John Wycliffe

John Wycliffe(1320-1384) was a theologian and early proponent of reform in the Roman
Catholic Church during the 14th century. He initiated the first translation of the Bible into the
English language and is considered the main precursor of the Protestant Reformation. Wycliffe
was born at Ipreswell (modern Hipswell), Yorkshire, England, between 1320 and 1330; and he
died at Lutterworth (near Leicester) December.
John Wycliffe, "was an English preacher, writer and Bible
translator who has been called "the morning star of the Reformation." He preached and wrote
against various doctrines and practices of the Church of Rome, translated the Bible into
English, and sent itinerant preachers (later called Lollards) throughout England to bring to the
common people the the Word of God and the message of salvation through Jesus Christ,who
was lived almost 200 years before the Reformation, but his beliefs and teachings closely match
those of Luther, Calvin and other reformers. As a man ahead of his time, historians have called
Wycliffe the"Morning star of the Reformation."
The work of wycliffe, a prose writer only, and a 'scared' and philosophical prose
writer , is less novel, less attractive, but not less important. Little, despite his fame and the
violent partisanship for and against him, is really known of the auther. we do not know when
John Wycliffe was born or where, though the probabilities connect his birth with the place of
Wycliffe-on-rees and the time of 1320-1325. He was certainly master od Balliol(a northern
college) at Oxford, in 1360;and by the confession of his opponents,was a recognized expert in
theology and scholastic philosophy.
The english work of Wycliffe and the Wyclifites (for a large part of the university of
Oxford was saturated with his doctorine, and the complete body of Wyclifian literature is
rather an earlier 'Tracts for the Times'than the work of any one man) consists on the one hand
of a new and complete translation of the Bible, on the other of a considerable mass of tracts
and sermons inteded for popular consumption.
Wyclif is chiefly remembered and honored for his role in Bible translating. In the
early 1380's he led the movement for a translation of the Bible into English, and two complete
translations (one much more idiomatic than the other) were made at his instigation. (How
much of the translating he did himself, if any, remains uncertain.) He proposed the creation of
a new religious order of Poor Preachers who would preach to the people from the English Bible.
Today, the Wyclif Foundation, named in his honor, is committed to translating the Bible into
all the languages spoken anywhere in the world.Sources: (1) Every Man's Book of
Saints (Mowbray's, London and Oxford, 1981); (2) Encyclopedia Britannica; (3) The New
Catholic Encyclopedia; (4) H B Workman, John Wyclif: a Study of the English Medieval Church,
2 vol, 1926. (5) George Saintsbury,A Short History of English Literature