The Wycliffe Bible (c. 1382) - Reformation Stewards

The Wycliffe Bible

c. 1382 — The First Complete English Bible

Before there was a printing press in Europe, before a word of the New Testament had been read in Greek by an Englishman for a thousand years, a company of Oxford men gave England its first complete Bible in English. They copied it by hand. Around a hundred and seventy of those copies still exist, which means the scribes made a great many more.

It is a landmark and it deserves its honor. It is also the one fact about the Wycliffe Bible that must never be left out of the telling: it was not translated from Hebrew and Greek. It was translated from Latin.

Wycliffe and his associates worked from Jerome’s Vulgate, and there is no reason to suppose any of them knew the original tongues at all.¹ Their Bible was, in Philip Comfort’s plain phrase, a translation of a translation.² Every error, every gloss, every drift of a thousand years of Latin transmission passed straight through into the English.

This is not a charge against them. It is the measure of what they were up against, and it is the reason the story does not end with them.

The Man

John Wycliffe (c. 1320–1384) was born on a sheep farm two hundred miles from London and was on the faculty of Oxford by about the age of thirty, where he grew into a brilliant and proud theologian. He had been Master of Balliol, held livings from his college and from the Crown, was employed officially in England’s controversy with the Pope, and enjoyed the protection of John of Gaunt and the strenuous support of the University.³ He was not a marginal figure. He was the most eminent theologian in England, and his attacks on the church came from inside its establishment.

When the church demanded financial support from an England straining to defend itself against France, Wycliffe advised Parliament not to comply, arguing that the church was already too wealthy and that Christ had called his disciples to poverty. He rejected transubstantiation as unbiblical. He criticized the sale of indulgences and the hierarchy itself.

And when Urban VI and Clement VII were each claiming the papacy and excommunicating each other, and Urban called for war, Wycliffe answered:

How dare he make the token of Christ on the cross (which is the token of peace, mercy, and charity) a banner to lead us to slay Christian men, for the love of two false priests!⁴ John Wycliffe

The pope, he said, was not the voice of God on earth. The Bible was. And that single conviction is what produced an English Bible: if Scripture rather than the hierarchy is the voice of God, then Scripture must be put where the people can hear it.

Five papal bulls ordered his arrest. His friends protected him, and he was never convicted of heresy in his lifetime. Removed from his Oxford post in 1381, he withdrew to the church at Lutterworth.

“Englishmen Learn Christ’s Law Best in English”

The objection raised against the translation survives in the church’s own words, and it is worth reading slowly:

“By this translation, the Scriptures have become vulgar, and they are more available to lay, and even to women who can read, than they were to learned scholars, who have a high intelligence. So the pearl of the gospel is scattered and trodden underfoot by swine.”

Wycliffe’s reply was as short as the complaint was long:

Englishmen learn Christ’s law best in English. Moses heard God’s law in his own tongue, so did Christ’s apostles.⁵ John Wycliffe

One honest qualification belongs here, because Protestant retellings regularly overstate the case. The church did not object to Bible translation as such. Portions of Scripture had existed in English since Cædmon, and copies of the Wycliffe version itself were legally owned by nobles and clergy. The objection was that this was Wycliffe’s Bible — distributed by the Lollards, deployed against the teaching and practice of the church, and placed in the hands of an uneducated laity whose salvation was understood to be mediated through clergy and sacrament.⁶

That distinction does not soften the charge. It sharpens it. What was resisted was not translation but access.

What It Was Translated From

Here is the heart of the matter, and it governs everything else that can be said about this Bible.

The base text was the Latin Vulgate — Jerome’s fourth-century translation, which had been the Bible of the Western church for nearly a thousand years. Frederic Kenyon states the position without softening it: Purvey’s work was on the level of the best scholarship and textual knowledge of the age, and yet

In the first place, it was translated from the Latin Vulgate, not from the original Hebrew and Greek, with which there is no reason to suppose that Wyclif or his assistants were familiar. Secondly, its exegesis is often deficient, and some passages in it must have been wholly unintelligible to its readers.⁷ Frederic Kenyon

Comfort puts the same fact in the sharpest possible form: their Bible was a translation of a translation, not a translation of the original languages.

