Battle of the Bibles - Present Truth

Wycliffe's unpretentious priests gladly. The scholasticism of Rome with its penchant for
allegorising away the Scriptures began to be replaced with faith in Jesus Christ as the
one and only Saviour and Mediator between man and God (1 Timothy 2:5, 6).
Wycliffe's intense interest in expounding the Scriptures eventually led him to take
the prestigious degree of Doctor of Divinity. He now felt competent to undertake the
ambitious and unheard of task of making the Bible available to all by translating it into
English. Being highly skilled in Latin, he set about translating the Roman Catholic Latin
Vulgate Bible. He worked on the New Testament for over ten years, completing it in
1380. At once an enthusiastic bank of copyists set about the task of hand-copying
hundreds of Bibles which were soon eagerly received by the lower and upper-class
alike.
This was too much for the authoritarian Church of Rome. The last thing the
papacy wanted was to have the people being led by the Holy Spirit to an understanding
of Bible truths. Successive attempts to stifle Wycliffe and his work were thwarted by
those who had seen the light of reform. But the great strain on the pioneer Reformer
gradually took its toll. At the age of sixty, Dr. John Wycliffe succumbed to a stroke. He
was not to know that future events would confer on him the illustrious title: "The Morning
Star of the Reformation". Mercifully, he did not witness the terrible persecutions to which
his countrymen would be subjected, nor the intense anger of Rome which would seek to
expiate its wrath by committing the sacrilege of digging up his bones for public burning
thirty years after his death!
As the missionary work of the Lollards continued expanding after Wycliffe's
death, it seemed that the reform of the Catholic Church in England was imminent. But
sinister CounterReformation forces were at work. What the church could not do by
persuasion, it would seek to carry out by using the powers of the state. In 1390 a motion
was made in the Upper House of Parliament to have all copies of Wycliffe's Bible seized.
But the Duke of Lancaster indignantly exclaimed, "Are we then the very dregs of
humanity, that we cannot possess the laws of our religion in our own language?" (ibid
Chapter VIII).
Rome does not give in easily. By the dawn of the fifteenth century, the Primate of
the Catholic Church, Archbishop Arundel, connived with the new King, Henry IV for
papal support in return for the outlawing of the Lollards. In no time, a pious priest who
refused adoration of the cross, became the first of a long list of English martyrs. William
Sowtree was his name. He was burnt alive at Smithfield in 1401.
The famous French chronicler of the Reformation, H.J. Merle D'Aubigne, D.D.,
gives us an inkling of the hatred exhibited by the papacy against the Bible:
"Encouraged by this act of faith - this auto da fe - the clergy drew up articles
known as the `Constitution of Arundel', which forbade the reading of the Bible, and styled
the pope, 'Not a mere man, but a true God "' (ibid Chapter IX).
But even as Wycliffe's ashes were cast into the River Swift at Lutterworth, to flow
eventually into the bosom of the restless sea, so his seeds of reform were to reach out
far from the shores of England, eventually to rock Roman Catholicism to its very
foundations.
But the time was not yet. God's divine programme was yet to be revealed. Vital to
the success of His plan was the restoration of His Word in unadulterated form. Wycliffe's
Bible, a bold translation of Rome's Latin Vulgate, was in effect an English version of
Jerome's fourth-century Bible. This was a different Bible from that used by people like
the Waldenses and Albigenses who had received and guarded their scriptures from
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