JOHN WYCLIFFE, who lived in the fourteenth century, was a native of Richmond in Yorkshire; and he proceeded from there to Oxford, where he received his education, becoming in due course master of Balliol College. It was not long, however, before he resigned from this position, and turned his attention more particularly to writing and preaching. Appalled by the abuses with which he came in contact in the pre-Reformation church, and feeling that these abuses were largely the result of a misinterpretation of the Bible, Wycliffe decided that one of the most effective ways of putting a stop to what was going on, was for him to make it possible for the people as a whole to read the Scriptures in their native English, and to judge for themselves as to their meaning. It is true that before his time there had been various partial attempts to fill this need, but Wycliffe deserves all due credit as being the first man to provide a complete English rendering of both the Old and the New Testament. The translator began his work with the book of Revelation, afterwards turning his attention to the Gospels, and eventually, by about the year 1380, he had completed his rendering of the New Testament. It is now generally conceded, however, that the Old Testament, which was soon added, was not altogether the work of Wycliffe himself, but rather of one of his friends, a certain Nicholas de Hereford, though as Nicholas was exiled by his ecclesiastical opponents before he had finished the task he had set himself, Wycliffe completed it, thereafter arranging for the publication of the whole volume.
Despite the significant position which it rightly holds in the history of the English Bible, it may well be remembered that this translation was not made direct from the original Hebrew or Greek manuscripts, but was simply a rendering of the Latin Vulgate, and so was in reality no more than a translation of a translation. Moreover, in a number of instances, Wycliffe's renderings of the Latin were so exactly literal that the sense of the passage in English was obscured. Thus it came about that some two years after Wycliffe's passing a certain John Purvey undertook to revise the translation, noting in his preface that it was his purpose to make each "sentence as trewe and open in English as it is in Latyn." In spite of Purvey's modest description of himself as "a symple creature," his revision was both skillful and scholarly, and, as a result, what is sometimes called the Wycliffe-Purvey Version attained considerable fame, and as wide a circulation as was practicable—bearing in mind the fact that it was perforce published in manuscript form, printing being at that time unknown.
Not a few of the phrases introduced for the first time in the Wycliffe-Purvey Bible are still to be found in our Authorized and Revised Versions. Wycliffe's rendering had its limitations; yet Dr. Robinson contends that, "as a whole" it "did more than any other one thing to create and unify the English Language" ("Where did we get our Bible?" p.130).