Why Latin, and not Greek?

Because in England in 1380 there was effectively no alternative.

Greek had all but vanished from Western Europe for centuries. A handful of Englishmen had some acquaintance with it — Bede, Alcuin, Grosseteste, Roger Bacon — but the knowledge was fragmentary and dying. The revival of Greek learning in the West came chiefly through the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when Greek scholars fled into Italy carrying their manuscripts with them. Greek chairs were founded in the universities afterward; Grocyn began teaching Greek at Oxford in 1491.⁸

Wycliffe died in 1384 — sixty-nine years before Constantinople fell, more than a century before Greek was taught at Oxford, and a hundred and thirty-two years before Erasmus printed his Greek New Testament in 1516. Hebrew was in no better case.

There was no Greek New Testament in England to translate from. The Vulgate was not a lazy choice. It was the only door in the wall.

The case that can be made for it

John Eadie, who had no illusions about the version — he calls it flatly “only a version from a version” — nevertheless makes an argument for the decision that deserves a hearing.

Because Latin was the language of the church, a translation from the Vulgate came from a recognized source, and the correctness of any rendering could therefore be easily checked by anyone competent to check it. And Eadie adds a shrewd point about what a Greek-based version would have cost in 1380, had one even been possible:

Any attempt to translate from a Greek original at that period, had it been practicable, might have led to confusion and misunderstanding; for ignorance would have branded such a book as heretical and misleading, if it was found to differ in any way from the ecclesiastical text.⁹ John Eadie

The common people could not have adjudicated the variants, and every divergence from the Latin would have been ammunition for the priesthood. A Greek-based English Bible in the fourteenth century would have been condemned as a corruption of Scripture precisely where it was most accurate.

That is a real defense, and it also quietly names the problem. When the Latin has become the standard by which Scripture itself is judged, the church is no longer under the Word. This is the condition sola Scriptura was raised to answer, and the Wycliffe Bible stands inside it rather than outside it.

What it cost the text

The consequences were real and should not be glossed over.

Whatever had entered the Latin over a thousand years of copying — and a good deal had — was reproduced in English as Scripture.
The Vulgate’s interpretive choices became the English reader’s text. Where Jerome had committed to a reading, the English committed with him, and no appeal beyond him was possible.
The exegesis is often deficient. Some passages, as Kenyon says, must have been wholly unintelligible to their first readers — and many sentences in the earlier version can have conveyed very little idea of their meaning at all.
The ecclesiastical vocabulary of the Latin came through untouched. There was no congregation for ecclesia here, no repent for pœnitentiam agite, no elder for presbyter. Those renderings had to wait for a man who could read the Greek, and they cost him his life.

The distance between 1382 and 1526 is not a distance of courage. Wycliffe’s men had courage in full measure. It is a distance of access to the original text — and that is the distance the Renaissance and the printing press closed, and that Tyndale walked through.

This is the right place to correct a confusion that still circulates. It has sometimes been argued that because Wycliffe worked from the Vulgate, and every later English version merely revised its predecessor, the Authorized Version is ultimately a translation of the Latin. It is not. Tyndale went back to Erasmus’s Greek and to the Hebrew and began again; the line from 1526 forward rests on the original tongues. Eadie dismantles the claim at length, and it should not be repeated.

Who Actually Made It

The New Testament seems to have been completed about 1380, the Old Testament between 1382 and 1384. How much of it Wycliffe rendered with his own hand is genuinely uncertain, and the sources in this collection do not agree.

