The first complete Bible in English was not printed. It was copied by hand, in hundreds of manuscripts, in the decades around 1400. It was translated not from Hebrew and Greek but from the Latin Vulgate, the Bible of the medieval Western church. And it is named after a man who probably translated little or none of it himself: the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe.

The Wycliffite Bible, as scholars now usually call it, sits at the centre of one of the sharpest controversies of the late Middle Ages. To its supporters it was the word of God made available to ordinary people. To its opponents it was a tool of heresy. Historians today are still debating how it was made, who made it, and how strictly it was suppressed.

Wycliffe the Oxford scholar

John Wycliffe (often spelled Wyclif) was born in Yorkshire around 1330 and spent most of his career at Oxford, where he became one of the leading philosophers and theologians of his day. He was for a time Master of Balliol College, and later rector of the parish of Lutterworth in Leicestershire.

In the 1370s Wycliffe’s ideas became more radical. He argued that the Bible was the supreme authority for Christian belief and life, and that every Christian should know it. He attacked the wealth of the church, questioned the authority of the papacy, and, most controversially, rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation, the teaching that the bread and wine of the Mass become the body and blood of Christ in substance. His views were condemned by a council of bishops in London in 1382, and he withdrew to Lutterworth, where he continued to write until his death after a stroke at the end of 1384.

Who made the translation?

Wycliffe himself never claimed to have translated the Bible, and his Latin works do not describe doing so. But the translation came from the circle of scholars around him at Oxford, and from the start opponents linked it with his name. Most historians think it was a team project, inspired by Wycliffe’s teaching, which he may have encouraged or supervised.

A few names are attached to it, with varying confidence. One manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford has a note in the middle of the book of Baruch saying that the translation of Nicholas Hereford ends there. Hereford was an Oxford scholar and follower of Wycliffe, and this note is often taken to mean he worked on the early Old Testament translation, though its meaning has been debated. John Purvey, Wycliffe’s secretary at Lutterworth, was credited by nineteenth-century scholars with the later revision, but that attribution rests on weak evidence and is now widely doubted. In the end, the translators remain largely anonymous.

Two versions

The Wycliffite Bible exists in two main forms.

The Early Version, probably made in the late 1370s and 1380s, is extremely literal. It follows the Latin word order and grammar closely, sometimes so closely that the English is hard to understand without the Latin.

The Later Version, probably completed in the 1390s, is a thorough revision in more natural English. Its opening of John’s Gospel, which reads almost the same in both versions, is in a commonly printed spelling:

In the bigynnyng was the word, and the word was at God, and God was the word.

Compare the modern World English Bible: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). The Wycliffite wording follows the Latin order exactly in its last clause, “and God was the word,” where the Latin reads et Deus erat Verbum. Latin has no word for “the,” so either noun could be the subject. In the Greek, the article marks “the Word” as the subject, which is why later English translators, working from the Greek, settled on “the Word was God.”

Some manuscripts of the Later Version include a long General Prologue. In its fifteenth chapter the writer describes how the translation was made: by gathering many old Latin Bibles and correcting them, studying the commentators, consulting older grammarians and theologians about hard words, and then translating as clearly as possible according to the sense, not merely word for word. It is one of the earliest descriptions in English of a translation method, and it shows a real concern with getting the Latin text right before translating it.

The Lollards

Wycliffe’s followers were called Lollards, a name of uncertain origin used mostly by their opponents. The movement began among Oxford scholars and spread to clergy, merchants, craftsmen and some knights and gentry. Lollards valued the English Bible and English sermons, read and copied texts in groups, and criticised many church practices.

After a failed Lollard rising in 1414 led by Sir John Oldcastle, the movement was more firmly associated with sedition as well as heresy, and many Lollards were tried and some executed. It continued underground into the sixteenth century, when it met the English Reformation.

Arundel’s Constitutions

In 1407 Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, issued a set of decrees for the province of Canterbury, known as Arundel’s Constitutions, formally published in 1409. One of them forbade anyone to translate any text of scripture into English on their own authority, and forbade the reading of any such book made in Wycliffe’s time or since, unless it had been approved by a bishop or a provincial council.

How this worked in practice is debated. The traditional view, developed in Margaret Deanesly’s study of 1920 and in much later work, is that the decree effectively outlawed the English Bible and made owning one dangerous. Some heresy trials did cite English books as evidence. Nicholas Watson has argued that the Constitutions had a chilling effect on religious writing in English in general. Other historians, notably Henry Ansgar Kelly, argue that the ban was narrower than often thought: it required approval rather than banning translation outright, and orthodox owners, including members of the royal family and religious houses, continued to own and read copies of the Wycliffite Bible openly. Both views have evidence on their side, and the truth probably varied by time, place and person.

Surviving in manuscripts

What is not in doubt is how widely the translation was copied. About 250 manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible survive, complete or in part, more than for any other medieval English text. Most are of the Later Version, and many are of the New Testament alone, small enough to carry. Some are plain and cheap; others are beautifully decorated and were clearly made for wealthy owners. Many have tables of the church’s lectionary readings, suggesting they were used alongside the church’s services.

Wycliffe’s bones

The Council of Constance in 1415 condemned Wycliffe as a heretic, the same council that condemned the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus, who had been influenced by Wycliffe’s writings. It ordered that Wycliffe’s remains be removed from consecrated ground. The order was carried out in 1428 by Richard Fleming, bishop of Lincoln: Wycliffe’s bones were dug up at Lutterworth, burned, and the ashes thrown into the nearby River Swift.

Its legacy

The Wycliffite Bible was not printed until much later: the New Testament in 1731 and the whole Bible in 1850, in a great edition by Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden. It had little direct influence on the printed English Bibles of the sixteenth century, which were translated afresh from Hebrew and Greek. William Tyndale in the 1520s worked from Erasmus’s Greek New Testament, not from the Wycliffite text (see William Tyndale and the English New Testament). But the Wycliffite Bible proved that the whole Bible could be put into English, and showed how much demand there was for it.

A different starting point

Open Word Bible shares the Wycliffite translators’ conviction that ordinary readers should be able to read the Bible in their own language and that translators should explain their method. But it differs in two important ways. It translates from the Hebrew of the Westminster Leningrad Codex and the Greek of the SBL Greek New Testament, rather than from a Latin translation. And it needs nobody’s permission to be read or copied: the translation and all its reasoning are released under a CC0 licence. It is AI-assisted, its drafts have not yet been approved by named human reviewers, and it is still at an early stage. See AI-assisted translation and human review.

Sources

  • Deanesly, Margaret. The Lollard Bible and Other Medieval Biblical Versions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920.
  • Dove, Mary. The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
  • Forshall, Josiah, and Frederic Madden, eds. The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, with the Apocryphal Books, in the Earliest English Versions Made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and His Followers. 4 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1850.
  • Hudson, Anne. The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
  • Kelly, Henry Ansgar. The Middle English Bible: A Reassessment. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
  • Lahey, Stephen E. John Wyclif. Great Medieval Thinkers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
  • Solopova, Elizabeth, ed. The Wycliffite Bible: Origin, History and Interpretation. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
  • Watson, Nicholas. “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409.” Speculum 70, no. 4 (1995): 822–864.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article quotes a historic translation or gives its own literal rendering.