Church History Series • Lesson 13 • Scripture Arc 3 of 3

The English Bible

From Wycliffe’s hand-copied manuscript to the King James Version — how the Bible came into English at the cost of lives • c. 1380–1611

By PS-Church • Primary-source study

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Where this fits: Lesson 13 of the Pleasant Springs Church History series — last of the three-lesson Scripture arc. Lesson 11 covered the Hebrew Masoretic Text; Lesson 12 covered Jerome’s Latin Vulgate; this lesson covers the English Bible that grew out of both. See the full Series Timeline.

WHY THIS LESSON MATTERS

The Bible on your coffee table in English is the result of one of the most dangerous literary projects in human history. Men were burned alive for translating the words you now read. One translator was strangled and burned at a Belgian castle for rendering Paul’s Greek into the common speech of English plowboys. Another translator’s bones were dug up forty-four years after his death, burned, and scattered in a river, so no trace of him would remain. A king banned Bible reading by anyone below the rank of gentleman. Two queens burned or exiled the men who kept translating. And yet, by 1611, a committee of fifty-four scholars working in Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge had produced the translation that would carry English speech itself for four centuries — the King James Version.

Nearly every familiar English Bible phrase you know — “let there be light,” “my brother’s keeper,” “the salt of the earth,” “the powers that be,” “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” — was coined by a single translator the English crown had executed eighty years before the King James was printed. His name was William Tyndale, and roughly 83% of the King James New Testament is his words, barely retouched.

This is a lesson about how your English Bible arrived — about Wycliffe and the Lollards, Tyndale and the smoke over Vilvoorde, the six King James companies and their fifteen rules, and the phrases Tyndale gave the English language that you still speak without knowing it.

Greek NT (Matt 24:35): ὁ οὐρανὸς καὶ ἡ γῆ παρελεύσεται, οἱ δὲ λόγοι μου οὐ μὴ παρέλθωσιν. Matthew 24:35 (ESV): “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”

PART 1 — BEFORE WYCLIFFE: ENGLISH’S OLDER BIBLE

English Christians had been hearing parts of the Bible in their own tongue for six centuries before Wycliffe. Anglo-Saxon clergy routinely rendered Gospel and Psalter portions into Old English for the people they preached to.

• Cædmon (d. c. 680) — the illiterate cowherd at Whitby who, according to Bede, was given the miraculous gift of composing Scripture paraphrases in Old English verse. His Hymn survives; his longer biblical paraphrases (Genesis, Exodus) survive in later copies.

• Bede (c. 673–735) — the great Northumbrian monk at Jarrow. Bede was translating the Gospel of John into Old English on his deathbed, according to the deeply moving letter by his pupil Cuthbert. He finished the last verse minutes before he died.

• King Alfred the Great (r. 871–899) — translated the Psalter into Old English and prefaced his law code with his own translation of Exodus 20.

• The Wessex Gospels (c. 990) — the first complete Old English translation of the four Gospels. Genesis 1:1 in its language:

Old English • Wessex Gospels & Heptateuch, c. 990

On frymðe gesceop God heofonan and eorðan. Seo eorðe soðlice wæs idel and æmtig, and þeostra wæron ofer þære niwelnesse bradnesse…

“In the beginning God shaped heaven and earth. The earth truly was idle and empty, and darknesses were over the broad face of the deep…” — Genesis 1:1–2, Old English Heptateuch

After the Norman Conquest (1066), French replaced Old English as the language of the ruling class and the church, and the Old English Bible tradition withered. For the next three centuries, “the Bible” in England meant Jerome’s Latin Vulgate (see Lesson 12), read only by the clergy. By 1350, Middle English had emerged as a distinct language — and no Bible existed in it. That was the situation John Wycliffe set out to change.

PART 2 — JOHN WYCLIFFE AND THE FIRST ENGLISH BIBLE (c. 1380–1388)

John Wycliffe (c. 1320–1384)

Oxford scholar, philosopher, theologian • “Morning Star of the Reformation” • Master of Balliol College

Wycliffite BibleLollardsVernacular Scripture

Wycliffe was the most brilliant Oxford theologian of his generation and the most politically protected — an advisor to John of Gaunt, the uncle of the young King Richard II. He used that position to attack what he saw as the corruptions of the late medieval church: clerical wealth, the papacy’s temporal claims, transubstantiation, the cult of saints, and the idea that Scripture was the clergy’s private possession. In a series of treatises (De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae, De Potestate Papae, De Ecclesia) he argued that the Bible is the supreme authority in the church and that every Christian has the right to read it.