An Oxford manuscript assigns the greater part of the Old Testament, as far as Baruch 3:20, to Nicholas of Hereford, one of Wycliffe’s principal supporters at the university — and that portion is demonstrably in a different style from the rest, stiffer and more pedantic. Hereford appears to have abandoned the work abruptly, perhaps when he was summoned to London and excommunicated in 1382. The New Testament is generally attributed to Wycliffe himself, and he may have completed the Old as well; that part of the work is free and vigorous in style.¹⁰

Against this, Tony Lane states that Wycliffe was surrounded at Lutterworth by disciples who began the translation — certainly under his inspiration and probably at his bidding — but that there is no evidence Wycliffe took part in the actual work of translation.¹¹

The disagreement is worth knowing before it is preached. Hastings and Comfort attribute the New Testament to Wycliffe; Lane says there is no evidence he translated any of it. The safe statement, which all the sources support, is that the version was produced by Wycliffe’s circle, at his instigation, and under his authority — and that it is called his Bible for that reason rather than because his hand is proved on any page.

Purvey’s Revision, 1388

The Bible that fifteenth-century Englishmen actually read was not the one just described. It was its revision.

Within a few years of Wycliffe’s death a second Wycliffite Bible appeared, the fruit of a very complete revision of the first. It was traditionally assigned to John Purvey (c. 1353–1428), one of Wycliffe’s most intimate followers, and is usually dated 1388.¹² The attribution rests on circumstantial evidence — verbal resemblances between the translator’s preface and Purvey’s known works, and the fact that a copy of that preface is found attached to a copy of the earlier version which had once been his property. What is certain is that the second version is built on the first, and that its preface is saturated with Wycliffite opinion.

It swept the earlier version away. The difference in the surviving manuscripts tells the story: about thirty copies of the first version survive, and over a hundred and forty of Purvey’s.

The revision was needed. The stiffness of Hereford’s portion, the unevenness between his work and his continuator’s, and the imperfections inevitable in a first attempt on that scale all called aloud for it. Purvey’s English is smoother, clearer, and far more readable — the work, as Kenyon says, of the best scholarship and textual knowledge the age had.

It remained a translation of the Latin.

Popular timelines almost always give 1384 and stop, which gets two things wrong at once. 1384 is the year Wycliffe died, not the year of the translation — the New Testament was done about 1380 and the Old Testament between 1382 and 1384. And the version those timelines are pointing at was superseded within a few years by Purvey’s, which is the Wycliffite Bible that actually circulated.

The English of It

This is the first English Bible that a modern reader can follow without a glossary, and the first in which English has come near enough to its modern form to be generally intelligible. Here is John 14:1–7:

Be not youre herte affraied, ne drede it. Ye bileuen in god, and bileue ye in me. In the hous of my fadir ben many dwellyngis: if ony thing lasse I hadde seid to you, for I go to make redi to you a place. And if I go and make redi to you a place, eftsone I come and I schal take you to my silf, that where I am, ye be. And whidir I go ye witen: and ye witen the wey. Thomas seith to him, Lord, we witen not whidir thou goist, and hou moun we wite the weie. Ihesus seith to him, I am weye truthe and liif: no man cometh to the fadir, but bi me. If ye hadden knowe me, sothli ye hadden knowe also my fadir: and aftirwarde ye schuln knowe him, and ye han seen hym.¹³ Wycliffe BiblePurvey revision, John 14:1–7

Read it aloud and the achievement is obvious. I am weye truthe and liif is already, essentially, the sentence English-speaking Christians know. And so is the shape of the whole passage: the house, the many dwellings, the going to prepare, the coming again.

Kenyon’s summary is fair on both sides. The exegesis is often deficient and some passages are opaque — but this may be said of parts of the Authorized Version too, so it is small reproach; and on the whole it is a straightforward and intelligible version of the Scriptures.

A caution for anyone quoting the Middle English in print. The transcriptions in the printed sources vary, and the copy in this collection carries evident scanning corruption in places. Before setting any Wycliffite passage in a handout or a slide, check it against Forshall and Madden’s edition, which remains the standard text.

