The Ultimate Price of the First English Bible

 

John Wycliffe (c. 1329-1384) was born in Hipswell, Yorkshire, and attended Balliol College, Oxford. He was educated at Queen’s and Merton colleges of Oxford and became a teaching fellow of Merton College about 1356. Wycliffe was a brilliant scholar and a superb debater whose lectures were crowded with students. As time passed, he became concerned about the corruption in the church and the papacy. The church had become so wealthy and powerful that even the king of England had to bow to it.

 

Wycliffe responded by devoting more time to speaking and writing against this corruption. Needless to say, the pope and the established church bitterly resented the attention he was bringing on them. Ultimately, the power of the Roman Catholic Church ruled, and university officials let Wycliffe go.

 

Wycliffe’s message was for people to come back to the more biblical Christianity that the Church practiced earlier. Soon his views were accepted and spread by traveling preachers, of whom many were his own students from Oxford. Some became known as Lollards (meaning “heretics”). A key appeal of Wycliffe’s message was that the people needed the Bible in their own language for a real revival to take place. He steadfastly preached this:

 

“It helpeth Christian men to study the Gospel in that tongue

in which they know best Christ’s sentence.”

 

Even though Wycliffe is generally associated with the first translation of the entire Bible into English, it is uncertain whether Wycliffe made the translation himself or whether several of his students helped with the translation project while he oversaw the work. Wycliffe’s first version of the New Testament in Middle English was published 1380, and a second edition appeared in 1388 after his death. The first edition was a word-for-word translation of the New Testament from the Latin Vulgate. A problem with the translation is that in some places translators followed the Latin so closely that their translation makes no sense in English.

 

The Wycliffe translation of the Old Testament was completed about 1382. Nicholas of Hereford, Wycliffe’s friend, is believed to have been the primary translator before trouble broke out in Oxford in 1382 and forced him to leave. Nicholas did not do all the work himself. There is evidence of five different translators. In a version copied directly from Nicholas’s original (Douce 309) a note in red ink after Baruch 3:20 states in Latin: “Here ends the translation of Nicholas of Hereford.” Realizing the shortcomings of the first edition, John Purvey, a follower of Wycliffe, is credited with producing a second edition in 1388 -- four years after Wycliffe’s death in 1384.

 

Leaders of the Catholic Church condemned the Wycliffe Bible

and both Purvey and Hereford were thrown into prison, while some

of their friends were burned at the stake with Bibles tied around their necks.

 

A synod held at Oxford in July 1408 declared it forbidden to even read the Wycliffe’s Bible. Anyone caught reading it would suffer the forfeiture of their “land, cattle, life, and goods.” It is recorded that the price for borrowing a Wycliffe Bible for an hour was a load of hay. Interestingly, the unintended consequences of the threats of severe penalties for reading it produced the opposite effect.

 

● First, they aroused curiosity in people to discover what the forbidden Bible said.

 

● Second, it made people want to learn how to read. So ultimately Wycliffe not only accomplished his goal of giving the English a Bible written in their language, he ignited the desire for literacy among the common people.

 

In 1415 the Council of Constance condemned Wycliffe’s writings and ordered his bones to be dug up and burned, and his ashes were scattered in the River Swift. It is said that Wycliffe’s ashes were carried out to the sea and his teachings spread to other lands, which is why Wycliffe is sometimes called “the morning star of the Reformation.”*

 

Shalom,

Jim Myers  

 

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* SOURCE: The Journey from Texts to Translations: The Origin and Development of the Bible by Paul D. Wegner © 1999; Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, Michigan; pp. 281-284.