The Earliest English Translations, AD 735
As Christianity spread through the eastern part of the Roman Empire, many of its texts were translated into local languages. In the countries in the western part of the Empire, however, the Vulgate became the standard text.
Although Christianity soon spread quite widely in England, here also the Christian Bible continued to be available only in Latin, and only well-educated people could read it for themselves. Ordinary people had to rely on what they were told. A legend tells of a Saxon cowherd, Caedmon, a lay-brother who lived in an abbey. The brothers there used to sing after the evening meal, and Caedmon began to sing songs telling Bible stories, in the Anglo-Saxon language that people spoke every day. His paraphrases are believed to be the earliest form of the Bible in an English language.
About fifty years after Caedmon, an outstanding scholar called the Venerable Bede translated the Lord’s Prayer into Anglo-Saxon, and wrote commentaries on many books of the Bible. Believing that ordinary people should be able to read some part of the Bible in a language that they understood, he began to translate the Gospel of John. Bede died in 735, and there is no copy of his work left, so we do not know whether he was able to complete his task. However, this was the beginning of serious attempts to translate the Bible into the language of ordinary people in Britain. In the next two centuries, a tradition of translating the Bible into Anglo-Saxon continued to develop, marked particularly by King Alfred’s Psalter and Aelfric’s Old Testament.
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