“Christen men and wymmen, olde and yonge, shulden studie fast in the Newe Testament, for it is of ful autorite and opyn to undirstonding of simple men, as to the poyntis that be moost nedeful to salvacioun.”— Prologue to the Wycliffe Bible (c. 1388), attributed to John Purvey

Wycliffe’s own hand in the English translation that bears his name is debated; most of the actual work was done by his Oxford colleagues, above all John Purvey and Nicholas of Hereford. The translation was made not from Hebrew or Greek (which no Englishman of the period read) but from the Latin Vulgate.

Two versions:

• The Early Version (c. 1382). Completed while Wycliffe was still alive. Very literal — almost word-for-word Latin word order, painful to read.

• The Later Version (c. 1388–1395). Completed by Purvey after Wycliffe’s death. A much more readable idiomatic English revision with a remarkable prologue explaining the principles of translation. This is the Wycliffe Bible most manuscripts preserve.

Wycliffe died of a stroke on 31 December 1384, still technically in communion with the English church. Forty-four years later the Council of Constance (1415) condemned him as a heretic; in 1428 Pope Martin V ordered his bones exhumed, burned, and cast into the River Swift at Lutterworth. A seventeenth-century English historian wrote the summary: “Thus the brook hath conveyed his ashes into Avon; Avon into Severn; Severn into the narrow seas; and they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wycliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over.”

PART 3 — THE LOLLARDS AND THE BAN (1408–1525)

Wycliffe’s followers were called Lollards (a term of abuse, probably from Middle Dutch lollaerd, “mutterer”). They were largely lay preachers who travelled the English countryside reading Wycliffe Bibles aloud to anyone who would listen. The church reacted with fury.

1401 • Parliament passes De Heretico Comburendo (“on the burning of heretics”), the first English statute authorizing execution by fire for religious heresy. William Sawtrey, a Lollard priest, is burned at Smithfield as its first victim.

1408 • Archbishop Thomas Arundel’s Constitutions of Oxford forbid translating any portion of Scripture into English — and forbid reading any such translation, old or new — without explicit episcopal permission. For the next 125 years, owning an English Bible is prima facie evidence of heresy in England.

1415 • Jan Hus, the Czech reformer who had adopted Wycliffe’s theology, is burned at the Council of Constance. His execution inspires a generation of continental Protestants.

1417–1431 • Ongoing Lollard persecutions in England. Lollard Bibles are hidden, buried, smuggled in and out of houses at night. Roughly 250 Wycliffe Bible manuscripts survive today, often crudely bound or concealed — a measure of how many readers risked them.

What the ban produced. For more than a century, English Christians who wanted to read Scripture in their own language did so knowing they could be killed for it. The dangerous memory of the Wycliffe Bible, carried by tenacious Lollard communities especially in the Midlands, helped prepare the ground for Protestant reception when Tyndale’s New Testaments began to be smuggled in from Germany in 1526. The English Reformation did not create the desire for a vernacular Bible; it answered a hunger that had been kept alive illegally for 125 years.

PART 4 — WILLIAM TYNDALE (c. 1494–1536)

William Tyndale — the plowboy’s translator

Gloucestershire-born • Oxford (Magdalen Hall), Cambridge • translated from Hebrew and Greek • strangled and burned at Vilvoorde Castle, Belgium, 6 October 1536

Hebrew & Greek83% of KJV NTMartyr

Everything we now take for granted about the English Bible we owe to one man: William Tyndale. Born around 1494 in Gloucestershire, educated at Oxford and Cambridge, fluent in eight languages, and possessed of an English prose style that no one in sixteenth-century Europe could match, Tyndale set out to do something no Englishman had done: translate the Scriptures directly from the Hebrew and Greek original tongues into idiomatic, readable English.

The early 1520s gave him the tools. Erasmus’ Greek New Testament (1516) made the original Greek text accessible to European scholars for the first time in a thousand years. Reuchlin and Pagninus were publishing Hebrew grammars. Luther’s German New Testament (1522) had shown that a vernacular Scripture, rendered from the originals, could reshape a nation.

The famous exchange (c. 1522). Tyndale was serving as tutor in the house of Sir John Walsh in Gloucestershire. At a meal with visiting clergy, he argued the case for English Scripture. A learned cleric (Foxe would later name him) replied dismissively:

“We had better be without God’s law than the Pope’s.”— unnamed cleric to Tyndale, c. 1522 (John Foxe, Actes and Monuments)

Tyndale’s response is the single most-quoted line of English Bible history:

“If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost!”— William Tyndale, c. 1522

The translation begins. Tyndale sought licensure from Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall of London in 1523. Tunstall refused. Realizing that no English bishop would authorize an English translation, Tyndale fled to the continent in 1524, never to return.

