The English Witness

Scripture in the Common Language

For English-speaking Christians, the Bible we read today is a direct result of a long and hard-fought struggle. It’s embedded in the language we use in our daily prayers, in the hymns we sing, and in the very words we read. The English Bible didn’t appear by accident or as a gift from the Church—it came through years of conflict, courage, and immense cost, paid by those who believed God’s Word should be accessible to all.

Long before English Protestantism existed as a category, there were believers who insisted on a simple conviction: if God has spoken, His people must be able to hear Him in their own language.

That conviction was treated as rebellion.

John Wycliffe and the First English Light

In the late fourteenth century, John Wycliffe stood at the heart of England’s most prestigious intellectual center: Oxford University. He was not an outsider, not a fringe agitator, and not a political revolutionary. He was a respected scholar, a priest, and a careful theologian—deeply immersed in Scripture, the Church Fathers, and the theological debates of his day.

What troubled Wycliffe was not disorder in the streets, but disorder in the soul of the Church.

As a pastor and teacher, he watched ordinary Christians recite prayers in a language they did not understand, receive teachings they could not evaluate, and submit to spiritual authority without access to the very Word that claimed to ground that authority. Forgiveness was mediated through systems they could not examine. Salvation was explained through categories they could not verify. The Bible—when it was quoted at all—was filtered through layers of clerical interpretation.

This burdened him.

Over time, Wycliffe realized that the problem ran deeper than abuse or excess. He became convinced that the crisis facing the Church was not merely moral corruption or clerical excess, but epistemological captivity: God had spoken, yet His people could not hear Him directly. Scripture had become the possession of an institution rather than the nourishment of the flock.

His conclusion was as simple as it was explosive:

the Bible must be available to the people in their own language.

Wycliffe defended vernacular Scripture on explicitly biblical grounds: Christ and the apostles taught the people in their common speech, not in a sacred language reserved for elites. If the gospel was first given in the language of fishermen and farmers, he argued, then the Church had no right to withhold it from ordinary believers.

At the time, this was not viewed as pastoral care. It was viewed as insubordination.

There was no printing press to soften the risk. An English Bible had to be copied by hand—page by page, word by word. Each copy represented months of labor and immense danger. To own such a manuscript could result in imprisonment. To distribute it could lead to execution. To teach from it was to place oneself outside the protection of the Church.

And yet, Wycliffe pressed forward.

Under his influence, portions—and eventually the whole—of Scripture were translated into Middle English. These manuscripts began to circulate quietly among students, clergy sympathetic to reform, and ordinary believers hungry for truth. The Bible was no longer only heard in fragments; it could now be read, weighed, remembered.

This single act shattered an assumption that had governed medieval Christianity: that Scripture required institutional permission to be understood. And once Scripture was placed back into the hands of the people, other questions inevitably followed.

Wycliffe’s theology continued to develop alongside this conviction—that Scripture itself must stand as the final authority for the Church. He openly challenged doctrines that could not be grounded clearly in Scripture—papal supremacy, the absolute authority of ecclesiastical tradition, and eventually the doctrine of transubstantiation. He insisted that Christ alone was the true head of the Church, and that Scripture—not hierarchy—was the final court of appeal.

Predictably, opposition followed.

Church authorities condemned his teachings. His writings were censured. Councils denounced him. Yet due to political protections and the complexity of his position within English society, Wycliffe himself was spared execution during his lifetime. He died in 1384, officially at peace—but under condemnation.

The story did not end there.

Decades after his death, the Church ordered his remains exhumed. His bones were dug up, burned, and scattered into a river—an act meant to erase his memory and warn future dissenters. Instead, it became a symbol: the man could be silenced, but the Word he released could not.

Wycliffe’s followers—the Lollards—would carry his translation, his theology, and his courage into the next century, at the cost of their lives. What began in Oxford lecture halls moved into homes, fields, and marketplaces. Scripture was no longer confined to stone walls.

Later generations would rightly call Wycliffe the “Morning Star of the Reformation”—not because he completed the work of reform, but because he saw its first light while the rest of Europe still lay in darkness.

Wycliffe never saw the Reformation.

But the Reformation never would have happened without him.

He lit the first English light—not by shouting, not by rebellion, but by insisting that God’s voice belongs to God’s people.

And once that light was lit, it could not be put out.

The Lollards: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Cost

Those who carried Wycliffe’s teaching beyond the university and into daily life came to be known as Lollards—a term originally used in mockery by the Roman Catholic authorities to portray them as unlearned murmurers or religious nuisances. In reality, they were neither agitators nor revolutionaries. They were ordinary believers.

