Heresy

The Lollard Bible

woodcut
A page from the Lollard Bible
Gospel of Mark, Chapter 15, v33-41

But the movement persisted also because of its own strengths. Not least of these was the creation of an English translation of the Bible.

It was not illegal to translate the Bible. The risk, as far as the Catholic Church was concerned, lay not in the act of translation but in the reading of the Bible by the uneducated. The work is filled with passages that require careful judgment. Are the words to be taken literally? Or are the words a parable, in which the events may or may not be literally true but the inner meaning is the point? Christ is the lamb of God, though plainly Christ is not literally a sheep. Some passages can be readily interpreted while others are difficult and subtle.

Why not allow multiple interpretations? This gets back to the general danger of heresy, explained earlier. Moreover, Satan was viewed as an active agent, so any reader of the Bible might not only err honestly but actually be led astray by evil spirits. Even the educated struggled with the Bible, spending a lifetime in study.

I don't like to draw modern parallels, but we take it for granted that it would be unwise for an uneducated person to pick up a medical book and think he can be a doctor. And we would call it criminal if he were actually to set up a practice. We would support sending him to jail. If his unlearned medicine led to hundreds of deaths, we might even support his execution. The analogy cannot be stretched; I pose it in hopes of giving an emotional sense of the issues involved.

Translations had been made before Wyclif. Mostly these were individual books of the Bible translated for wealthy patrons for their personal study, under the guidance of a chaplain. But in exile at Lutterworth, Wyclif and his friends (it's not clear how great was his personal contribution) made a translation of the Bible intended for a wider audience.

The translation is literal, almost word for word, which produced a Bible painful to read, as it reproduced the sentence structure of the Latin.  It may be that this version was intended mainly for the preachers, as a kind of reference work.

After Wyclif's death, a second and more graceful translation was made (around 1395-97), and it was this version that became widely popular and is generally known as the Lollard Bible. This version was clearly aimed at a general readership. Since the Bible was the highest and even sole source of authority for a Lollard, having a version the faithful could read for themselves was vital.