Wycliffe Translates The Bible Into English

This series has four easy 5 minute installments. This first installment: Wycliffe on Trial.

Introduction
It may safely be said that no greater service has been rendered at once to religion and to literature than the translation of the Bible into English. This achievement did not indeed, like that of Luther’s German translation, come as it were by a single stroke. Luther’s Bible caused him to be regarded as the founder of the present literary language of Germany — New High German — which his translation permanently established. The English Bible, on the other hand, was the growth of centuries. But to the contributions of able hands through many generations, during which the English language itself passed through a wonderful formative development, the incomparable beauty of King James’ version owes its existence, and our literature its greatest ornaments.

It is impossible to say when the first translation of any part of the Bible into English was made. No English Bible of earlier date than the fourteenth century has ever been found. But translations, even of the whole Bible, older than Wcyliffe’s are, by at least two eminent witnesses, said to have existed. “As for olde translacions, before Wycliffe’s time,” says Sir Thomas More, “they remain lawful and be in some folkes handes.” “The hole byble,” he declares (Dyalogues, p. 138, ed. 1530), “was long before Wycliffe’s days, by vertuous and well learned men, translated into the English tong.” And Cranmer, in his prologue to the second edition of the “Great Bible,” bears testimony equally explicit to the translation of Scripture “in the Saxons tongue.” And when that language “waxed olde and out of common usage,” he says, the Bible “was again translated into the newer language.” There has never been any means of testing these statements, which were probably due to some inexplicable error. Abundant evidence exists relating to many Saxon and later translations of various parts of the Bible before the time of Wycliffe. Among the most notable of the early translators were the Venerable Bede and Alfred the Great. Some portions of Scripture were likewise translated into Anglo-Norman in the thirteenth century. Some of the early fragments are still preserved in English libraries.

Three versions of the Psalter in English, from the early years of the fourteenth century, still exist, one of which was by Richard Rolle, the Yorkshire hermit, who also translated the New Testament.

But so far as known, the first complete Bible in English was the work of John Wycliffe, assisted by Nicholas de Hereford — whom some would name first in this partnership, though the product of their joint labors is known as “Wycliffe’s Bible.”

John Wycliffe, the “Morning Star of the Reformation,” was born near Richmond, Yorkshire, about 1324. He became a fellow, and later master of Balliol College, Oxford, afterward held several rectorships — the last being that of Lutterworth, upon which he entered in 1374. For opposing the papacy and certain church doctrines and practices, he was condemned by the university, and his followers — known as Lollards — were persecuted. Something of his life in connection with these matters is fitly dealt with by Smyth in connection with his account of the famous translation.

This selection is from How We Got Our Bible by J. Paterson Smyth published in 1886. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

J. Paterson Smyth (1852-1932) was a writer of religious books with a special reputation for writing with clarity.

Time: 1382
Place: Oxford University

After the early Anglo-Saxon versions comes a long pause in the history of Bible translation. Amid the disturbance resulting from the Danish invasion there was little time for thinking of translations and manuscripts; and before the land had fully regained its quiet the fatal battle of Hastings had been fought, and England lay helpless at the Normans’ feet. The higher Saxon clergy were replaced by the priests of Normandy, who had little sympathy with the people over whom they came, and the Saxon manuscripts were contemptuously flung aside as relics of a rude barbarism. The contempt shown to the language of the defeated race quite destroyed the impulse to English translation, and the Norman clergy had no sympathy with the desire for spreading the knowledge of the Scriptures among the people, so that for centuries those Scriptures remained in England a “spring shut up, a fountain sealed.”

Yet this time must not be considered altogether lost, for during those centuries England was becoming fitted for an English Bible. The future language of the nation was being formed; the Saxon and Norman French were struggling side by side; gradually the old Saxon grew unintelligible to the people; gradually the French became a foreign tongue, and with the fusion of the two races a language grew up which was the language of united England.

Passing, then, from the quiet death-beds of Alfred and of Bede, we transfer ourselves to the great hall of the Blackfriars’ monastery, London, on a dull, warm May day in 1378, amid purple robes and gowns of satin and damask, amid monks and abbots, and bishops and doctors of the Church, assembled for the trial of John Wycliffe, the parish priest of Lutterworth.

The great hall, crowded to its heavy oaken doors, witnesses to the interest that is centered in the trial, and all eyes are fixed on the pale, stern old man who stands before the dais silently facing his judges. He is quite alone, and his thoughts go back, with some bitterness, to his previous trial, when the people crowded the doors shouting for their favorite, and John of Gaunt and the Lord Marshal of England were standing by his side. He has learned since then not to put his trust in princes. The power of his enemies has rapidly grown; even the young King (Richard II) has been won over to their cause, and patrons and friends have drawn back from his side, whom the Church has resolved to crush.

The judges have taken their seats, and the accused stands awaiting the charges to be read, when suddenly there is a quick cry of terror. A strange rumbling sound fills the air, and the walls of the judgment hall are trembling to their base — the monastery and the city of London are being shaken by an earthquake! Friar and prelate grow pale with superstitious awe. Twice already has this arraignment of Wycliffe been strangely interrupted. Are the elements in league with this enemy of the Church? Shall they give up the trial?

“No!” thunders Archbishop Courtenay, rising in his place. “We shall not give up the trial. This earthquake but portends the purging of the kingdom; for as there are in the bowels of the earth noxious vapors which only by a violent earthquake can be purged away, so are these evils brought by such men upon this land which only by a very earthquake can ever be removed. Let the trial go forward!”

What think you, reader, were the evils which this pale ascetic had wrought, needing a very earthquake to cleanse them from the land? Had he falsified the divine message to the people in his charge? Was he turning men’s hearts from the worship of God? Was his priestly office disgraced by carelessness or drunkenness or impurity of life?

Oh, no. Such faults could be gently judged at the tribunal in the Blackfriars’ hall. Wycliffe’s was a far more serious crime. He had dared to attack the corruptions of the Church, and especially the enormities of the begging friars; he had indignantly denounced pardons and indulgences and masses for the soul as part of a system of gigantic fraud; and worst of all, he had filled up the cup of his iniquity by translating the Scriptures into the English tongue; “making it,” as one of the chroniclers angrily complains, “common and more open to laymen and to women than it was wont to be to clerks well learned and of good understanding. So that the pearl of the Gospel is trodden under foot of swine.”

More information here and here and below.