1525 • A first attempt at a New Testament is printed at Cologne. Raided by authorities; only one fragment (Matthew 1:1–22:12) survives, now in the British Library.

1526 • Tyndale’s first complete New Testament is printed at Worms by Peter Schöffer. Roughly 3,000 small octavo copies are smuggled across the Channel in cloth bales and flour sacks. Bishop Tunstall buys up every copy he can find and burns them at St. Paul’s Cross. The proceeds from Tunstall’s book-burning campaign, ironically, fund Tyndale’s next printing.

1530 • Tyndale’s Pentateuch is published at Antwerp, translated directly from Hebrew — a Jewish-taught Englishman producing the first direct Hebrew-to-English rendering of Moses’ books.

1531 • Jonah appears. Probably the historical books of the Old Testament (Joshua–2 Chronicles) were translated next but unpublished at the time of his arrest; they survive in Matthew’s Bible (1537).

1534 • Tyndale publishes his revised New Testament, the mature form of his greatest work. This is the text King James will use as its base for 83% of its New Testament.

1535 • Tyndale is betrayed by an English spy, Henry Phillips, in Antwerp. He is arrested and imprisoned in Vilvoorde Castle, six miles north of Brussels, under the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

6 October 1536 • After 500 days in Vilvoorde, Tyndale is strangled at the stake and his body burned. His last words, reported by a bystander, became the single most prophetic sentence of Reformation England:

“Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.”— William Tyndale, last words at Vilvoorde, 6 October 1536 (Foxe)

Within three years, by royal decree, every parish church in England would be required to display an English Bible. Henry VIII had changed his mind.

PART 5 — THE PARADE OF ENGLISH BIBLES (1535–1568)

In the thirty-three years after Tyndale’s execution, England produced six major English Bibles in rapid succession, each building on the last.

Bible	Year	Translator	Significance
Coverdale Bible	1535	Miles Coverdale	First complete printed English Bible. Translated from Latin and German (Luther) with reference to Tyndale. Dedicated to Henry VIII.
Matthew’s Bible	1537	“Thomas Matthew” = John Rogers	Essentially Tyndale’s NT and Pentateuch + Tyndale’s unpublished historical books (Joshua–2 Chron) + Coverdale for the rest. The first full English Bible printed with royal license. “Thomas Matthew” was a pseudonym to avoid associating it with the executed Tyndale.
The Great Bible	1539	Miles Coverdale (commissioned by Thomas Cromwell)	A folio revision of Matthew’s Bible, with further Vulgate consultation. Placed in every parish church in England by royal decree 1538–39. Called “Great” because of its physical size. The version chained to church lecterns — the first Bible many English peasants ever saw.
The Geneva Bible	1560	Marian exiles at Geneva (William Whittingham et al.)	The first English Bible translated by scholarly committee; the first in Roman type rather than black-letter; the first with verse numbers throughout. Famous for its extensive Calvinist marginal notes. The Bible of Shakespeare, John Donne, the Pilgrim Fathers, and Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army. Wildly popular — more than 140 editions in the next eighty years.
The Bishops’ Bible	1568	English bishops under Archbishop Matthew Parker	An Elizabethan establishment response to the Calvinist Geneva. Adopted as the official pulpit Bible of the Church of England. Theologically moderate; never as well-loved as the Geneva. Will become the explicit starting text for the KJV.
Douay-Rheims Bible	NT 1582, OT 1609–10	Gregory Martin and English Catholic exiles at Rheims and Douay	The Catholic answer: an English translation from the Vulgate, prepared by exiled English Catholic scholars on the continent. Strongly Latinate vocabulary (“supersubstantial bread,” “concupiscence”). Influenced the KJV more than is often admitted, especially in the Old Testament wisdom books.

A political footnote. Between the Great Bible (1539) and the Bishops’ Bible (1568), English Bible-reading was interrupted by Mary I (r. 1553–1558), who executed nearly 300 Protestants in an attempt to reverse the Reformation. John Rogers — translator of Matthew’s Bible — was the first Marian martyr, burned at Smithfield in February 1555. Thomas Cranmer, architect of the English Bible policy under Edward VI, was burned at Oxford in March 1556. Many Protestant scholars fled to the continent; those who sheltered at Geneva produced the Geneva Bible. When Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558 and reversed her sister’s policy, it was the Geneva Bible that returned with the exiles.

