John Wycliffe's New Testament

    John Wycliffe,[1] c. 1331[2]–84, was a priest and professor at the University of Oxford. He, through sermons and writing, advocated the translation of the Latin Bible, Vulgate version, into Middle English so that ordinary people could see the truth in their own way. At one time it was thought he translated the whole Bible, but it is now thought he completed the Gospels and some of the New Testament and his followers worked on the Old Testament.[3] The ‘Wycliffite Bible’ was the first complete translation of the Bible, and was finished by 1382[4]. The first version was more literal, difficult to read and had some awkward translations. The earliest which can be securely dated is in the British Library.[5] Updated, easier to read versions followed in the next thirteen years translated by his friend John Purvey with the help of others.

 

Artistic impression of John Wycliffe from a book by C. C. Savage 1856. Wikimedia, Public Domain.

            The bible was never used in church services, but circulated widely amongst clergy until 1538 when Henry VIII enforced his Great Bible on every parish. The significance of Wycliffe’s inspired translation is that it laid the foundation for the reforms of the 16th-century and eventually the rise of Protestantism. Wycliffe saw God’s wisdom lay  in words set out in the gospels and not as taught doctrinally and variably by priests in the Roman Catholic Church. In 1409, a provisional council of the English Church banned further translations of the Bible into English. In 1425, Wycliffe was posthumously condemned by the church and his bones were dug up and burned.

Lichfield’s Wycliffe New Testament

            The cathedral possesses a Wycliffe New Testament (MS Lich 10). It was bequeathed by Prebendary Ernest R.O. Bridgeman, Rector of Blymhill, and placed in the library around 1941. Dated c. 1410, it has 124 bi-folios, each 270 mm x 207 mm, and is handwritten in iron gall ink on vellum. The text appears in two columns and there are numerous decorated initials at the start of prologues and chapters.

Part of a decorated page

     Around 250 manuscripts of the Bible in varying states of completeness exist. It is strange more Wycliffe Bibles of the early 15th-century exist than do the orthodox versions of this time. About 150 manuscripts, complete or partial survive, containing the updated translation in its revised form. Lichfield cathedral’s updated version is second to St Chad’s gospels in importance.

    The irony of Wycliffe’s provocative and audacious distribution of a popular Bible was that it was banned in all its forms by episcopal authority, yet vernacular translations of scripture were freely available in France, Germany, Italy and the Low Countries by the time of the Reformation.[6] Furthermore, there were texts based on the gospels written in the vernacular and acceptable to own.

[1] His name has been spelt in at least twenty different ways. He came from a wealthy family with known ancestry and has been linked with the parish of Wycliffe, near Richmond, Yorkshire.

[2] Dates of 1324, 1328 and 1331 have been given He was in Oxford by 1345..

[3] Some historians believe Wycliffe played a minor role in the translations and a leading role in making the vernacular Bible known to many. He is known to have translated the Apocalypse in 1356, entitled ‘The last age of the church’, which could have reflected his view of the church. It was also eight years after the Black Death and with much loss of clergy, those taking their place were seen to be inferior. His next work included extracts taken from other authors.

[4] Bede was translating the Gospel of John into Old English in the 8th-century at the time of his death. Various Mercian texts were translations of parts of the Psalter and other commentaries, see M. P. Brown, ‘Mercian manuscripts: The implications of the Staffordshire Hoard, other recent discoveries, and the New Materiality'. E. Kwakkel (ed.) Writing in Context: Insular manuscript culture 500--1200. (Leiden: 2013), 23--66. The first six books of the Bible were translated for the Old English Hexateuch in the 11th-century. Short translated commentaries were published by others previous to Wycliffe. Therefore the idea of having a translated bible for all to read was not new, but it was Wycliffe that enabled it to happen.

[5] Egerton MS 617. 

[6] P. Marshall, Heretics and Believers. A history of the English Reformation. (New Haven and London: 2017), 117.