Chapter 11: The English Bible: From Wycliffe to the King James Version

John Wycliffe and the Lollards

By the late Middle Ages, the Bible in the West was kept in Latin, and church teaching often rested on tradition more than on the text. John Wycliffe (c. 1330–1384), an Oxford theologian, argued that Scripture is the supreme authority and that every Christian should be able to read it. He and his associates produced the first complete English Bible, translated from the Latin Vulgate, in about 1382, with a revision about 1388. The copies were laboriously written by hand, and some 250 manuscripts survive. His followers, called Lollards, travelled and read the Scriptures to the people.

The church authorities reacted. In 1415, the Council of Constance condemned Wycliffe’s teachings, and in 1428, his bones were dug up, burned, and thrown into the River Swift. The Czech reformer Jan Hus, who had been influenced by Wycliffe, was burned at the stake at Constance in 1415. The hostility showed what was at stake: a people who could read the Bible would judge the church by it.

The printing press and the Greek New Testament

About 1454–55, Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz printed the Latin Bible, the first major book in Europe printed from movable type. Scripture could now be reproduced in quantity. In 1516, Erasmus published the first printed Greek New Testament, with a Latin translation, in which he wrote that he longed for the Scriptures to be translated into all tongues, so that the farmer at his plough and the weaver at his loom might sing from them (Erasmus, Paraclesis). The printing of the Greek text opened the way for translations from the original languages.

Luther and Tyndale

Martin Luther, after posting his Ninety-five Theses in 1517, was condemned at the Diet of Worms in 1521 and hidden at the Wartburg castle. There he translated the New Testament into German in about eleven weeks, and it appeared in September 1522; the full German Bible followed in 1534. Luther’s Bible shaped the German language.

William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536) was a scholar of Oxford and Cambridge. When a clergyman objected to his plan, he is reported to have said that if God spared his life, he would make “a boy that driveth the plough” know more of the Scripture than the clergyman (Foxe, Acts and Monuments). Forbidden to translate in England, Tyndale went to the Continent, and his English New Testament, translated from the Greek, was printed at Worms in 1526 and smuggled into England in bales of merchandise. Bishops burned copies; Tyndale continued translating the Old Testament from Hebrew. He was betrayed, imprisoned for more than a year at Vilvoorde, strangled, and burned at the stake in October 1536. His last words, as Foxe reports them, were a prayer: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.”

The prayer was answered almost at once. Within three years, the king authorised an English Bible for every church.

The sixteenth-century English Bibles

(Daniell 2003; Bruce 1984)

The King James Version (1611)

In January 1604, at the Hampton Court Conference, the Puritan scholar John Reynolds asked the newly crowned King James I for a fresh translation. The king agreed, partly because he disliked the notes in the Geneva Bible. The translators were about forty-seven of the best scholars in England, divided into six companies that worked at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge. They were to follow the Bishops’ Bible but to consult the Hebrew and Greek, along with earlier English versions and other translations. The work took seven years and was published in 1611 (Nicolson 2003; Daniell 2003).

Its title page declared that it was “translated out of the original tongues” and “with the former translations diligently compared and revised.” Its translators did not claim that they were making a new Bible. Their preface, The Translators to the Reader, said: “Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel.” They also affirmed that even the plainest English Bible, produced honestly, “containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God” (The Translators to the Reader, 1611).

The King James Version was never formally “authorized” by a royal act or by Parliament, though “Authorized Version” became its name in Britain. It was widely used from about the mid-seventeenth century, and it displaced the Geneva Bible. Printers made many small changes in the first century and a half, and the standard text most people use today is the 1769 Oxford edition, edited by Benjamin Blayney. For some three hundred years, it was the main English Bible of the English-speaking Protestant world, and it formed the language of English prayer, worship, and literature.

The KJV’s strengths are its faithful translation, rhythm, and wide use. It was also made from the best available texts of its day, chiefly the Textus Receptus, and from a fairly small body of manuscripts. Because English has changed since 1611, some words have shifted in meaning or fallen out of use (“conversation” for conduct, “prevent” for go before, “let” for hinder).

After the King James Version

The discovery of older manuscripts and the changes in English led to new translations. Among the principal ones are the English Revised Version (1881–85) and American Standard Version (1901), the Revised Standard Version (1952), the New American Standard Bible (1971), the New International Version (1978), the New King James Version (1982), and the English Standard Version (2001). Translators have followed two main approaches: formal equivalence, which keeps close to the structure of the original words, and dynamic or functional equivalence, which aims at the meaning in natural English. Many believers find it useful to read more than one translation side by side.

Christians differ about whether the KJV is the only Bible that should be used. Some hold to the “King James Only” position, which usually rests on the Textus Receptus and on the English style of the KJV. Most evangelicals hold that the KJV is a magnificent and trustworthy translation, and that other faithful translations are also the Word of God. The KJV translators themselves said that their aim was not to produce an altogether new translation but “to make a good one better” (The Translators to the Reader, 1611), a modest aim that leaves room for further improvement in later generations.

Summary. The English Bible was given at great cost. Wycliffe’s bones were burned, Tyndale was strangled, and Rogers was burned at Smithfield. The King James Version of 1611 gathered the work of those who suffered, and it carried the English-speaking world for centuries.