Page:Gospel of Saint John in West-Saxon.djvu/30

xxvi Gospels in the original, and to the translator's gradual variations in manner as he proceeded in his work, such variations, for example, as that which is made apparent in the increased use in John of Þæt as a particle to introduce indirect discourse (see Notes i, 32; Henshaw, 17 f.), and the increasing tendency to inversion of words and clauses which begins after the middle point of Luke and becomes characteristic of John.

The Version was made from the Latin Bible known as the Vulgate, by which is meant Jerome's revision of the Old Latin version of the New Testament (the Gospels of this revision appeared in 384) and of the Psalter, and his translation of the Old Testament, exclusive of the Psalter, from the Hebrew ("not without some mixture with his translation from the Septuagint"). As time went on the Vulgate came to be more and more generally accepted by the Church. In Western Europe it became the current Bible of the Middle Ages. But it was not a pure Vulgate text that was thus used: the old versions went on side by side with it for centuries, and even when they were thus nominally superseded, fragments of them found their way into probably all existing MSS... The same MS. will present us with an Old Latin text in some books of the New Testament, and with a Vulgate text in others." Moreover, in the