Anglo-Saxon Era
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Anglo-Saxon Era’
In the fourth century, Britain’s Christians acquired a taste for watering down the mystery of their message.
When the Roman Emperor Constantine ended decades of persecution for Christians in February 313, those in Britain returned to their churches with simple joy. Yet missionaries to Anglo-Saxon Britain in 597 found a church scattered and plagued by alien beliefs. St Bede blamed a priest from Egypt, Arius, for the startling change.
Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf imagines the farewell between Jesus and his Apostles, forty days after his resurrection.
Cynewulf (possibly the 8th century bishop Cynewulf of Lindisfarne) imagines Christ’s last words to his Apostles, before a cloud came and took him from their sight, never to be seen again – and yet, somehow, never to leave them.
The earliest Christians longed to celebrate the resurrection together at Passover, but that was not as easy as it sounds.
To keep Easter together during the Biblical festival of Passover was the shared dream of all the earliest Christian churches. But everyone seemed to have questions about how and when to celebrate the most important feast of the year, and no one seemed to have answers.
King Ecgfrith of Northumbria dismissed repeated warnings about his imperial ambitions.
The location of ‘Nechtansmere’, the Old English name for a crucial battle in 685 between Northumbria and the Picts of Scotland, is uncertain, though it appears to have taken place in mountainous country north of the Tay. Its result, however, could not be more clear: Northumbria would now begin its slow decline.
The seventh-century Bishop of London helped kings and clergy to shine Christian light into the darkness of mere religion.
St Erkenwald, the 7th century Bishop of London, is not particularly well-known today, but he played a prominent role in building up Christian civilisation amidst the violence, ignorance and superstition of Anglo-Saxon England’s pagan kingdoms.
The eighth-century English bishop and poet Cynewulf takes us to the threshold of God’s holy city, and gives us a choice.
Cynewulf (possibly the 8th century bishop Cynewulf of Lindisfarne) presents the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as a choice given to all mankind: what kind of life do we want in the hereafter, and what are we prepared to do in order to obtain it?