John of Beverley, or St John of Beverley, was an influential figure during the earliest history of what became the English speaking world. In my book I give a short summary of him. This blog goes further.

John died in 721, having been Bishop of Hexham (in modern Northumberland) from 687 and Bishop of York from 706. He was born in God’s Own County, Yorkshire, although it was called “Deira” in those days. He ended his days in seclusion at the East Yorkshire location which came to be known as Beverley.

In the picture, I look quite casual because I have just come upon the scene as a surprise. My brother-in-law found it and showed me. I am in the graveyard of a lost church near Beverley, known as St Faith’s, outside Leven. You can see the track of old foundations in the grass behind. The lost church had been on one of the earliest worship sites anywhere in what became England. The moving force behind the original foundation of the parish is attributed to John of Beverley.

John was an enduring influence for good. He was Christ-like. He did authentically Christ-like things. And he was shaped by a fusion of different rich Christian cultures.

Perhaps the chief of them was monastic life at Whitby. Whitby is a coastal town in the north east of England. Great fish and chips. Evocative ruined Abbey. In John’s time, in an earlier building than the ruin, the Abbey was led by the Abbess, Hild. Although many female figures get into my book, Hild does not. That happened by accident rather than design. I will correct a little of my omission here.

Hild received Christ in the very first Awakening of Christian Identity in what we now call Yorkshire. She would have been in the court of King Edwin, becoming Christian under the leadership of the Latin monk, Paulinus. You can read about those two at length in my book. Long story short, the young Hild was caught up in a major movement of the Holy Spirit of the Christian God which began in Deira under Paulinus in 627.

Paulinus was of the Latin team which developed at Canterbury from 597 under St Augustine of Canterbury. He joined it in 601, sent from Rome by Pope Gregory the Great. Canterbury is in Kent, the far south east of what became England, a long way from the north in those days. Poor or non-existent roads. Paulinus would have come north by sea.

Now, Paulinus’s ministry in the north collapsed in 633 in catastrophic circumstances. However, Christian Identity did not collapse there. And later in life, Hild was called, by a Christian from a different stream to the one that Paulinus came from, to lead monastic life in the north east. This led on to the leadership of the Whitby which shaped John.

The Christian who called her was St Aidan. St Aidan was a Gaelic Celt from the lineage of Iona and St Columba. As such, he was a product of a different Christian way to that of Paulinus. My book traces it back to St Martin of Tours, 316-397. Although Paulinus’s ministry had collapsed, Saint King Oswald, King Edwin’s successor and Early England’s Lost Christ Figure, had rescued the situation. And in 635 Oswald had invited Aidan, a.k.a. the Apostle to the English, into Northumbria. Aidan brought a fresh and different brand of major Christian Awakening with him.

So, John of Beverley was shaped in Hild’s monastic world. And Hild herself, when she came to Whitby later in life, was a product of not one but two major Christian Awakenings; and not one but two inspired Christian figures: Latin Paulinus – gifted with revelatory powers; and Celtic Aidan – gifted with revelatory and miraculous powers. As to Hild, aristocratic Anglo Saxon, she came to favour the Gaelic Celtic way out of the two Awakenings that shaped her.

The world-shaping powers of these Christian Awakenings were the everyday reality of Hild’s world. The modern mind tends to understand monasticism by post-Reformation caricature: religiosity, privileged, dry-as-dust, secluded from reality. However, the monks of those times were founding educational systems to civilise us and proto-medical systems to care for us. Those of Aidan’s Gaelic tradition, in particular, walked amongst the peoples, messaging the Christ and healing the sick. And whilst the worship life of Paulinus’s Latin world may have been rather set-orderly, the worship life of Aidan’s Gaelic world had a certain create-from-new-genius to it. John of Beverley would have shared in it. A star figure in the group of monasteries led by Hild was a young worship leader, Caedmon. The English language developed as he sang inspired poetic praises of all sorts to the Christian God. A near equivalent to Caedmon in modern times would be the musical life followed in some parts of the UK Christian scene today: at events such as “Soul Survivor”, and diversely inspired out of Catch the Fire Toronto, Bethel California, Hillsongs Australia, and various sources in the UK such as Holy Trinity Brompton.

The point is this: John of Beverley, within the very different culture of the late 600’s, was a product of Christian sources similar to certain modern ones: revelatory, miraculous, and inspirationally worshipful. The monastic life in which he shared had been shaped by a product of not one but two powerful Christian Awakenings; under not one but two exceptionally gifted monks; each from completely different cultures, Gaelic Celt and Latin.

A further important source that shaped John of Beverley was that he went south – sorry and all that, God’s Own County – to train at Canterbury, on the site of what is now the English Heritage ruin of St Augustine’s Abbey. There he would have been taught by a figure I mention briefly in my book, Abbot Hadrian. Hadrian was the number two to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore, Archbishop 668 to 689. I say a lot about Theodore in my book. Canterbury is classed as a World Heritage City. Theodore was arguably the chief World Heritage figure of its long history.

Theodore and Hadrian were just about as exotic a pair of cultural products as it would have been possible to be in proto-England in the later 600’s. Theodore was Greek, born in the Tarsus of the Apostle Paul, and trained in the Antioch which was the first great prophetic centre of the infant Gentile Christian church. Hadrian was of North Africa. They were both products of a Roman-Empire-descended world. Arriving to shape the newly developing civilisation of the Germanic-origin Anglo Saxons, I liken Theodore to a spaceship landed amongst the Barbarians. Hadrian could be seen as the Spock to Theodore’s Kirk.

The point is this, however, for John of Beverley: what a fusion came together within him. A fusion of Christian cultures, Gaelic and Latin in the north, Greek and North African in the south. All of them highly dynamic, the world shaping forces of their time.

Now, what arose from this fusion in the life of John of Beverley? John was famously good. He was a great civilising influence in his time. His good reputation endures to this day. Later Medieval times did their usual trick of layering on the superstitious exaggerations. So that, rejecting those, the modern mind throws out the baby with the bathwater. But, if we dig into the older sources, in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, there is no getting away from the baby: it is easy to see it from the non-exaggerated records: John was Christ-like. He exercised healing gifts in ways that Christ modelled. He took care to lead to Christian maturity when healing. And he laid Christ-like influence for peace into the founding times of the people who became the English.

One other circumstance to note as well. As Bishop of Hexham, John was ordained by Archbishop Theodore. There is a fashion in modern Christian understanding which is unhelpful to the type of reconciling peace which John stood for. This is an over-emphasis on conflict of Celtic and northern Christianity with Roman and southern Christianity. However, of what was John a product? Celtic and Roman, northern and southern, in fusion. As to Archbishop Theodore, Canterbury’s World Heritage hero, what made him such? I spell it out in my book. Wherever this southerner/Greek/Roman could, in building the church around which England developed, he appointed bishops with northern and Gaelic Celtic Christian background. For example, Theodore ordained St Cuthbert as a Bishop: an all-time great Saint of the English, spiritual descendant of St Aidan, and of the many who came before him, all the way back to St Martin of Tours. Theodore created a fusion church. It endures to this day.

John of Beverley summed up its pristine nature. It was his fusion Christian culture that the Kings slowly united around to become the English. In John of Beverley and his ilk, the English speaking world had a wholesome Christian fusion root.