All the time the present writer was engaged on this article he was looking forward to the day when he could present it to Dr. Westcott as some acknow- ledgment, however unworthy, of a debt of grati- tude that has been accumulating for 24 years, and gather from his kind but searching criticism what measure of success had attended this attempt to expound and illustrate the principles on which he and his great collaborator had worked. Now he can only inscribe it with reverence and affection to their memory. Christian scholarship will for all time be the richer for the example of their ‘implicit confidence in all truth’ and their ‘ guile- less workmanship’ (Inér. § 425).
J. O. F. Murray.
VERSIONS (ENGLISH).—Owing to the length of the subject, it may be found convenient to divide it into the following sections : (i.) Anglo- Saxon ; (ii.) Anglo-Norman ; (iii.) Wyelifite ; (iv.) Reformation period; (v.) Puritan 3 (vi.) Eliza- bethan; (vii.) Roman Catholic 3 (viii.) The ‘ Authorized’ and its successors ; (ix.) The ‘Re- vised’; (x.) The ‘ American Revised.’
jamin Thorpe in 1832, and again published by Grein in his Bibliothek in 1857. A short assage from Thorpe’s literal rendering, on the subject of Nebuchadnezzar’s chastisement, will give some notion of Czedmon’s style— ‘ To thee shall not be meal-meat, save the mountain’s grass, nor rest assigned :
but thee the rain’s shower shall waken and chastise.’
Bede (} 735) himself is known to have trans- lated portions of Scripture into his native tongue. Purvey, indeed, in his General Prologue,* asserts that ‘if worldli clerkis loken wel here croniclis and bokis, thei shulden fynde, that Bede translatide the bible.’ No authority, so far as is known to the present writer, can now be found for this statement. But Bede expressly says, in a letter to Bishop Eegbert (c. v.), that he had often trans- lated the Creed and Lord’s Prayer for uneducated priests.+ And the touching passage is familiar to all, in which his biographer Cuthbert describes the end of his life approaching, before he had finished his version of St. John.t It is a matter for regret, that not even this version should have escaped the ravages of time.
King Alfred (}+ 900) added to his other titles to the name of Great an expressed conviction that his code of civil laws must be based upon the revealed law of God. Acting on this conviction, he pre- faced his code of Saxon laws with a free trans- lation of the enactments in Ex 20-23, and of the letter sent by the apostles in Jerusalem, contained in. Ac 15. His reason for the addition, at first sight apparently singular, of this passage from the NT, was to show how the harshness of the Hebrew lex tulionis was modified by the teaching of Chris- tianity. In king Alfred’s translation there are some noticeable peculiarities. In Ex 20" ‘for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth,’ for ‘Lord’ (Dominus) he puts, not Dryhten, the usual word, but Crist:—‘for’am on .VI. da3um crist 3ewohrte heofonas J eordan.’ The explanation is that, in a contemporary Anglo-Saxon poem, Christ is made to describe how He created the earth ; and Dominus, in the Vulgate of the NT, is of course frequently used of Christ. Another sin gular change is his transposition of a clause in the Fifth Commandment. He places ‘which the Lord thy God giveth thee’ directly after ‘thy father and thy mother,’ apparently wishing to take ‘land? in the general sense of earth, and so removing the limitation. A third alteration is made at the end of Ac 15%, In the Latin text followed by him there is an interpolated clause: ‘et quod vobis non vultis fieri, non faciatis aliis.? This is duly rendered : ‘J pet 3e willen pet o3re men Cow ne don, ne dod 3e Set oprum monnum’ 3; ‘and what ye would that other men should not do to you, that do ye not to other men.’ §
Besides these, there are extant various MSS by unknown authors, containing Anglo-Saxon ver- sions of the Psalms and of the Gospels. One such version of the Psalter, contained in a MS found in the National Library of Paris about the be-
* Forshall and Madden’s J ntroduction, p. 59.
t ‘Propter quod et ipse multis sepe sacerdotibus idiotis hac utraque, et symbolum uidelicet et dominicam orationem, in linguam Anglorum translatam optuli.’
{See Appendix ii. to vol. i. of Plummer’s edition. A diffi- culty is caused, as the editor points out, by the reading of the St. Gallen MS, which appears to make Bede’s translation extend only to Jn 619, Such a limitation spoils the sequel of the story ; unless we understand it to mean that the translator had got no further, when the premonitory symptoms of his illness came upon him.
§ See The Legal Code of Ailfred the Great, ed. by Professor Milton Haight Turk, Boston (U.8.A.), 1893, pp. 33-37. The explanations given in the text are from Professor Turk, who in
ao acknowledges his indebtedness to the late Dr. Ff. J. A. ort.
i. ANGLO-SAXoN.—At the head of this period it is usual to place Cadmon (+c. 680), although he did not, properly speaking, translate any part of the Bible. ‘The work ascribed to him is an alliterative poem, in which he paraphrases the Scripture account of the chief events in Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel. A continuation of the poem, now imperfect, treats of portions of the life of Christ. His story is picturesquely told by Bede (HE Iv. xxiv.),—how, from a servant, he became a monk in the mixed monastery under St. Hilda; and how, when bidden to exercise his newly found gift of song, he burst forth into a hymn of praise of the great Creator. Bede gives in Latin the substance of this hymn. On the margin of some MSS of Bede a short West-Saxon poem of nine lines is found, purporting to be the original. At the end of the Moore MS (Camb. Univ. Lib. Kk. v. 16) the verses are found in the Northumbrian dialect; and, as this would be Ceedmon’s own tongue, it has been considered to be the older form. But whether any of these is the original vernacular of Ceedmon, or only a retrans- lation from Bede’s Latin, cannot be pronounced with certainty. The hymn bears only a general resemblance to the beginning of the poems, and hence doubts have been thrown on the Ceedmonian authorship of the latter.* The poems exist, so far as is known, in one manuscript only (Bodleian, Junius xi.). It was given by Archbishop Ussher to Francis Dujon, or Junius, librarian of the Earl of Arundel, and by him bequeathed to the Bod- leian. It was printed at Amsterdam in 1655, and was edited with an English translation by Ben-