Wyclif's Bible

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Wyclif's Bible is the name now given to a group of Bible translations into Middle English, that were made under the direction of, or at the instigation of, John Wycliffe. They appeared over a period from approximately 1382 to 1395.^[1] These Bible translations were the chief inspiration and chief cause of the Lollard movement, a pre-Reformation movement that rejected many of the distinctive teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. What was received of the Bible in the earliest part of Christianity to the masses was an oral version of scriptures, verses and homilies in Latin. At this point in time, only the educated (and only the wealthy could afford to be educated) could read and understand Latin. Wyclif’s idea was to translate the Bible into what the common man was speaking, giving the commoner the chance and ability to read the Bible and create one’s own understanding of the Bible’s meaning, rather than the Church’s condensed and biased version.

“[…] it helpeth Christian men to study the Gospel in that tongue in which they know best Christ’s sentence.”^[2]

Beginning of the Gospel of John from a 14th century copy of Wycliffe's translation

Long thought to be the work of Wycliffe himself, it is now generally believed that the Wycliffite translations were the work of several hands. Nicholas of Hereford is known to have translated a part of the text; John Purvey and perhaps John Trevisa are names that have been mentioned as possible authors. The translators worked from the Vulgate, the Latin Bible that was the standard Biblical text of Western Christianity. They included in the testaments those works which would later be called deuterocanonical along with 3 Esdras which is now called 2 Esdras and Paul's epistle to the Laodiceans.

Although unauthorized, the work was popular. Wycliffite Bible texts are the most common manuscript literature in Middle English. Over 250 manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible survive; its nearest competitor is the essay on the "Prick of Conscience" that survives in 117 copies.^{[citation needed]}

Surviving copies of the Wycliffite Bible fall into two broad textual families, an "early" version and a later version. Both versions are flawed from a slavish regard to the word order and syntax of the Latin originals; the later versions give some indication of being revised in the direction of idiomatic English. A wide variety of Middle English dialects are represented. The second, revised group of texts is much larger than the first. Some manuscripts contain parts of the Bible in the earlier version, and other parts in the later version; this suggests that the early version may have been meant as a rough draft that was meant to be recast into the somewhat better English of the second version. The second version, though somewhat improved, still retained a number of infelicities of style, as in its version of Genesis 1:3

Vulgate: ---- Dixitque Deus: Fiat lux, et facta est lux

Early Wyclif: And God said: Be made light, and made is light

Later Wyclif: And God said: Light be made; and light was made

King James:- And God said: Let there be light; and there was light

The familiar verse of John 3:16 is rendered in the later Wyclif version as:

For God louede so the world that he yaf his oon bigetun sone, that ech man that beliueth in him perische not, but haue euerlastynge lijf.

The Wycliffite Bible, and its popularity, caused the kingdom of England and the established Roman Catholic Church to undertake a drastic campaign to suppress it. In the early years of the 15th century, Henry IV (De haeretico comburendo), Archbishop Thomas Arundel, and Henry Knighton (to name a few) published criticism and enacted some of the severest religious censorship laws in Europe at that time. Even twenty years after Wycliffe's death, at the Oxford Convocation of 1408, it was solemnly voted that no translation of the Bible should be made without prior approval.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Wyclif's Bible

• John Wyclif; contains a text of the Wycliffite Bible
• John Wycliffe Translation from Wesley NNU; gives each book on a single page
• Vernacular Scriptures before Wycliff
• Catholic Encyclopedia article on John Wyclif

[edit] For further reading

• David Daniell, The Bible in English (Yale, 2003); ISBN 0-300-09930-4
• Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, eds., The Holy Bible: Wycliffite Versions, 4 vols. (Oxford 1850)