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John Wycliffe (c. 1330-80) was the first to upset the establishment by making the Bible available in English. The learned Wycliffe regarded the preaching of Scripture as "an act more solemn than the making of any sacrament." While others before him had claimed that Scripture was the norm for all truth, Wycliffe argued that every man had a right to examine the Bible for himself. Thus he not only challenged such medieval practices as Masses for the dead, indulgences, and a church organized along feudal lines, but he also encouraged all Christians to read the Bible and form their own opinions on these matters.

McGrath quotes one contemporary who complained that Wycliffe had translated the Bible "from Latin into the English [Latin: anglica], not the angelic [Latin: angelica], language." The critic went on to complain that what had been reserved for the learned clergy was now available to the laity—"in fact, even to women who can read. As a result, the pearls of the gospel have been scattered and spread before swine." Many in the establishment shared his scorn. The English nobility preferred French and Latin, and rarely used English except when communicating with their social inferiors.

Wycliffe's followers sharply criticized the clerical establishment, with its wealth and privilege. For example, shortly after Wycliffe's death, Nicholas Hereford ended one sermon by declaring it God's will for the Christian population to rise up and seize the church's wealth. The establishment panicked, and, as McGrath writes, "The mere possession of a vernacular Bible [became] presumptive evidence of heresy in fifteenth-century England."

William Tyndale (1494?-1536) made the next major effort at vernacular Bible translation into English. One day, in an argument with an ignorant priest, he lost his temper. "I defy the pope and all his laws," Tyndale said, "and if God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scriptures than thou doest."

Tyndale had to translate on the lam. The 1408 Constitutions of Oxford were still in force, making it technically illegal for a scholar even to possess an English vernacular Bible or to raise many of the questions he was eager to debate. And so in May 1524, Tyndale left England and sailed to Germany.

Because vernacular Bible-reading had been associated with the peasant uprisings in Europe during the very years Tyndale was doing his work, the fruits of his labors were outlawed in England. But the network of weavers and wool merchants who had financed his translation work helped also to smuggle more than 18,000 copies of his New Testament into England between 1525 and 1528. We may think of them as prototypes of Brother Andrew, "God's Smuggler." The English authorities, however, viewed them they way we regard Colombian cocaine smugglers. Many of those copies were seized and burned, but many got through to believers who loved God's Word.

Bobrick calls Tyndale's translation a "tour de force." Tyndale's contemporaries had other words for it. Sir Thomas More, for example, included Tyndale's New Testament among the heretical writings he tried to refute. Though he damned it as a whole, he had difficulty specifying its errors, complaining mainly about Tyndale's anti-ecclesiastical word choices: congregation rather than church, senior or elder rather than priest, favor rather than grace, repentance rather than penance, and love rather than charity. These terms were not heretical, but were rather an opportunity to read the text afresh without being mentally hampered by the baggage of medieval church life.

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October 22 2001, Vol. 45, No. 13