John Wycliffe and the First English Bible

The First Bible in English

The first complete Bible in the English language was made in the last twenty years of the fourteenth century, at the prompting of the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe. It was translated from the Latin Bible of the Western church, and every copy of it was written out by hand, because printing had not yet come to England. That was a hundred and fifty years before William Tyndale's New Testament came off a press at Worms in 1526.

About two hundred and fifty manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible, whole or in part, still survive. That is more than of any other book written in English in the Middle Ages. Many of them carry no owner's name, and there is a reason. For more than a century after 1409, a person found with an unlicensed English Bible could be suspected of heresy, and a heresy trial could end in prison or at the stake. This is the story of that handwritten Bible, the men who made it, the people who copied and carried it, and the church authorities who tried to keep it in check.

John Wycliffe of Oxford

John Wycliffe was born in Yorkshire, probably around 1330. The sources give dates from the early 1320s to 1331. He spent most of his working life at Oxford, which was then the leading university in England. He was master of Balliol College around 1360, became a doctor of theology about 1372, and from 1374 he also held the parish of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, where he spent his last years.

Wycliffe's writings came more and more to rest on one conviction: that Scripture is the rule by which the church's teaching must be tested. In his later works he argued that ordinary Christians should have the Bible in a language they could understand, so that they could read for themselves what God had said. This brought him into conflict with the church authorities on many points, including the claims of the papacy and the teaching of the Mass. On the place of the Bible, his conviction was the one the Bereans showed when they heard Paul preach in their synagogue. They received the word gladly, and then they went to the Scriptures themselves to see whether what he said was true.

These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.

Acts 17:11
KJV

In May 1382 a council of bishops met at the Blackfriars in London under Archbishop William Courtenay and condemned twenty-four propositions drawn from Wycliffe's teaching, ten of them as heresy. His supporters at Oxford were pressed to recant. Wycliffe himself had already withdrawn from Oxford to Lutterworth in the autumn of 1381. He was never excommunicated in his lifetime. He suffered a stroke while hearing Mass in his parish church at the end of December 1384 and died a few days later, on the last day of that year. He was buried in Lutterworth churchyard.

Translating the Whole Bible from the Latin

It is often said simply that Wycliffe translated the Bible, but the record is more modest. The translation was a shared work, probably begun at Oxford in Wycliffe's lifetime and finished after his death. Wycliffe is credited with inspiring it and setting it going. The one translator named in the manuscripts themselves is Nicholas Hereford, an Oxford follower of Wycliffe, whose name appears in two copies of the earlier form of the Old Testament. The name of John Purvey, another of Wycliffe's followers, is usually attached to the later revision, but that link first appears in a letter of 1729 by the Cambridge scholar Daniel Waterland, who admitted he was guessing. So it is safest to call the translators what the evidence allows: Wycliffe's followers.

They translated from the Latin Vulgate, the Latin Bible that the churches of the West had read since the days of Jerome. In England in the 1380s almost no one could read the Old Testament in Hebrew or the New Testament in Greek, and there were no printed texts of either to work from. The Latin was the Bible the translators had, and they took great care over it. The prologue to the revised version describes how they first compared many old Latin Bibles to arrive at a reliable text, because copies of the Latin differed from one another, and then studied hard passages with the help of the old commentators before putting them into English.

The work came out in two forms, which scholars call the Early Version and the Later Version. The Early Version follows the Latin almost word for word, keeping its word order and constructions, so that in places it is hard to follow without the Latin beside it. The Later Version, completed around 1390 or soon after, recasts the same text in natural English that can be read aloud and understood. It became the standard: manuscripts of the Later Version far outnumber those of the Early Version. The goal was the same one Ezra's Levites had when they read the law to the people who had returned from Babylon.

So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.

Nehemiah 8:8
KJV

A few verses of the Later Version show what the translation sounded like. In the table below the Wycliffite text is given first in its own spelling, then in modern spelling, beside the King James Version.

The third row shows how closely the translators followed their Latin. In Matthew's Gospel the Vulgate calls the bread of the Lord's Prayer "supersubstantial," and the Wycliffite Bible turns that one Latin word into English as bread "over other substance." The King James translators, working from the Greek, wrote "daily bread," as Tyndale had before them. The prayer itself is studied in The Lord's Prayer: A Model for How to Pray.

Carried from Hand to Hand

Wycliffe's followers came to be called Lollards. It was a name their opponents gave them, and its origin is uncertain; it may have meant a mumbler or an idle talker. Their preachers carried Wycliffe's teaching into the towns and villages of England, and the English Bible went with them. Most people in England could not read, so the Scriptures usually reached them by being read aloud, in a household or a small gathering, to men and women who were hearing the words of the Bible in their own language for the first time.

So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

Romans 10:17
KJV

Every copy had to be written out by a scribe, sheet by sheet, on parchment, and a whole Bible was a large and costly book. Only about twenty complete Wycliffite Bibles survive, and more than two thirds of the surviving manuscripts contain only the New Testament or parts of it. For how Scripture was copied by hand before printing, see The Process of Writing and Copying Ancient Manuscripts.

Not every owner was a Lollard. More than a third of the surviving manuscripts include a table showing which Epistle and Gospel were read at Mass on each day of the church year, which suggests that the scribes who made them expected devout parishgoers to buy them. Some noblemen and members of religious orders are known to have owned copies. The authorities still saw a danger in an English Bible that anyone could read. The chronicler Henry Knighton, a canon of Leicester writing in Wycliffe's time, complained that the translation had made the gospel more open to lay men, and even to women who could read, than it usually was to well-educated clergy. He reached for Christ's own words about casting pearls before swine to describe what he thought had been done.

