Old English produced the earliest substantial Christian literature in a Germanic language, and its distinctive achievement was to carry Christian material in the metre and vocabulary of heroic poetry. The Dream of the Rood, part of it carved in runes on the Ruthwell Cross and the whole of it preserved in the Vercelli Book, gives the crucifixion from the point of view of the cross, which speaks as a retainer obliged to stand fast while its lord is killed upon it. Nothing else in early medieval Europe does quite that.
The corpus includes biblical paraphrase, saints' lives in verse and in prose, homilies, charms, riddles and the poems gathered in modern editions of the Anglo-Saxon minor works. Beowulf, preserved in a single manuscript, is a poem about pagan Scandinavians composed by a Christian who declines to say that his heroes are damned, and the tension in it is the tension of the whole literature.
Prose came later and went further. The translation programme associated with Alfred in the ninth century, and Aelfric's homilies and biblical translations around the year 1000, made English a language of religious instruction at a time when almost every other vernacular in Europe had none.