The Cambridge Old English Reader

The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John provide a narrative of the career of Christ, culminating in his crucifixion and resurrection. Our word ‘gospel’ derives from OE gōdspel, ‘good news’, a translation of Latin euangelium, which was itself a borrowing of the Greek euangelion; this meant originally a ‘reward for good news’ and then came to mean the ‘good news’ itself. The Old English Gospels (formerly known as the West Saxon Gospels) represent the earliest complete rendering of the gospels in English, made from the Latin Vulgate, probably in the second half of the tenth century. Six complete manuscript copies survive, along with fragments of two others. All were made in the eleventh or twelfth centuries. It is unlikely that the OE version was intended to give the common people access to scripture, as were the much later Middle English translations associated with the reformer Wyclif. The context of both its production and its use was probably the monastery. The addition of Latin annotations to some of the manuscripts may have been to allow cross-referencing with the Vulgate, which remained the official Bible of the church; and no doubt they would have been a help for monks learning Latin, too.

The extract given here covers the last hours of Christ's life as a man: his arrest by the Roman authorities, his ‘trial’ before Pilate and his execution, followed by his resurrection from the tomb. One of the central aims of the gospel-writers was to show Jesus to be the Messiah of the Jews, whose coming had been prophesied in the OT, and this idea of fulfilment is repeatedly emphasised by quotations from OT books. In the extract, for example (lines 40–2, translating Mt 27.35), we are told that the sharing out of Christ's clothes by his executioners fulfils the words of a prophet (see 41–2n).

The language of the preserved copies of the Old English Gospels is late WS. The eleventh-century manuscript used here (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 140) was written by four different scribes with their own idiosyncrasies; the one who wrote the latter part of Matthew preferred the ‘late’ form heom to him for the dative plural third-person pronoun (17, 18, etc) but also wrote hym (25), another late form, and he preferred hyne to hine for the third-person accusative singular masculine pronoun.