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John Wycliffe was an Oxford-educated theologian and philosopher who dedicated his life to translating the Bible into common English. Born in England in 1328, Wycliffe earned three degrees at Oxford, including a doctorate in theology.
More than a century before Martin Luther, Wycliffe believed in each individual's right to experience God through biblical evidence, to understand Christ through personal familiarity with the Scriptures. The key to such knowledge was having God's Word in the language people could really understand. This was his most deeply felt and personal belief.
Yet making the Bible available to the masses in common English was considered to be unacceptable heresy. This greatly threatened the authority of the Church, and it considered Wycliffe to be dangerous.
After becoming rector of St. Mary's Church of Lutterworth, Wycliffe formed, supervised and inspired a group committed to translating the Bible from Jerome's nearly 1,000-year-old Latin Vulgate, into the vernacular. Completed by his followers after his death, this first English Bible gave rise to other translations, making a standard written English widely known, and thereby helping to make English literature possible.
John Wycliffe died quietly on New Year's Eve, 1384. In 1415, 30 years after his death, the Council of Constance declared Wycliffe a heretic, ordered that his writings be burned, and directed that his bones be exhumed from consecrated ground, burned and cast into the river. They also excommunicated him.
But Wycliffe's doctrines had already spread throughout Europe, influencing John Huss and eventually Martin Luther. Many consider Wycliffe to be the father of modern Protestantism, the morning star of the Reformation.
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