Truth Unites - John Wycliffe's Bible: Correcting a False Narrative

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

Gavin Ortlund explains the history of the first translation of entire Bible into English by John Wycliffe and the Lollards.Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

Was there opposition to translating the Bible into the vernacular languages of medieval Europe before the Reformation and during and after the Reformation? The answer to that is absolutely yes. People often try to minimize this or deny this, and they'll point to a few scattered examples of translations that existed prior. But these translations were very little known and disseminated among the common people, and there was immense pressure against fresh efforts at translation of the Bible. into languages like English, for example.

This video is going to chronicle how this played out in 15th century England. In 1407, let's start with this. Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, drafted the constitutions of Oxford to oppose translations from Scripture into the vernacular language. Quote, we therefore decree and ordained that no man hereafter, by his own authority, translate any text of the scripture, into English or any other tongue by way of a book libel or treatise,

and that no man can read any such book libel or treatise, now lately set forth in the time of John Wycliffe, or since or hereafter to be set forth in part or in whole. So as you can see there, this is targeting John Wycliffe and his followers who are called the Lollards. Wickliff was a priest and professor at the University of Oxford. He's often called the Morning Star of the Reformation because he anticipated many of the concerns of the Protestant Reformation with corruption in the church at this time and other things, and one of those concerns was the laity need the word of God in their own mother tongue so they can understand what it says. We'll talk about that in just a moment. Now, those who transgressed, the constitutions of Oxford were stipulated to be cursed with excommunication, and anyone who relapsed

was burnt at the stake. Why burnt at the stake? The constitutions of Oxford came six years after another law called De Heretico-Comboretto, comarendo, which is a Latin phrase meaning on burning of heretics. And this law was enacted in 1401 and stipulated burning at the stake as a punishment for various heresies and crimes, including making or possessing heretical books. So if you combine the constitutions of Oxford and de heretical combrendo, what that means is translating the Bible into English can get you burned alive. And that is exactly what happened to many of the law lords, as we will document. People will often say, well, the concern here was just with bad translations or heretical translations. But let's just clear up the chronology here.

The constitutions of Oxford are drafted at a time when there existed no current English Bible translation other than that produced by Wycliffe and more actually the Wycliffeite community. Some smaller portions of the Bible had been translated, especially into older or middle English. For example, back in the 8th century, Beed had translated the gospel of John, for example. There's various examples like this. But these were not widely known, and it wasn't of the entire scripture. And so the result is that you have widespread ignorance of just basic scriptural content. In my video on William Tyndale, I talk about how many priests in the church couldn't name the Ten Commandments and didn't know who authored the Lord's Prayer.

John Wycliffe is generally credited to be the first person to translate the entire Bible into English, though it was more likely not just him alone, but the Wycliffeite community. There wouldn't be a Catholic translation met with approval of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, a translation of the entire Bible, until the early 17th century, when the Dewey-Rames translation was completed around the year 1610. So just think about the timeline here. If you live in England during the 1400s or during the 1500s, and you speak English, like the vast majority of people,

then you don't have the Bible, except for, for these efforts of the Lawlards and others after them in the next century like Tyndale, who were suppressed and opposed by the church hierarchy. So, yes, I mean, I just, you know, you want to just be clear on some of these basic facts. Opposition to Bible translations was absolutely a reality at this time. It was literally a crime punishable by being burned alive, being burned at the stake. And in the height of this struggle, actually, even just owning an English Bible, appears to have been a dangerous act. This is somewhat disputed in the scholarship, but you'll find

people like Brian Moynihan saying, the possession of any biblical manuscript in English was taken as evidence of Lollardy. A particular quality of horror was thus attached to the translation of the scripture into English. Similarly, Anne Hudson, who's a leading scholar in the field of Lollardy, writes, ownership of vernacular books clearly became a serious contributory factor in the official discernment of a heretic, especially in the course of the 15th and 16th. centuries. It was, therefore, wise not to enter marks of ownership into any manuscript owned, not to betray in titles or colophones the origin of a text, to hide or even destroy incriminating materials. The late suspect who declared that he would rather burn his books than that his books

would burn him is hardly likely to have been unique, even if he was unusually candid. She's quoting a statement there from a man named John Fipp, who was targeted by the bishop of Lincoln in the 16th century, John Longland. So again, some mixed reports in the scholarship there about just how much the mere possession of an English translation of the Bible would get you into trouble, but there's no dispute that it's criminal to produce them. So it's not just bad translations that the Roman Catholic hierarchy is opposing. This is a claim that people often make, and yet they fail to mention that between the constitutions of Oxford and the completion of the Dewey-Rame's translation, there's more than two.

hundred years. So, you know, just imagine if you're going to school and the lunch lady won't give you any lunch or any food, not a single morsel of food for months on end. And you go through the line and every day, no food for you, like Seinfeld, no soup for you. And you go home hungry every day for months. And finally, you bring it up to your parents. They bring it up to the principal. There's this whole thing about it. And the lunch lady's excuse is, oh, I just didn't want you to get any bad food. And you're like, but I didn't get any food. You know, it's like, it's bad enough to not give the kid any food. Now you've got to gaslight them by acting like you were acting in his best interest all along.