The Lollards

Wycliffe organized the version’s distribution as deliberately as he had instigated its making. His “poor priests” — the Lollards — went through England preaching and reading the Scriptures in the mother tongue to all who would hear.¹⁴ The translation was not an academic monument. It was a weapon in a campaign, and both sides understood it that way.

The surviving manuscripts show how far it traveled and into whose hands. Some are large folio volumes, handsomely written and illuminated in the best style of the period — one fine two-volume copy belonged to Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, uncle to Richard II. Others are plain copies of ordinary size for private persons or monastic libraries. Many of Purvey’s are small pocket volumes, plainly the personal property of individuals for their own study. Copies survive that once belonged to Henry VI, Henry VII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth.

A Bible copied by hand was expensive — Christian History notes that in the 1300s a Bible might cost a priest’s entire yearly income. That people at every level of society paid it, and hid the results, is the whole argument about whether ordinary Christians wanted the Scriptures.

The Reaction

Copies of Wycliffe’s books and of his Bible were burned, and so were some of his followers. The pressure was severe enough that both Nicholas of Hereford and John Purvey recanted.¹⁵

That fact belongs in an honest account. The two men who did most of the translating both broke. It does not diminish the work; it measures the weight that was brought against it.

The legal machinery followed. In 1401 Parliament under Henry IV passed De heretico comburendo, the Suppression of Heresy Act, making heresy punishable by burning at the stake; it stood until 1677. In 1408 a decree passed at Archbishop Arundel’s instigation through the Council of Blackfriars — the Constitutions associated with the Council of Oxford — forbade unauthorized translation outright:¹⁶

It is a dangerous thing … to translate the text of the Holy Scripture out of one tongue into another, for in the translation the same sense is not always easily kept. … We therefore decree and ordain, that no man hereafter, by his own authority translate any text of the Scripture into English or any other tongue … No man can read any such book … in part or in whole. Constitutions of Oxford1408

It did not work. Purvey’s version circulated in large numbers in spite of the decree.

The persecution was real but neither universal nor continuous. Much of it was driven by particular bishops, Arundel above all, and not every bishop shared his views; Wycliffe had powerful protectors, and under them copies could be produced and circulated. As time passed, the version’s Wycliffite origin was often simply forgotten — apart from Purvey’s preface, which appears only rarely in surviving manuscripts, nothing in the translation itself betrays its Lollard source. Many people in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries almost certainly used it without any suspicion of where it came from. Sir Thomas More, whose good faith there is no reason to doubt, appears to have been one of them.

But the danger did not disappear. As late as 1514, Richard Hun was condemned by the Bishop of London partly on the basis of the prologue to the Bible in his possession — and the charges against him are taken verbatim from Purvey’s prologue.

And the hatred outlived the man. Forty-three years after Wycliffe died, church officials dug up his body, burned his remains, and threw the ashes into the river Swift.¹⁷

Was It Really Wycliffe’s? The Gasquet Theory

One counter-argument should be known, because it is still occasionally met and because Kenyon answers it thoroughly.

The Roman Catholic historian Abbot Gasquet argued in 1897 that the versions passing under Wycliffe’s name were not produced by Wycliffe or his followers at all, but were translations authorized and circulated by the heads of the English church — Wycliffe’s own enemies. His strongest evidence was that copies were owned by kings, princes, and religious houses of unquestioned orthodoxy.¹⁸

Kenyon grants the one point that is sound: this does show that persecution of the English Bible was not as universal or continuous as it is sometimes represented. But the theory fails on the evidence. It requires ignoring passages in Wycliffe’s own writings on the importance of a vernacular version, and doing violence to passages in which his opponents — Arundel, Knyghton, the Council of Oxford in 1408 — name and condemn his work. The depositions against the Lollards constantly mention possession of vernacular Bibles. And the charges against Richard Hun, which Gasquet claimed had no counterpart in the Wycliffite Scriptures, were printed in parallel columns against Purvey’s prologue in the Church Quarterly Review, leaving no room for doubt.

