. See his Preface to Genesis, Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Prosa (Cassel & Göttingen, George H. Wigand, 1872), pp. 22 f.; James W. Bright, An Anglo-Saxon Reader (New York, H. Holt & Co., 3d ed. 1894), pp. 107 f. 2. BEDE'S TRANSLATION OF THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN The West-Saxon version of the Gospels was made somewhat near the close of the Anglo-Saxon literary period, in the south of England where the centre of literary activity had been fixed in the reign of Alfred the Great. About equally near the beginning of Anglo-Saxon literature, in the north of England, the illustrious Bede (or Bæda) was engaged, at the time of his death (A. D. 735), in translating into the language of the people, "for the benefit of the Church of God,' the Gospel of St. John. An interval of more than two and a half centuries thus separates this first attempted version of the fourth Gospel and that which happily survives. All that is now known, and perhaps ever can be known, of Bede's translation is contained in what is accepted to be an authentic account of it in a letter written by Cuthbert (afterwards Abbot of Wearmouth and Jarrow), a disciple of Bede, to his co-disciple Cuthwin. The earliest surviving copy of Cuthbert's letter, a MS. of the ninth century, in the library at St. Gallen, contains the specific statement that Bede's translation extended from the beginning of St. John's Gospel to the place where it is said, but what are they among so many' (vi, 9). This reading is supported by other MSS.1 A second division of the MSS.2 1 It is supported by the text of J. A. Giles in Sancti Bonifacii... Opera (London, 1844), I (Epistola), 236; by Acta Sanctorum XIX, 714; and by the Annales Ecclesiastici of Baronius (Lucae, 1742) XII, 403. The St. Gallen MS. CCLV (compared with CCLIV) is represented in the text of Mayor and Lumby, Venerabilis Bedae Historiae Ecclesiasticae Gentis Anglorum III, IV (Cambridge, University Press, 1881), pp. 176–179. Professor Charles Plummer has reproduced this text: Venerabilis Baedae Historiam Ecclesiasticam Gentis Anglorum etc. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1896), vol. 1, pp. CLX-CLXIV. 2 Belonging to this division are, for example, the three MSS., C1, C2, C7, described by Mayor and Lumby (op. cit. pp. 413, 416). See also the text of the letter in Symeonis Monachi Opera Omnia, ed. Thomas |