The Wycliffe Bible

The event

John Wycliffe, an influential Oxford theologian, argued increasingly from the 1370s onward that scripture, rather than church tradition or papal authority, should serve as the final standard for Christian doctrine and practice, and that ordinary believers should have direct access to the Bible in their own language rather than depending exclusively on clergy trained in Latin.

Wycliffe's followers, most notably his associates Nicholas of Hereford and John Purvey, produced the first complete English translation of the Bible in the early 1380s (with a revised, more idiomatic version following around 1395), translated primarily from the Latin Vulgate rather than the original Hebrew and Greek texts, since knowledge of the biblical languages was rare in fourteenth-century England.

The translation and the broader reform movement associated with Wycliffe and his followers, known as Lollards, provoked strong opposition from church authorities, who viewed unauthorized vernacular translation and lay access to scripture as dangerous to doctrinal control and clerical authority; England's Archbishop Arundel issued constitutions in 1409 explicitly banning unlicensed translation and possession of English scripture, and Lollardy was actively suppressed, with some adherents executed for heresy in the following decades.

Though Wycliffe himself died of natural causes in 1384, the Council of Constance posthumously condemned him as a heretic in 1415, and in a symbolically charged act in 1428 his remains were exhumed, burned, and scattered into the River Swift. His advocacy for vernacular scripture and challenge to clerical and papal authority nonetheless earned him the later title "Morning Star of the Reformation," and his ideas influenced the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus, whose own movement in turn helped shape the intellectual climate in which Martin Luther's Reformation would emerge over a century later.

Dating

The exact roles of Wycliffe himself versus his associates in producing the translation are debated by scholars; it is generally referred to as the "Wycliffe Bible" reflecting his inspiration and oversight of the project rather than certain personal authorship of every part.

Other witnesses

• surviving manuscripts of the Wycliffe Bible (various)
• Constitutions of Oxford, 1409

Further reading

• Christian History Magazine 3: John Wycliffe, Bible Translator — free full issue
• Catholic Encyclopedia (1913): John Wyclif — a hostile Catholic account, written in 1912