As one of the most brilliant scholars in England during his time, Wycliffe gathered quite a following. He believed that ultimate authority resided in the Bible, not the Pope. Wycliffe was a Reformer before there were Reformers. But even though the Reformation was still 150 years away, the Morningstar of the Reformation began to shine bright in the fourteenth century. The Reformation doctrine of the priesthood of the believer would never stand for only clergy having access to Scripture. Keeping the laity away from Scripture was one of the problems which led to the Reformation.
Translating a Bible into a language other than the approved Latin version could land you in prison or the chopping block. While some desired to translate the Bible into native languages, the church forbade this activity. The problem was that by the Middle Ages, almost nobody knew Latin, including much of the clergy! Large chunks of Scripture, therefore, had never been read nor heard. Since the start of the fifth century, the Latin Vulgate was the official Bible translation for the church in the West. In fact, English didn’t even exist when the Bible was written! So how did the Bible end up in our language? That’s what I hope to explain in this article. The Bible, after all, wasn’t written in English but in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. In this post, we will consider the history of the English Bible. You can check out the first six articles below: This article is part 7 in a nine-part series on how we got our Bible.
0 kommentar(er)
