Excerpt from Evangelium Secundum Iohannem: The Gospel of Saint John in West-Saxon; Edited From the Manuscripts, With Introduction, and Notes The west-saxon version of the Gospels was made somewhat ncar the close of the anglo-saxon literary pe riod, in the south of England where the centre of literary activity had been fixed in the reign of Alfred the Great. About equally near the beginning of anglo-saxon litera ture, in the north of England, the illustrious Bede (or Bada) was engaged, at the time of his death (a. D. 73 in translating into the language of the people, for the benefit of the Church of God, ' the Gospel of St. John. An interval of more than two and a half centuries thus separates this first attempted version of the fourth Gospel and that which happily survives. All that is now known, and perhaps ever can be known, of Bede's trans lation is contained in what is accepted to be an suthen tic account of it in a letter written by Cuthbert (after wards Abbot of Wearmouth and Jarrow), a disciple of Bede, to his co-disciple Cuthwin. The earliest surviv ing copy of Cuthbert' 3 letter, a ms. Of the ninth century, in the library at St. Gallen, contains the specific state ment that Bede' s translation extended from the beginning of St. John's Gospel to the place where it is said, but what are they among so many (vi, This reading is supported by other mss.l A second division of the mss.' About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.