Early History of the English Bible
Answer the questions at the end after reading the following article.
The history of the English Bible begins with John Wycliffe, who believed that everyone
should have the opportunity to read God's Word. In 1382 he and his followers produced the
first complete English translation of the Scripture-a translation made from the Latin Vulgate.
(Wycliffe knew no Hebrew or Greek.) Although the common people wanted to know what the
Bible had to say, the clergy strongly opposed Wycliffe's work. The archbishop of Canterbury
called Wycliffe "the very herald and child of anti-Christ, who crowned his wickedness by translating
the Scripture into the mother tongue." Nevertheless, the religious and political authorities
could not destroy God's Word. Wycliffe's translation survived, and some of its wording even
found its way into the King James Version. For example, the phrase "strait is the gate, and narrow
is the way" (Matt. 7:14) and the words "beam" and "mote" (Matt. 7:3) come from Wycliffe's
translation.
William Tyndale (1492-1536), an able Hebrew and Greek scholar, produced the first English
Bible translated directly from the ancient biblical languages. Forced to flee his native England,
Tyndale went to Germany, where his New Testament was published in 1525. The authorities in
England, however, made every effort to seize or purchase these New Testaments as they were
smuggled into the country. On one occasion, a London merchant who was Tyndale's friend sold
numerous copies at a high price to the bishop of London. Although the bishop had the copies
destroyed, Tyndale used the money he received from the sale to finance a better printing of the
New Testament! He also managed to publish part of the Old Testament, but before he could
translate and publish all of it, he was captured in Belgium. Condemned as a heretic, he was
strangled and then burned at the stake.
Tyndale died, but his work was not in vain. Others used what he had done to produce new
translations. A year before Tyndale died, Miles Coverdale (1488-1569) published a translation
of the entire Bible. Since he did not know Greek or Hebrew, he relied heavily upon Luther's
German translation, the Latin Vulgate, and Tyndale's work. Two years later one of Tyndale's
friends, John Rogers, produced the so-called Matthew's Bible. (He published it under the pseudonym
of Thomas Matthew.) This was not really a new translation, because Rogers simply combined
parts of Coverdale's work with sections of the Old Testament that Tyndale had translated
but never published. In 1539 Coverdale himself revised Matthew's Bible. When it was published
it measured 16 1/2 by 11 inches and received the name Great Bible because of its size. This was
the first version of the English Bible specifically authorized to be read publicly in the churches.
For almost thirty years it was the only version that could be used legally in England.
Bible translation work did not cease, however. During the reign of Mary I, some of the most
important Protestant leaders fled to Geneva to escape death. While there, these men produced
a Bible in 1560 that contained, in their words, "most profitable annotations upon all the hard
places." Known as the Geneva Bible, this was the first English version to have numbered verses.
This version also used italics to indicate words that were not actually found in the Greek and
Hebrew manuscripts. Within a short time, the Geneva Bible became very popular, especially
among the Puritans.
In an effort to weaken the popularity of this unauthorized version, the Church of England
commissioned a new translation. It came out in 1568 and became known as the Bishop's Bible.
In spite of its official status, it never gained wide acceptance. The culmination of all this early
translation work occurred at the beginning of the seventeenth century. King James I authorized
a group of about fifty scholars to produce a new revision of the Bible. Following the king's orders,
these men used the Bishop's Bible as their guide and consulted other English translations
