3 Studying, Reading and Preaching the Gospels

The Gospels are the most important text of the Christian Bible, containing the narrative of Christ’s life, ministry, death and resurrection. Gospel readings form the centrepiece of the Mass and are understood by Christians as the fulfilment of the prophecies of the Old Testament – the process known as typology. Between the conversion period (c. 600–700) and the eleventh century, the Gospels were continually translated, adapted and interpreted in Old English prose and verse.1 For a summary, see Morrell, Manual of Old English Biblical Materials, pp. 154–97. Vernacular poems based on or inspired by gospel stories proved especially popular in the early Old English period, though in most cases these were not direct translations as such but rather adaptations or paraphrases drawing on intermediary sources as well as the Bible.2 On the origins of Old English biblical poetry, see Introduction, pp. 13–16. For example, the Advent Lyrics (also known as Christ I), are a series of hymns in celebration of Christ’s nativity and in praise of the Virgin Mary, mostly based on the Latin ‘O antiphons’ used in the liturgy, while Christ in Judgement (Christ III) dramatises the Second Coming and Last Day by combining elements of the biblical narrative with material derived from a sermon by Caesarius of Arles.3 See Jasmine Jones, ‘Vernacular Theology in the Old English Advent Lyrics: Monastic Devotion to Mary’, RES 75 (2024), 1–16; Thomas D. Hill, ‘Vision and Judgement in the Old English Christ III’, SP 70 (1973), 233–42. Drawing on both of these Old English poems, as well as works by Gregory the Great and Sedulius, the (probably) ninth-century Mercian poet Cynewulf composed a bridging work, Ascension (Christ II), to complete a tripartite narrative of the life of Christ which now stands at the head of the tenth-century anthology of vernacular verse known as the Exeter Book.4 See Colin Chase, ‘God’s Presence through Grace as the Theme of Cynewulf’s Christ II and the Relationship of this Theme to Christ I and Christ III’, ASE 3 (1974), 87–101; Thomas D. Hill, ‘Literary History and Old English Poetry: The Case of Christ I, II, III’, in Sources of Anglo-Saxon Culture, ed. Paul E. Szarmach with the assistance of Virginia Darrow Oggins, Studies in Medieval Culture 20 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1986), pp. 3–22; Andy Orchard, ‘Alcuin and Cynewulf: The Art and Craft of Anglo-Saxon Verse’, Journal of the British Academy 8 (2020), 295–399. Christ’s Passion, his Harrowing of Hell and his role as judge on the Last Day are also the subject of The Dream of the Rood, a highly sophisticated poem preserved in the tenth-century Vercelli Book that blends the gospel narrative with accounts of the Passion of St Andrew as well, perhaps, as the hymns of Venantius Fortunatus (d. c. 600).5 On connections between The Dream of the Rood and the martyrdom of St Andrew, see Thomas D. Hill, ‘The Passio Andreae and The Dream of the Rood’, ASE 38 (2010), 1–10. On the poem’s various iterations and connections with medieval Latin poetry, liturgy and art, see Éamonn Ó Carragáin, Ritual and the Rood: Liturgical Images and the Old English Poems of the Dream of the Rood Tradition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). On the Harrowing of Hell, see p. 111. The popularity of this particular New Testament poem across the Old English period is attested by inscriptions on the eighth-century Ruthwell Cross and the tenth-century Brussels Cross as well as citations in homilies.6 For evidence of the influence of The Dream of the Rood on Old English homilies, see below, p. 132. Further Old English poems on broadly biblical themes are also preserved in the Vercelli Book, including Andreas, a long narrative poem based on the apocryphal Acts of Andrew and Matthew, and Cynewulf’s own work, The Fates of the Apostles, a short versification of a Latin martyrology, itself derived from the Acts of the Apostles.7 Both poems appear to be influenced by Beowulf: see further Andy Orchard, ‘Both Style and Substance: The Case for Cynewulf’, in Anglo-Saxon Styles, ed. Catherine E. Karkov and George Hardin Brown (Binghampton, NY: SUNY Press, 2003), pp. 271–305; Andreas: An Edition, ed. Michael D. Bintley and Richard North (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). Other Old English poems on New Testament themes are scattered across various manuscripts, with Judgement Day proving by far the most popular theme.8 Judgement Day I and The Descent into Hell are copied in the Exeter Book; Judgement Day II, a poem based on Bede’s De die iudicii, is in Cambridge Corpus Christi College (CCC) MS 201; Christ and Satan, which combines Old Testament stories such as the Fall of the Rebel Angels and Fall of Man with the New Testament accounts of the Temptation in the Desert and Judgement Day, is preserved as the final item in Oxford Bodleian Library MS Junius 11, following a sequence of poems on Old Testament themes, Genesis A (and B), Exodus and Daniel. Three poems based on the Lord’s Prayer (Mt. 6.9–13; Lk. 11.2–4) are included in the Exeter Book, CCC 201 and Junius 121, respectively. For the impact of the New Testament on Old English literature more generally, see Richard Marsden, ‘Biblical Literature: The New Testament’, in Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, 2nd edn, ed. Godden and Lapidge, pp. 234–50. Indeed, Bede himself composed a short Old English poem on Judgement Day, which survives in the monk Cuthbert’s account of his dying days, now known as Bede’s Death Song.9 On Cuthbert’s account of Bede’s death, see above, pp. 16–19. Given the popularity of the genre of the gospel harmony on the continent, it is perhaps surprising that no such work survives in the corpus of extant Old English poetry, though the combination of the three Christ poems preserved in the Exeter Book may reflect an attempt to produce something broadly analogous.10 On the production of vernacular gospel harmonies in ninth-century Francia, see above, pp. 8–11.