John Wycliffe and the English Bible
First complete English translation
John Wycliffe is a Oxford theologian — one of the finest philosophical minds of the fourteenth century — who has spent years arguing with the institutional church about poverty, papal authority, and the nature of the Eucharist. His arguments draw on Augustinian theology and his own formidable dialectical ability. The church finds him troubling but difficult to pin down.
And then he does something that makes him permanently dangerous: he insists that the Bible should be in English.
The argument is simple and radical: every Christian should be able to read scripture for themselves. The church's authority depends on keeping the text in Latin, accessible only to clergy. Break the Latin monopoly and you break the church's interpretive monopoly along with it.
Wycliffe and his followers — the Lollards — produce the first complete translation of the Bible into English, completed around 1382. It is translated from Jerome's Vulgate rather than the original Hebrew and Greek, and it is not as elegant as the translations that will follow. But it is English. Ordinary people can read it.
The institutional church's response is to make it illegal. The Constitutions of Oxford in 1408 prohibit unauthorized translation of scripture into English and the reading of unauthorized translations. Possession of a Wycliffe Bible becomes prima facie evidence of heresy.
The people hide the Bibles in walls and under floors.
Wycliffe dies in 1384 of a stroke, not at the stake. Thirty years later the Council of Constance declares him a heretic, orders his bones dug up and burned, and throws the ashes in the River Swift.
The Swift carries them to the Avon, the Avon to the Severn, the Severn to the sea. Thomas Fuller writes a century later: The Avon to the Severn runs, the Severn to the sea, and Wycliffe's dust shall spread abroad, wide as the waters be.
“It helpeth Christian men to study the Gospel in that tongue in which they know best Christ's sentence.”
— The General Prologue to the Wycliffite Bible, c. 1395
“These words, which I command you this day, shall be on your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up.”
Wycliffe's argument is still the argument: scripture belongs to the people it is about and for. The word of God is not the property of an institution. It is the inheritance of every person who will receive it.
The church's attempt to restrict the Bible to Latin was not merely institutional self-protection. It was a theological claim: that the text required authorized interpretation, that ordinary people could not be trusted with it alone.
Wycliffe's counter-claim — that every Christian should be able to read it — has won, at least in the Protestant world. We live in the world his argument made.
But the underlying question remains: what do you do with the text once you have it? The freedom to read scripture for yourself is only as good as the humility and the community with which you read it.
How are you reading the Bible you have been given? And who is reading it with you?