Well, similarly, it's bad enough to starve the laity of having the Word of God. But then to act like this wasn't wrong as a further offense, we have 202 years approximately between the constitutions of Oxford and the completion of the Dewey Rames translation of the Bible. Besides that, some of the translations produced during this time period were simply not bad translations. Tyndale's later New Testament was outlawed and burned in public conflagrations held by leading Catholic authorities. Like this episode, you can see on the screen. That's from October 1526, and that's Cuthbert Tunstall on the left, the Bishop of Durham.

They were burning the New Testament, burning it in public gatherings. And to smuggle, and they were cracking down on its being smuggled in, to smuggle in a Tyndalian New Testament was dangerous business. many people burned at the stake, including eventually Tindale himself. But it wasn't a bad translation. The 54 divines tasked with the King James translation kept about 85% of the same New Testament as Tindale. So, and you can see all of this, more on this in my video on William Tindale, and I review the four particular translation choices that got Tindale's translation into trouble, even though they're perfectly defensible linguistically.

But in this video, let's go back a century earlier. Tyndale's 16th century effort at translating the Bible into English came on the heels of the Lollards in the 15th century. And this began with Wycliffe himself in the late 14th century. So let's just introduce him a bit. The goal of this video is just to sort of introduce the Lollards and encourage more knowledge about them. Brief Chronicle here.

Wickliff had a wide variety of concerns. It wasn't just this issue. He was critical of the Roman Catholic Church's corruption and wealth. and just how controlling it was at this point. The biggest issue was the Eucharist. He believed in real presence, but he rejected transubstantiation as it was classically formulated

as the way to construe real presence. And that really got him into trouble. And this is a really important point to stress here is that the issue is not real presence itself. All the time we're told things like Protestants reject the Eucharist and things like this. and transubstantiation and real presence are just conflated. But historically, most of the Protestant concerns were not with real presence.

That came about with Zwingli, but that was a minority view among the reformers. And certainly back with Wycliffe, the concern was not with real presence, but with the requirement of this particular philosophical construal of real presence in Aristotelian categories. You can see this from an early Lollard poem that would later become famous, and I'll put it up on the screen with updated English language here. I say the truth through true understanding, his flesh and blood, through subtle works, is there in the form of bread, in what manner it is present need not be debated, whether as subject or accident, but as Christ was when he was alive, so he is truly there.

So the sentiment in this Lollard poem is that Christ is there, and that's the important thing. How he's there exactly is less important. Paul Hardwick cites this poem and then comments, although not going as far as to argue against the Orthodox doctrine of transubstantiation, the Pelican, that's the representation of the Lollard point of view, remains resolutely non-committal. It's self-opposition sufficient to identify the poet's heterodox stance. For this Lollard writer, it is the real presence that is the significant matter,

whilst theological subtleties are at best unimportant and he strongly suggests may indeed provoke unnecessary confusion. So this is one big issue. The Eucharist and just affirming real presence, but not in this specific sort of Aristotelian ontology that is involved in transubstantiation. Of course, there's other things. Wycliffe is critical of the Pope, as you can see on the screen. He has other various concerns, especially moral issues and ethical issues in the church. But one of the other convictions of the Wyclophytes was that the scripture should be accessible to everyone, not just to the clergy. the Lawlards were ridiculed as Bible men because they were trying to translate the Bible into English. Here's how Wycliffe gave the rationale for this idea.

The truth of God standeth not in one language more than in another. An English Bible may edify the lewd people as it doth clerks in Latin. Why may we not write in English, the gospel, and other things dedicating the gospel to the edification of men's souls? The word edification gets at the core concern here. believed that the laity having the scripture in their own language edifies them and builds them up in the faith. That seems kind of obvious maybe to us today, but it wasn't obvious at that time, and it was Protestants and proto-Protestants like Wycliffe who were really leading the charge on this,

and they were being opposed. Wickliff dies in 1384, but this belief lingers on in his followers. So here's a picture of Wickliff presenting a Bible to some of his followers, the Lollards. during Wycliffe's life, he had some powerful supporters, and he was not killed. He was later exhumed and burned, his bones were burned. But during his life, he remained protected, and as we'll see, the Lollards weren't quite as controversial earlier on. I got more and more heated up. But also his influence was a little more limited, especially more to scholarly circles and

within Oxford circles. The early Lollard scholars, so like 1380s, 1390s like this. They are a pretty sophisticated movement within the church. They're producing their writings in standard university format, so first Latin, then English, with biblical citations, patristic citations, and legal citations. And this is a sort of academic debate. It's not as controversial.

