John Wycliffe

John Wycliffe was the most formidable theologian at Oxford in the fourteenth century — and the most dangerous. Long before Luther, he argued that Scripture, not the pope or the councils, is the final authority for the church, and that a corrupt clergy had no claim on the obedience or the wealth they demanded. He called the church back from the trappings of power to the plain word of God.

His boldest act was to make that word available. Convinced that every Christian had the right to read the Bible for themselves, Wycliffe inspired and oversaw the first complete translation of the Scriptures into English. His followers — the 'Lollards' — carried hand-copied portions across England, preaching in the fields and reading the Bible aloud to people who had never heard it in their own language. The institutional church was horrified; possessing an English Bible could now cost a person their life.

Wycliffe also attacked the doctrine of transubstantiation as it was then taught, and questioned indulgences, pilgrimages, and the cult of relics — the very abuses Luther would later name. Protected by powerful patrons, he died of a stroke in 1384, still in his parish. The church was not finished with him: the Council of Constance (1415) condemned him as a heretic, and in 1428 his bones were dug up, burned, and scattered on a river. The act backfired as prophecy — as one chronicler wrote, the river carried his ashes to the sea, and his teaching with them, 'into all the world.'