Above all, the prologue itself settles it. No translation whose preface speaks of “the pardouns of the bisschopis of Rome, that ben opin leesingis” — the pardons of the bishops of Rome, which are open lies — was authorized by the official heads of the English church.

Kenyon’s verdict is that the theory has failed to stand examination and is to be allowed to lapse.

Legacy

With Purvey’s revision the history of the manuscript English Bible comes to an end. No further English translation was made in that form. The Lollard controversy subsided under the strain of the French wars and the Wars of the Roses, and when religious questions came forward again in the sixteenth century the whole situation had been changed by printing.

For a hundred and forty years, though, the Wycliffe and Purvey Bible was the only Bible the English people had in their own tongue. Eadie describes what that meant in the homes that possessed one: the Lollards had fallen from their conspicuous place as a party, but the word of the Lord endures forever, and in many houses their Book must have been a light, and in many hearts the hidden spring of comfort and power.¹⁹

And then he gives the figure that best places this Bible in the whole history, drawn from the healing at Bethsaida. The translation of the Latin Scriptures was a first step toward something higher, an intermediate gift to the nation. The effect was like the first touch of the Blessed Hand upon its vision — it saw men as trees walking. When at length the second touch passed over it, it looked up, and saw every man clearly.

That is exactly right, and it is the reason this page insists on the Latin so hard. The Wycliffe Bible was a true gift and a partial one. It gave England the Scriptures at one remove, in a version that could not be checked against the tongues the Spirit had used, at a moment when no Englishman alive could have checked them. Wycliffe’s men did everything that could be done in 1382 and paid for it.

The second touch came in 1526, from a man at Worms with Erasmus’s Greek open in front of him.

Sources

Frederic G. Kenyon, “English Versions,” in Dictionary of the Bible, ed. James Hastings (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), §10. ↩
Philip W. Comfort, “History of the English Bible,” in The Origin of the Bible, ed. Philip Wesley Comfort (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2004). ↩
Stephen Miller, “The Fiery Man behind the First English Bible,” Christian History 43 (1994); Kenyon, “English Versions,” §7. ↩
Wycliffe, quoted in Miller, “The Fiery Man behind the First English Bible.” ↩
The objection and Wycliffe’s reply, both quoted in Miller, “The Fiery Man behind the First English Bible.” ↩
Tony Lane, “The Crown of English Bibles,” Christian History 43 (1994). ↩
Kenyon, “English Versions,” §10. ↩
John Eadie, Tyndale (from The English Bible, London: Macmillan, 1876), ch. 5, surveying the revival of Greek learning; Comfort, “History of the English Bible,” for Greek taught at Oxford by 1500. ↩
Eadie, Tyndale, ch. 5. ↩
Kenyon, “English Versions,” §7; Comfort, “History of the English Bible.” ↩
Lane, “The Crown of English Bibles.” ↩
Kenyon, “English Versions,” §8, for the revision and the manuscript counts; Comfort, “History of the English Bible,” for the date 1388 and Purvey’s dates. ↩
Kenyon, “English Versions,” §10, printing specimen passages from the later Wyclifite version. ↩
Comfort, “History of the English Bible”; Kenyon, “English Versions,” §7, for the character and ownership of the surviving manuscripts; David M. Scholer, “Did You Know?” Christian History 43 (1994), for the cost of a fourteenth-century Bible. ↩
Lane, “The Crown of English Bibles.” ↩
Kenyon, “English Versions,” §8, dating the decree to 1408 through the Council of Blackfriars at Arundel’s instigation. The text of the Constitutions is quoted as reproduced in the timeline materials in the Reformation Bible collection. ↩
Miller, “The Fiery Man behind the First English Bible,” giving forty-three years; Comfort, “History of the English Bible,” says “several decades after he died” and names the Swift. ↩
Kenyon, “English Versions,” §9, answering F. A. Gasquet, The Old English Bible (1897), 102–178. ↩
Eadie, Tyndale, ch. 5. ↩