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John Wyclif
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John Wyclif was the fourteenth-century English thinker responsible for the first English Bible, and for the Lollard movement which was persecuted widely for its attempts to reform the church through empowerment of the laity. Wyclif had ... been an Oxford philosopher, and was in the service of John of Gaunt, the powerful duke of Lancaster. In several of Wyclif's formal, Latin works he proposed that the king ought to take control of all church property and power in the kingdom - a vision close to what Henry VIII was to realise 150 years later. This book argues that Wyclif's political programme was based on a coherent philosophical vision ultimately consistent with his other reformative ideas, identifying for the first time a consistency between his realist metaphysics and his political and ecclesiological theory.
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John Wyclif, a professor at Oxford University, was an English religious reformer. While stressing scripture's priority over the traditional customs and teachings of the Church, Wyclif ... saw that wealth was corrupting the Church and was outspoken in his criticism of it. Wyclif also denied the doctrine of transubstantiation and in the end attacked the entire administrative structure of the Church as being corrupt and unauthorized by scripture. He taught that the Church hierarchy had no absolute authority, that the pope was fallible, and that secular rulers should assume responsibility for the Church's welfare in their respective domains. Wyclif's ideas were developed and spread in England by his followers, the Lollards. The Wyclif English Bible and memories of Lollard beliefs lasted until the sixteenth century, and in Bohemia his ideas had a great influence on the Hussite movement.
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John Wyclif, who died in 1384, had advocated in his later works the availability of the Bible to the laity in a language that they could understand. Wyclif was certainly perceived as the instigator of the enterprise of translation, but it seems unlikely that he himself took part in the actual work. That work was a long and complicated process, a process which is described in the so-called ‘General Prologue’, found in a small number of copies and usually attached to parts of the translation. This tells how the first, and evidently arduous, task was to produce a reliable Latin text — at a time of manual copying each copy differed in some repsect from every other copy, and correction was very hazardous. One ingenious way used to check the text was to compare its wording with the precise words commented on by fathers such as Augustine, Jerome and Ambrose: the verbal detail in these fathers might allow later corruptions to be perceived. The workers ... consulted commentaries of this kind, and other available tools such as concordances, to clarify the meaning of the text; particular attention was paid to oddities of syntax and technical vocabulary.
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John Wyclif was both a great champion of the Reformation and a dismal failure. He assaulted the papacy and the church in ways that had previously been unthinkable, yet he was cut down at nearly every turn. He pioneered ideas such as sola Scriptura and vernacular Bibles, trying to sweep away centuries of extra-biblical tradition, but met with little to no success. Though his reforms did begin to take hold, they were put down within his lifetime. John Hus managed briefly to rekindle Wyclif’s ideas in the early fifteenth century, but the church extinguished Hus’ voice even more quickly than it had Wyclif’s. Not until Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door at Wittenberg did the seeds of Wyclif’s legacy bloom into the Reformation - but then how glorious was their flowering!
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John Wyclif was born near Richmond (Yorkshire) before 1330 and ordained in 1351. He spent the greater part of his life in the schools at Oxford: he was fellow of Merton in 1356, master of arts at Balliol in 1360, and doctor of divinity in 1372. He definitely left Oxford in 1381 for Lutterworth (Leicestershire), where he died on 31 December, 1384. It was not until 1374 (when he went on a diplomatic mission to Bruges) that Wyclif entered the royal service, but his connection with John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, probably dates back to 1371. His ideas on lordship and church wealth, expressed in De civili dominio (On Civil Dominion), caused in 1377 his first official condemnation by the Pope (Gregory XI), who censured nineteen articles. As has been pointed out (Leff 1967), in 1377-78 Wyclif made a swift progression from unqualified fundamentalism to a heretical view of the Church and its Sacraments.
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John Wyclif was born about 1328 and was educated at Oxford, gaining his master of arts at Balliol about 1358. He became vicar of Fillingham in 1363 and of Ludgershall in 1368, but he got permission to be absent while he studied at Oxford for several more years. Wyclif earned his doctor of divinity in 1372. The previous year papal nuncio Arnold Garnier had arrived in England to recover all property bequeathed for the deliverance of the Holy Land. However, in February 1372 Garnier was forced by King Edward III to swear before Chancellor Thorpe and others that he would not act contrary to the interests of the realm nor take any treasure out of England for the pope or cardinals. Wyclif may have been present; but even if he was not, he was impressed by this.
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John Wyclif