They were craftsmen, farmers, household servants, tradesmen, and women. Many could not read fluently, yet they memorized large portions of Scripture that others read aloud to them. They gathered in kitchens, barns, and fields. They repeated the words of Christ quietly, carefully, knowing that a single informant could cost them everything.

Their beliefs were simple, but they were disruptive.

They held that Scripture belonged to the whole Church, not to a clerical class.

They confessed Christ alone as mediator, rejecting any system that placed human authority between the sinner and the Savior.

They believed conscience was bound to God’s Word, not to ecclesiastical decree.

These convictions did not remain abstract. They shaped daily life.

Lollards refused oaths they believed Christ had forbidden. They questioned prayers offered in languages the people could not understand. They resisted the veneration of images and relics. They spoke of forgiveness as flowing from Christ, not purchased or mediated through institutional channels.

For this, they were not debated—they were pursued.

By the early fifteenth century, English law had hardened against them. Statutes authorized the search of homes. Vernacular Scriptures were seized and burned. Teaching from Wycliffe’s writings became a criminal offense. To be found with an English portion of the Bible could result in imprisonment—or death.

Interrogations by Roman Catholic church courts—often followed by handover to civil authorities—followed a familiar pattern. Believers were pressured to recant publicly. Some, under fear or exhaustion, complied. Others refused.

Those interrogations were not vague or exploratory. Roman Catholic bishops and church courts questioned suspects on specific points of conscience: whether they possessed Scripture in English, whether they denied the teaching that the bread and wine of the Mass literally become the body and blood of Christ, whether they rejected papal authority, whether they believed priests could forgive sins, and whether they had taught others from Scripture without ecclesiastical permission. These were not abstract theological inquiries; they were tests of submission.

If a person recanted, penalties were often imposed to mark and restrain them—public acts of penance, visible signs of shame worn on the body, and strict prohibitions against teaching or possessing Scripture. If they refused, questioning intensified. Surviving episcopal registers show that examinations were frequently repeated over days or weeks, accompanied by pressure to name other believers, demands for public renunciation, and escalating threats of imprisonment or death.

The aim was not merely to gather information, but to break resistance. What was sought was submission of conscience.

Those who refused paid dearly.

They were imprisoned for years without trial.

They were driven from their homes and separated from their families.

Some were burned alive—publicly, as a warning.

And yet the Word continued to move.

Manuscripts were hidden in walls. Passages were memorized and passed orally. A verse learned in one village reappeared months later in another. Suppression slowed the witness, but it did not extinguish it.

This is how sackcloth testimony survives—not through prominence, not through protection, but through conviction that obedience to God is worth the cost.

The Lollards left no monuments.

They held no councils.

They issued no decrees.

But they carried Scripture into the bloodstream of English Christianity, and it remained there—waiting—until the light would break again in a later generation.

William Tyndale and the Price of Scripture

If John Wycliffe lit the first English flame, William Tyndale carried it into the modern world—and paid for it with his life.

Tyndale lived at a turning point in history. The Renaissance had reopened access to the original biblical languages. Greek manuscripts of the New Testament circulated once more. Hebrew studies revived. For the first time in centuries, Scripture could be tested directly against the apostolic text rather than filtered exclusively through the Latin Vulgate.

Tyndale took that opportunity with deadly seriousness.

He became convinced that God’s Word must not remain trapped behind layers of Roman Catholic tradition or a sacred language inaccessible to ordinary people. Scripture, he believed, must be translated directly—from Greek and Hebrew—into the living speech of the nation. Not for novelty. Not for rebellion. But so that God’s voice could be heard clearly by those who were expected to obey it.

That conviction hardened into resolve when Tyndale encountered resistance from English clergy. He later recalled disputing with a learned churchman who declared, “We were better to be without God’s laws than the Pope’s.” Tyndale’s reply was not measured diplomacy, but prophetic defiance:

“I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life, before many years I will cause a boy that drives the plough to know more of the Scripture than he does.”

Those words were not rhetorical.

They were a death sentence.

The Catholic English authorities would not permit such a translation. To render Scripture into English without authorization was not merely ecclesiastical disobedience—it was treason. Church and crown were bound together by law, and to undermine Rome’s control over Scripture was to destabilize the kingdom itself.

Tyndale was forced to flee.

