Where does Christianity come from in Beowulf? The Christian influences in Beowulf ultimately came from the Christian/Catholic Church of Rome which converted the Romans, and thus the Roman legions. and therefore the occupied provinces. The Christian/Catholic bishop of Rome also sent missionary priests and monks to the British Isles to proselytize the population. There are also other considerations to take into account. First of all, let's be clear that Britain's conversion to Christianity began quite early. The Catholic priest Venerable Bede, born in Bernicia, Northumbria, around 673, states in Book 1, Ch 4 of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People that, while Eleutherius was bishop of Rome (AD 175–189), a king of Great Britain named Lucius requested from the Pope that the king be baptized Catholic by papal decree: In the year of our Lord 156, Mark Antoninus Verus was named emperor with his brother Aurelius Commodus. He was the fourteenth after Augustus. In their time, when a holy man called Eleutherius was bishop of the church of Rome, Lucius, king of Britain, sent him a letter begging him to become a Christian by a rescript of his own. His pious request was quickly granted, and the British preserved the faith they had received, inviolable and complete, in peace and tranquility, until the time of the Emperor Diocletian. Bede's last sentence in the passage implies that Christianity had already been established in Britain for some time before Eleutherius occupied the chair of Peter from 175 to 189. This seems reasonable according to what the historian Eusebius Pamphilus writes, Bishop of Caesarea, in his Ecclesiastical History written in the 300s. The Ecclesiastical His...... middle of paper ......McClure, Judith, publishers. Bede: The Ecclesiastical History of the English People; The Great Chronicle; Letter from Bede to Egbert. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius, translated by CF Cruse. Peabody, MS: Hendrickson Publishers, 2000. Magoun, Frances P. “Oral-formular character of Anglo-Saxon narrative poetry.” In TheBeowulf Poet, edited by Donald K. Fry. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968. “Nero.” The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. www.bartleby.com/65/. “St. Patrick. » The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. www.bartleby.com/65/.Ward & Trent, et al. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. New York: Sons of GP Putnam, 1907-1921; New York: Bartleby.com, 2000