PART 6 — THE KING JAMES VERSION (1604–1611)

Hampton Court Conference, January 1604. Three months after James Stuart (already King James VI of Scotland) was crowned King James I of England, he summoned bishops and Puritan leaders to Hampton Court to address church grievances. Near the end of the conference, a Puritan leader named John Reynolds, President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, proposed a new Bible translation — partly because the Geneva Bible’s marginal notes included some James thoroughly disliked (Geneva Exodus 1:19 had defended midwives who disobeyed Pharaoh as a pattern for subjects disobeying kings).

James approved. By July 1604 Archbishop Richard Bancroft had drafted fifteen rules for the translators, the most important of which were:

Bancroft’s fifteen rules (excerpts):

Rule 1: “The ordinary Bible read in the Church, commonly called the Bishops’ Bible, to be followed, and as little altered as the original will permit.”
Rule 3: “The old ecclesiastical words to be kept, as the word church not to be translated congregation.” (A pointed rejection of Tyndale’s deliberate choice.)
Rule 6: “No marginal notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew or Greek words.” (An answer to the Geneva.)
Rule 14: “These translations to be used when they agree better with the text than the Bishops’ Bible, viz. Tyndale’s, Matthew’s, Coverdale’s, Whitchurche’s, Geneva.” (An honest admission of the chain.)

Six companies, fifty-four scholars. The translators were organized into six “companies” at three locations. About 47 actually did the work; all were Church of England clergy or scholars; most were fellows of Oxford or Cambridge colleges; several were the greatest Hebraists or Hellenists in Europe at the time.

First Westminster Company

OT: Genesis – 2 Kings. Director: Lancelot Andrewes (later Bishop of Winchester, considered one of the most learned men in England).

First Cambridge Company

OT: 1 Chronicles – Song of Solomon. Director: Edward Lively, the king’s Hebraist.

First Oxford Company

OT: Isaiah – Malachi. Director: John Harding, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford.

Second Oxford Company

NT: Gospels, Acts, Revelation. Director: Thomas Ravis, Dean of Christ Church, later Bishop of London.

Second Westminster Company

NT: Romans – Jude. Director: William Barlow, Dean of Chester.

Second Cambridge Company

Apocrypha: Tobit – 2 Maccabees. Director: John Duport, Master of Jesus College, Cambridge.

The process. Each scholar in a company translated his assigned portion independently. The company then met to compare and merge their work. Finished portions were sent to the other five companies for review. Disputes were referred to a general meeting of twelve delegates (two from each company) in 1610 at Stationers’ Hall, London. Finally the whole work was given a final editorial pass by Miles Smith and Thomas Bilson; Smith wrote the preface (“The Translators to the Reader”), one of the best defenses of Bible translation ever written, though rarely printed in modern KJV editions.

Publication. The first printing appeared in early 1611 from Robert Barker’s press in London. Two variant first editions exist — the so-called “He Bible” (Ruth 3:15 “and he went into the city”) and “She Bible” (Ruth 3:15 “and she went into the city”). No one knows for certain which printing was first; scholars lean toward the “He.”

Why it still sounds the way it does. The KJV uses English that was already slightly archaic when it was printed — deliberately so. Its translators were working toward the cadences of public liturgical reading, not everyday speech. “Thou” and “ye” distinguished singular and plural second-person where modern English does not. Verb endings in “-eth” (“he speaketh”) preserved subject-verb agreement with Greek precision. The long, balanced sentences matched Hebrew parallelism beautifully. The result was a translation whose dignity carried it across three and a half centuries, through two empires’ worth of English-speaking churches, and into the common memory of English itself.

PART 7 — WHAT TYNDALE GAVE ENGLISH

Roughly 83% of the KJV New Testament and about 76% of the Old Testament portions Tyndale completed are his words, unchanged or only lightly retouched. When we speak of “biblical English” we are largely speaking of one Englishman’s prose style that happened to be adopted, eighty years after his execution, as the voice of our Scripture. Tyndale coined, into English, phrases we now use without noticing:

Tyndale’s enduring English

“Let there be light” (Gen 1:3)
“Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen 4:9)
“The land of the living” (Job 28:13)
“A man after his own heart” (1 Sam 13:14 / Acts 13:22)
“The salt of the earth” (Matt 5:13)
“Seek, and ye shall find” (Matt 7:7)
“Signs of the times” (Matt 16:3)
“With God all things are possible” (Matt 19:26)
“The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” (Matt 26:41)
“Eat, drink, and be merry” (Luke 12:19)
“Fight the good fight” (1 Tim 6:12)
“The powers that be” (Rom 13:1)
“The patience of Job” (James 5:11)
“Scapegoat” — Tyndale coined the word for Lev 16.
“Passover” — Tyndale coined this word too.
“Atonement” — and this.
“Mercy seat” — and this.
“Beautiful” — Tyndale may have been the first to use it in English at all.