And even though it had a wider hearing, lots of people were sympathetic to this broad idea that the Bible should be more widely known. early on this is getting a lot of serious discussion. As it goes forward, it gets more and more controversial, and the Lollard movement gets associated with social disorder. In 1395, the 12 conclusions of the Lollards are written. This is an official expression of Lollard beliefs. Some of them are theological, and they anticipate many of the Protestant concerns, things like the third conclusion, which opposes clerical celibacy on the ground that it actually increases sexual immorality. I have a video on that topic, by the way, if you're interested. Others are just moral

issues. So they're opposing women getting an abortion to hide the fact that they were pregnant because they had taken a vow of celibacy. That's one of the issues. They're protesting these kinds of basic ethical issues in the church and just issues of sin. One of the biggest concerns is how the church has gotten so involved with politics and temporal power. And they're against the use of capital punishment for heresy, for an example. Again, we've got to try to get back in the mindset of this time and see what was going on. Let me put up an example from the 10th conclusion where you can read a translation from the Middle English into contemporary English, where the Lollards are basically saying, look at the New Testament. Jesus taught us to have mercy on our enemies not to slay them.

Over time, Lollardy is getting more popular, okay? And this picture from Wikipedia shows areas of Lollard influence in the final decades of the 1300s in green, and then areas where it has spread in the early 1400s in red. So you can see this is not a totally marginal movement. This is making real inroads into the church. And so in the early 15th century, the early 1400s, there's a fierce response. And that's where you see those laws that I've already mentioned. Let's just mention some of these Lollard martyrs. In 1401, right after the passing of De Heretico Comberendo, William Sautry is reported to have been burned at the stake in March of that year. He is a priest who was discovered to have Lollard convictions. He believed that the real bread, he believed real bread remained after the

consecration of the Eucharist. He basically held to something in the ballpark of consubstantiation rather than transubstantiation. He also challenged practices at that time of venerating images and the particular way pilgrimages were understood and various other things. He was initially imprisoned in 1399 and he objured, but then after the passing of De Heretical Camberendo, this enables him to be tried again. Arundel himself is personally involved in his conviction. He's found guilty and he's burned at the stake in March of 1401. And this generates a lot of responses and things start to escalate as you're getting into the

1400s. There's a lot of fear among some Lollards. So Sotri had a friend and a fellow Lollard named John Purvey who recanted in order to avoid the same fate. But among others, Sotry's burning sort of galvanized Lollardy. And this is how it so often happens that when something is persecuted, it actually grows more. Unfortunately, Lollardy also gets more radical during this time too. In 1410, John Badby became the first layman among the lawmen. To be burned at the stake for heresy.

He was burned in London for his rejection of transubstantiation. And then in 1414, there's a big flare-up. Toward the end of the previous year, Lollard named John Oldcastle had been condemned and held in the Tower of London, where a lot of later martyrs like Hugh Latimer would be held. But he escapes and he leads a revolt. And there's this big battle in early 14-14. And the Lollards are routed,

and Oldcastle is himself, eventually later on, burned at the stake in 1417. So you can see this change happening from like the 1380s where the Lollards is a little more academic, a little less controversial, to now in the 1410s and pushing forward into the 15th century where it's more radical and there's this concern of violent revolt and so on and so forth. Some scholars have argued that is getting involved with these social uprisings along with the lack of the printing press at this time that ultimately caused Lollardy to not get the traction that the later Protestant movements would get. Some have called Lollardy an abortive reformation.

Nonetheless, we can certainly be thankful for their efforts to translate the Bible into English, even if they were somewhat abortive, and even if it would take later efforts of someone like Tindale for that to be more fully realized. My main hope in this video is, first of all, to just get clarity against the minimization of this concern of, opposition to vernacular translations. But more basically than that, just to encourage more reading about the Lollards. For an update on the scholarship of the Lollards, a great starting point is Lollards and their influence

in late medieval England. This was a book that was published in 2009, and it reviews the explosion of scholarship on Lollardy since the 1960s. There's been a huge amount of interest in this over the past few generations, especially as a result of the work of Anne Hudson. It's really cool in the scholarship when one person's efforts. I know lots of my viewers have negative feelings about scholarship. I tend to think that scholarship is like everything else in a fallen world. It can be twisted and done badly, but in and of itself, it is a noble enterprise and a good thing. And it is cool when you see positive things happening

in the scholarship. It is cool when you see one person who really moves a whole field like this. and Ann Hudson has done that, though there's been others as well. If you want to read Hudson's full work, don't worry, it's only $280 on Amazon. But right now it's 17% off, so you only have to pay $230. And I haven't read it for that reason. I'm looking for it in a library. I've read enough reviews and summaries of it to know the general gist. I am not claiming she would agree with everything I have said here.

She has a pretty nuanced take, but she gives a good, from what I can understand, and she's giving basically a good portrait of Lollardy as a coherent movement. So if someone wants to do a deep dive in this, that'd be a great place to go. There's so much that needs to be done here with the Lollards. It's kind of a fascinating thing. It's like finding a cave and you're exploring and there's so much to uncover. So my hope is that this video may inspire at least one person to do a master's thesis or a doctoral dissertation on the Lollards.

There's a lot more need for study of them. All right, thanks for watching, everybody. Let me know what you think in the comments.