The Lindisfarne Gospels

 The brightest historians have been trying to tell us, for a century and more, that the Dark Ages weren't so completely dark, and they keep pointing to Dark Age Ireland and England as examples of that, and the best examples of what they're talking about which I've found so far are the spectacularly illuminated books made in Dark Age Britain and Ireland. The most celebrated example of these is probably the Book of Kells. Other famous pieces of insular illumination ("insular" referring to the islands of Britain and Ireland, and "illumination" to the decoration) are the Echternach Gospels, ca AD 690; the Book of Durrow, ca AD 650-700; and the Codex Amiatinus, ca AD 700, the earliest surviving complete Vulgate Bible.

But to me, the fairest of them all are the Lindisfarne Gospels, and my favorite page of that volume is Folio 3r:

The colors remind me of stained glass. 

Besides a tremendous amount of color and imagery, imagery which, in the style typical of insular illumination, draws both on Christianity and on pre-Christian Celtic culture, the volume contains the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, in a version referred to as the "insular Vulgate," which has a higher admixture of readings from the Old Latin than do some other versions of Jerome's Vulgate, and higher than that which eventually became the Catholic Church's standard version, commissioned at the Council of Trent in  the 16th century.

The volume is generally agreed to have been made around AD 700 in Lindisfarne in northeastern England, by a monk named Eadfrith, who became Bishop of Lindisfarne in 698. Recently, however, some authorities have argued for a later date, and for Ireland as the manuscript's origin. I do not know nearly enough to be able to weigh in on this controversy. 

According to the traditional account of things, still widely accepted, the Lindisfarne Gospels were made as a tribute to St Cuthbert (c634-687), who was very deeply revered in the region in his own time, and would be made more widely famous by Bede's Ecclesiatical History. In AD 795, Lindisfarne was raided by Vikings, and the traditional story is that monks from Lindisfarne carried this volume around with them as they wandered homeless for quite a long time after their abbey had been destroyed. Whatever actually happened to the Lindisfarne Gospels in the Dark and Middle Ages, it can be said with somewhat more confidence that Robert Cotton, one of the greatest collectors of English historical documents, owned the volume around AD 1600, and that it was given to the British Museum when that institution was founded in 1753, and it belongs to the British Library today. 

I have never actually seen the Lindisfarne Gospels. I would have to go to London to see the volume, and even then, there is very little chance that I was see it other than through a very thick pane of glass. I have seen pictures of it, in books and online, and I have spent some time wondering which of those photographs more accurately represent its appearance. 

Given its (generally accepted, I believe) date of ca AD 700, I was surprised at first not to find this manuscript being cited among the witnesses for the 4th edition, 1994, of the Stuttgart Vulgate. But then I examined the list of witnesses for the New Testament in the Stuttgart Vulgate a bit more closely, and saw to my surprise that almost half of them are actually older than AD 700. I'm used to looking at lists of manuscripts of works of Classical Latin, where one single manuscript as old as that is quite sensational, and the Bible is an entirely different ballgame.

However, there is one linguistic aspect where the importance of the Lindisfarne Gospels reigns supreme. Take a look at the photo in this post. You see all of those words in tiny print between the lines? Those words are between the lines all throughout the volume, all throughout all four Gospels. They were added to the volume in the 10th century. They are a word-for-word gloss in Old English, also known as Anglo-Saxon, of the Latin text. It's just a gloss, not a complete stand-alone translation in correct Anglo-Saxon syntax; still, it makes the Lindisfarne Gospels the oldest surviving manuscript of an English Biblical translation.