The Constitutions of Oxford

The fear of the authorities was heresy, and with it disorder. Wycliffe's teaching had been condemned, his followers were accused of spreading it with the English Bible in their hands, and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 had left the governing classes of England alarmed at what unlicensed preaching might stir up. In 1401 Parliament made burning the penalty for relapsed heretics. Then Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, drew up a set of rules against the Lollards at Oxford in 1407, which were issued in 1409 and are known as the Constitutions of Oxford.

One of them dealt with the Bible. It ordered that no one should translate any text of Scripture into English on his own authority, in a book or a tract, and that no translation made in Wycliffe's time or since should be read, in public or in private, until it had been approved by the bishop of the diocese or by a provincial council. Historians still discuss whether this was meant as a full ban or as a licensing rule, but for most readers the effect was the same. The Wycliffite Bible was the translation the rule had in view, so owning one without a bishop's leave became grounds for suspicion of heresy, and English Scripture went underground. The rule was still in force when Tyndale came to London in 1523 hoping for a bishop's support for a new translation. His story is told in William Tyndale: The Man Behind the King James Version.

Some paid for it with their lives. At Coventry, in 1519 or 1520 (the records differ), six men and a widow named in John Foxe's account as Mistress Smith were burned as heretics. Among the evidence against them was that they had taught their children the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Creed in English. They had done what Moses told every household in Israel to do.

And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

Deuteronomy 6:6-7
KJV

Condemned at Constance, Scattered in the Swift

Wycliffe's books travelled further than England. Students carried them to Bohemia, where they were read by Jan Hus of Prague. In 1415 the Council of Constance, called to end the division of the Western church between rival popes, condemned Wycliffe's teaching as heresy, ordered his books burned, and decreed that his bones be dug up and removed from consecrated ground. The same council condemned Hus, and he was burned at the stake that July.

The order against Wycliffe's remains waited thirteen years. In 1428, at the command of Pope Martin V, Richard Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, had the grave at Lutterworth opened. Wycliffe's bones were burned, and the ashes were thrown into the Swift, the small river that runs past the town. Two centuries later the English church historian Thomas Fuller told what happened next. The Swift, he wrote, carried the ashes into the Avon, the Avon into the Severn, the Severn into the narrow seas and then into the ocean, so that Wycliffe's ashes became "the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed the world over."

Fuller was writing about Wycliffe's teaching, but his picture fits the Bible Wycliffe set going even better. The Apostle Paul wrote his second letter to Timothy as a prisoner, chained like a criminal, and he made the same point about the gospel itself.

Wherein I suffer trouble, as an evil doer, even unto bonds; but the word of God is not bound.

2 Timothy 2:9
KJV

Paul uses two related Greek words in that verse. The first, translated bonds¹, means a band or a shackle, the chain of a prisoner. The second is the verb from which it comes, bound², meaning to tie or to bind. Paul himself was in chains, and he says that the word of God he preached was under no such restraint.

Matthew Henry's commentary, whose notes on this letter were finished after his death by another minister, draws the lesson: "Persecuting powers may silence ministers and restrain them, but they cannot hinder the operation of the word of God upon men's hearts and consciences; that cannot be bound by any human force." A little later he put it in one line: "Though the preachers of the word are often bound, yet the word is never bound." John Chrysostom, preaching at Antioch in the fourth century, said the same with an image from daylight: "For just as it is not possible to bind a sunbeam or to shut it up within the house, so neither can the preaching of the word be bound."

From the Latin by Hand to the Greek in Print

For more than a century after Arundel, the Wycliffite Bible was the only English Bible there was, and it was copied, read and hidden until printed Bibles took its place. It was never printed in its own time. Its New Testament was first printed in 1731, and the whole Bible in both versions only in 1850, in the edition of Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, which took them twenty years.

The two men who gave England its first English Bibles worked in different ways. Wycliffe's followers translated from the Latin and copied their work by hand. Tyndale translated the New Testament from the Greek and parts of the Old Testament from the Hebrew, and had his work printed by the thousand. Printing put the Bible within reach of far more readers, and translating from the original languages brought English readers closer to the words the prophets and apostles wrote. The Geneva Bible of 1560 and the King James Version of 1611 were built on Tyndale's foundation.

Yet the debt to Wycliffe's followers is real. They showed that the whole Bible could be put into English, and that English readers wanted it badly enough to copy it by hand and keep it at the risk of their lives. The conviction behind their work, that the Scriptures are the final authority and belong to every believer, was the conviction the Reformers would name Scripture alone. Wycliffe's followers held it in the language they spoke at home. For how the books of the Bible themselves were received and gathered, see The Canon of Scripture: How We Got the Bible, and for the place of Scripture as the believer's rule, The Sufficiency of Scripture.

The Word of the Lord Endureth

The men who made the first English Bible did not see the result of their work. Wycliffe died before it was finished, his bones were burned, and many who copied and read his Bible were forced to keep it hidden. But the English Bible was not lost. About a hundred and thirty years after the Constitutions of Oxford, the Great Bible of 1539 was set up in the parish churches of England by the king's authority, and in the centuries since, the Scriptures have been translated into more languages than any other book.

Peter's first letter, quoting Isaiah, gives the reason. The verb he uses, endureth³, means to stay, to abide, to remain where one is. Kings, councils and archbishops pass away like grass, and the word of God remains.

For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: But the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you.

1 Peter 1:24-25
KJV