Scholarly consensus dates the manuscript's production to around 800 CE and traces its origin to the monastic community founded by Columba, or Colum Cille, on the island of Iona off Scotland's west coast, an important center of Insular Christian learning and art in the period. Viking raids on Iona in the early ninth century forced the community to relocate, eventually to Kells in Ireland, and the manuscript's creation was most likely begun at Iona and either finished or continued after that move, though the precise division of the work between the two sites, and whether it was completed at all in its intended form, remains uncertain.
The book's first firm documentary appearance comes in the Annals of Ulster under the year 1007, which record the theft of "the great Gospel of Colum Cille," described as the chief relic of the western world, from the sacristy of the church at Kells, and its recovery some months later stripped of its gold and jeweled cover, buried under sod. That entry both confirms the manuscript's presence at Kells by the early eleventh century and shows it was already regarded as an object of major religious and material value, prized enough to steal for its covering alone. It remained associated with Kells through the medieval period before passing into the custody of Trinity College Dublin in the seventeenth century, where it has stayed since, rebound in the nineteenth century into four volumes and now kept on permanent public display, with two volumes shown at a time, one opened to a decorated page and one to running text.