Handle with Care: The Oldest Translations of the Bible in English – 4.30 pm on Thursday 5th June 2025 in the Lecture Theatre with Professor Francis Leneghan
The translation of the Bible into English did not begin, as is often thought, with the King James Bible. In fact, parts of the Bible were translated into English as early as the eighth century when the Venerable Bede began a translation of the Gospel of John. During the ninth and tenth centuries, the translation of scripture into English gathered pace as vernacular versions of the Gospels and the first seven books of the Old Testament (the Heptateuch) were produced, as well as a multitude of English glosses on Latin Bibles and homilies and biblical paraphrases. With these translations, the Bible was becoming increasingly available for the first time to readers outside of the walls of the monastery: noble laymen and women could now read parts of the Bible in their own homes. At the same time Benedictine monks such as Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham were pushing back against this widening access to scripture, fearing that lay readers might be confused and led into sin by unsupervised exposure to some of the Bible’s more contradictory and complex elements, especially the Old Testament. This talk will tell the story of the earliest translations of the Bible in the English language, demonstrating how the Bible played a central role in the emergence of English national identity during this transformational period.
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