He lived as a fugitive across Europe—Hamburg, Cologne, Worms, Antwerp—moving constantly, hiding from informers, working in borrowed rooms, dependent on sympathetic merchants and reformers. He slept lightly. He trusted few. His life was marked by isolation, cold necessity, and the knowledge that capture meant death.

There was no safety net.

And yet, in exile, he worked.

Using Erasmus’ Greek New Testament and drawing from Hebrew sources, Tyndale translated with a precision and clarity that would forever shape the English language. His prose was not ornate or academic. It was muscular, direct, unforgettable.

Let there be light.

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

Fight the good fight.

The English Bible did not merely become readable—it became memorable.

The first printed English New Testaments were smuggled into England hidden in bales of cloth, sacks of grain, and false-bottomed barrels. Merchants risked prison. Sailors risked execution. Ordinary believers risked their lives simply by touching the pages.

Church authorities responded with fury. Public burnings of Tyndale’s New Testament were staged—sometimes funded by bishops who believed they were erasing heresy. Ironically, those burnings only increased demand. The money used to destroy copies often financed the printing of more.

The Word spread faster than it could be contained.

For years, Tyndale lived this way—writing, translating, hiding, praying—until he was betrayed. A man named Henry Phillips, posing as a friend, gained his trust in Antwerp. One evening, Phillips led him out of a safe house. At a narrow alleyway, Phillips stepped aside.

Imperial officers stepped forward.

Tyndale was arrested and imprisoned in a cold stone cell for more than a year. His health deteriorated. His isolation was complete. From prison, he wrote one of the most heartbreaking letters in Christian history, requesting warmer clothing, a candle, and his Hebrew Bible and grammar so he could continue studying Scripture.

Even awaiting execution, he wanted to know God’s Word more clearly.

In October 1536, William Tyndale was led out to die. He was tied to a stake. A rope was placed around his neck. Before the fire was lit, the executioner tightened the cord and strangled him—slowly, deliberately—until his body went limp. Then the fire was set.

His body was burned.

His work was not.

His final words were not a curse, nor a plea for mercy. They were a prayer:

“Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.”

And God powerfully answered that prayer. Within a year, an English Bible—drawing heavily from Tyndale’s translation—was authorized for public use. Within decades, his phrasing would shape the King James Version. By many estimates, more than eighty percent of its New Testament rests directly on Tyndale’s work.

Rome called his translation heresy.

England called his work treason.

God used it as an inheritance for His people.

Translation as Threat

What made English Scripture so dangerous was not theology alone—it was access.

Once people could read the Bible for themselves:

• indulgence systems could be questioned
• clerical mediation could be tested
• tradition could be weighed against text

Translation of the Bible stripped religious power of its monopoly on meaning.

This is why Bible translation itself was condemned—not merely certain interpretations, but the act of placing Scripture into the hands of the people. Roman Catholic authorities repeatedly condemned unauthorized vernacular translations as spiritually dangerous, socially destabilizing, and even demonic.

The threat was never disorder.

The threat was discernment.

Why This Witness Still Matters

This chapter of history explains why English-speaking Christianity looks the way it does. Your Bible. Your language. Your freedom to read Scripture openly. None of it was inevitable.

What many believers now experience as ordinary Christian life—opening the Word, testing teaching, gathering freely—was once treated as criminal. Scripture was not returned to the people by institutional generosity, but by the courage of believers who refused to let God’s voice remain locked behind language and authority.

Wycliffe challenged the captivity of Scripture. The Lollards carried it quietly into homes and fields. Tyndale gave his life to place it into the hands of the nation.

They were not revolutionaries.

They did not seek disorder.

They sought understanding.

In that sense, this was not merely a battle for translation. It was a battle for testimony. Once Scripture was heard clearly, conscience could no longer be easily controlled. Once the Word spoke directly, other questions inevitably followed.

And that is where this study must pause.

Because when Scripture finally returned openly to England, it did not usher in peace. It provoked a sharper test—one no longer about whether the Bible could be read, but whether it would be surrendered once restored. Even after Wycliffe, the Lollards, and Tyndale, the cost of conscience would rise higher still. The next generation would face a different trial altogether—and that cost will soon be revealed.

This has been a weighty and emotional study. Therefore, it is fitting to close with words we’ve seen many times throughout these studies—grounded in the spirit Christ commanded: marked by love (John 13:34–35), peacefully submitting to governing authorities as far as conscience allows (Romans 13:1–2), and reserving all vengeance for God alone (Romans 12:19).