It is often said that the first English Bible was made by John Wycliffe’s followers in the fourteenth century. That is true if we mean the first complete Bible. But English speakers had been translating parts of the Bible for some seven hundred years before that, in the language we now call Old English, or Anglo-Saxon.

None of this earlier work added up to a whole Bible, and much of it was not translation in the modern sense. It included poems, interlinear glosses, and passages embedded in sermons and laws. But it shows that the desire to hear scripture in English is as old as English Christianity itself.

Caedmon, the cowherd who sang

The earliest story comes from Bede, the Northumbrian monk and historian, in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (book 4, chapter 24), finished in 731. Bede tells of Caedmon, a lay worker who looked after cattle at the double monastery of Whitby, ruled by the abbess Hild in the later seventh century.

At feasts, when the harp was passed around for each guest to sing, Caedmon would leave in embarrassment, because he knew no songs. One night, Bede says, a figure appeared to him in a dream and told him to sing about the creation. He sang verses in praise of God that he had never heard before. The next day he was brought to Hild, who recognised a gift from God, and he became a monk. The monks taught him the stories of scripture, and he turned them into English verse: the creation, the exodus, the life of Christ, the coming judgement.

Bede gives a Latin paraphrase of Caedmon’s first song, and several manuscripts of Bede add the Old English poem in the margin. This short poem, known as Caedmon’s Hymn, is one of the oldest surviving English poems. Bede’s account has a miraculous element, and we cannot check its details, but historians generally accept that Caedmon was a real person who pioneered Christian poetry in English. Longer Old English poems on Genesis, Exodus and Daniel were once credited to him, but they are now thought to be by later, unknown poets.

Bede’s last translation

Bede himself (about 673–735) wrote in Latin, but he also cared about teaching in English. A letter written by his pupil Cuthbert describes Bede’s last days in May 735. Although ill, he was dictating an English translation of the Gospel of John, with some extracts from Isidore of Seville. Cuthbert says the translation reached the words:

There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are these among so many? (John 6:9)

On his last day, the story goes, the young scribe told him that one sentence remained, and when it was finished Bede died, singing “Glory be to the Father.” The detail of the final sentence may be shaped by devotion, but the letter is early and generally trusted on the main point: Bede was translating John into English. His translation has not survived.

Later writers also claimed that Aldhelm (died 709), abbot of Malmesbury, translated the Psalms into English. That claim comes from much later sources and is doubtful, though Aldhelm is reported to have used English song to draw people to church.

Glosses between the lines

Some of the earliest surviving English Bible text is not freestanding translation but gloss: English words written above the Latin, word by word, to help readers understand it. The Vespasian Psalter, a Latin psalter from the eighth century, received an interlinear gloss in the Mercian dialect in the ninth century. It is often described as the oldest surviving English translation of any book of the Bible.

The most famous gloss is in the Lindisfarne Gospels, one of the great treasures of early medieval art. The Latin Gospels were written and decorated at Lindisfarne around 700, probably by Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne. Some two hundred and fifty years later, in the mid-tenth century, a priest named Aldred, working at Chester-le-Street, added an Old English gloss in the Northumbrian dialect between the lines. He also wrote a colophon naming the people he believed had made the book, which is our main evidence for its makers. Aldred’s gloss is the oldest surviving English version of the Gospels.

A gloss follows the Latin word order and often gives more than one English word for a single Latin one. It was a help for reading the Latin, not a replacement for it. In that respect it resembles what modern readers call an interlinear.

Alfred and the Ten Commandments

King Alfred of Wessex (reigned 871–899) believed that learning had collapsed in England during the Viking invasions. In a famous preface to his English version of Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care, he lamented how few people could understand Latin and proposed that certain books “most necessary for all men to know” be translated into English.

Alfred’s own law code begins, unusually, with a translation of the Ten Commandments and much of the following law from Exodus 20–23, followed by part of the letter of the council of Jerusalem in Acts 15. Alfred presented his laws as standing in a tradition that ran from Moses through the apostles. A prose translation of the first fifty Psalms is also attributed to him, though scholars differ on how certain that attribution is.

Ælfric and the worry about translation

The most thoughtful Old English translator was Ælfric (about 950–1010), a monk of Cerne Abbas and later abbot of Eynsham. He wrote homilies and saints’ lives in clear, rhythmic English, and at the request of a nobleman named Æthelweard he translated part of Genesis.

Ælfric’s preface is one of the earliest discussions of Bible translation in English, and it is strikingly uneasy. He worried that unlearned readers would take the stories of the patriarchs at face value, for example thinking they might take several wives as Jacob did, without understanding the spiritual meaning the church saw in them. He also explained that he had translated simply, since English and Latin do not have the same way of speaking, but that he had tried not to add anything. Translators have weighed the same concerns ever since: faithfulness to the original, naturalness in the new language, and the risk of being misunderstood (see Word for word or meaning for meaning?).

Ælfric’s Genesis was later combined with translations of other books by unknown translators into what scholars call the Old English Hexateuch (or Heptateuch), covering parts of Genesis to Judges. One eleventh-century copy, in the British Library, is richly illustrated with hundreds of drawings.

The West Saxon Gospels

The fullest Old English Bible translation is the West Saxon Gospels, a translation of all four Gospels into continuous English prose, made in the late tenth century by an unknown translator or translators. Unlike a gloss, it reads as English. Several manuscripts survive, which suggests it was copied and used, perhaps by priests preparing to preach.

After 1066

The Norman Conquest of 1066 brought a French-speaking ruling class, and Latin remained the language of the church. Old English was gradually transformed into Middle English, and copying of the old translations dwindled. Biblical material still appeared in English in the following centuries, in verse paraphrases such as the twelfth-century Ormulum, in sermons, and in the psalter with commentary by the hermit Richard Rolle (died 1349). But a complete English Bible had to wait until the late fourteenth century (see John Wycliffe and the first English Bible).

What it means for Open Word Bible

The Anglo-Saxon translators worked from Latin, not from Hebrew and Greek, and their methods ranged from word-by-word glosses to free verse. Open Word Bible offers something of that range in one place: every sentence has a word-for-word gloss of the Hebrew or Greek and a translation at three reading levels, from close to the original’s structure to plain modern English, all sharing the same decisions about meaning (see Literal, Balanced, Readable: three levels, one meaning).

And like Ælfric’s preface, it tries to explain itself. Each decision is recorded with its reasons. The drafts are AI-assisted and none has yet been approved by a named human reviewer, so these records are there to be checked and challenged.

Sources

  • Bede. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Edited and translated by Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. Book 4, chapter 24; also includes Cuthbert’s Letter on the Death of Bede.
  • Brown, Michelle P. The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality and the Scribe. London: British Library, 2003.
  • Keynes, Simon, and Michael Lapidge, trans. Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
  • Liuzza, R. M., ed. The Old English Version of the Gospels. 2 vols. Early English Text Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994–2000.
  • Marsden, Richard. The Text of the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
  • Marsden, Richard, ed. The Old English Heptateuch and Ælfric’s Libellus de veteri testamento et novo. Vol. 1. Early English Text Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
  • Marsden, Richard, and E. Ann Matter, eds. The New Cambridge History of the Bible. Vol. 2, From 600 to 1450. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article quotes a historic translation or gives its own literal rendering.