Nearly every modern English translation — including the one you will read tomorrow morning — still inherits its vocabulary from this vocabulary. “Salt of the earth” has not been improved upon since 1526. Neither has “let there be light.” When modern translators try to render these phrases differently, readers notice immediately; the KJV and its Tyndale substrate are still, in many ways, the default register.

PART 8 — AFTER 1611

1611–1769 • Successive editions of the KJV — most notably Benjamin Blayney’s 1769 Oxford edition — correct printer’s errors and modernize spelling. The 1769 text is essentially what is sold today as the KJV.

1881–1885 • The Revised Version (RV) is published in England, the first official revision of the KJV. The ERV is the grandfather of every modern literal English translation.

1901 • The American Standard Version (ASV), the American cousin of the RV.

1946–1952 • The Revised Standard Version (RSV) and a family of later descendants (NRSV 1989, ESV 2001, CSB 2017).

1978 • The New International Version (NIV) — the best-selling English Bible of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Today • Dozens of English translations exist, each optimizing for different readers. All of them, directly or indirectly, descend from Tyndale. The translation lineage has not been broken since 1526.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR US

• Your English Bible cost someone his life. Tyndale was executed so that you could read Romans in English. Wycliffe’s bones were burned and scattered. Rogers was burned at Smithfield. Hus was burned at Constance. When we leave our Bibles unread, we show contempt not only for the Word but for the witnesses who gave us the words.

• Vernacular Scripture is a gift Jesus intended. Pentecost (Acts 2) says the gospel speaks every language. Tyndale’s plowboy-argument is a Pentecost argument. There is no room in Christianity for the view that the Bible belongs only to an educated clergy. The Holy Spirit speaks Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Old English, Middle English, King James English, and modern English — all of them, at once, to his people.

• The committee is a gift too. The KJV was produced by fifty-four scholars who disagreed with each other, met in companies, reviewed each other’s work, and submitted their private preferences to a corporate judgement. That model — a convocation of competent, humble scholars bound by agreed rules — is still the best way we know to translate Scripture. Every serious modern English translation (RSV, NIV, ESV, NRSV, CSB, NASB) is produced by the same pattern.

• No translation is the final word. The Hebrew and Greek are the inspired originals. Every English Bible — including the King James — is a faithful human rendering of them. To prefer a translation to its source, or to insist that one English version alone is inspired, is to misunderstand what translation is. The translators of 1611 did not claim this; neither should we.

Greek NT (Rom 13:1 in Tyndale 1526): “Let every soule submit him silfe unto the auctorite of the hyer powers.” Romans 13:1 (ESV): “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities.”

Tyndale’s “the powers that be” (Rom 13:1, 1526) is still in English idiom 500 years later. Most modern readers have no idea whose words they are quoting.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Tyndale’s plowboy quote was a provocative claim: that an English farmer with a Bible could know more Scripture than a Latin-trained priest. Does that principle still apply? What are its limits?

2. Archbishop Arundel’s ban on English Bibles (1408) was a church act, not a civil one. What does that tell us about the church’s relationship to Scripture when the church feels threatened?

3. Wycliffe translated from the Vulgate; Tyndale translated from Hebrew and Greek. What changed between 1382 and 1526 to make the second possible, and what did it cost?

4. The KJV committee was given fifteen rules and told to start from the Bishops’ Bible. Could a committee today produce a Bible that lasts four centuries? What would have to be true for it to happen?

5. Read aloud Tyndale’s phrases in the gift-list section. How many did you use in speech last week without thinking of the Bible?

6. “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.” What prayer of yours, if answered the way Tyndale’s was, would change something large over the next three years?

CLOSING PRAYER

Lord of every language, we thank you for Wycliffe at Lutterworth, for Purvey with his pen, for Hus at Constance, for Tyndale at Vilvoorde, for Rogers at Smithfield, for Cranmer at Oxford — for every name we cannot remember who risked being burned so that a plowboy could read your word in his own speech. Thank you for the fifty-four scholars of Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster who produced the King James. Thank you for the long chain of translators that has kept the English Bible alive for six hundred years. Forgive our neglect of what cost them everything. Open our Bibles tomorrow morning as though we were the first plowboy to see a page of them. Through Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, who still speaks our language. Amen.