As I wrote about in a recent post (see *First Millenium Popes* below, October 7), the popes around the end of the first millenium were miserably corrupt. Fat cats in purple robes studded with blinding arrays of priceless gems, rolling around shag pile rugs with the finest foods oozing from their piggish jaws, in ecstasies of gluttony. They told the masses that it was only through them and their secret knowledge and intimacy with God that the common *bogmen* had any chance of entering the pearly gates of Heaven. Their immensely bloated bulks moved laboriously through the masses, demanding money from the sick and near-death, the extreme poor, that they may purchase their way into paradise; a sure escape from this miserable earthly existence.
It was in these times, around 1378, that a man named John Wycliffe challenged the popes and the Church’s authority with the simple, but explosive, assertion that no bishop, no clergyman and no pope had the power to save a man’s soul, or to grant the keys to Heaven. The Church – these popes and their hierarchy – had the monopoly on Salvation and it was only through them that one could be saved. The Bible was only known in Latin, and only the fat cats of the Church knew Latin and thus had a monopoly on the Word of God, and indeed Christ’s Word. Wycliffe wanted to translate the Bible into English so that the common man could read it, and this posed the greatest threat to the fat cats of the Church because this would essentially strip the power from them: “The Church had no desire to share the secrets of its trade. Its monopoly of faith was bolstered by its near monopoly of Latin. The common people were dependent on the clergy to interpret the gospel for them, and the Church feared that an English version would reduce its prestige and open its dogmas to question.” ...
“Wycliffe died of a stroke at Lutterworth on New Year’s Eve, 1384, some eight years before the translation of the Vulgate into the English dialect of the Midlands was completed. Although it was largely the work of his followers, he was its inspiration, and its rendering from dusty Latin into vivid prose gave the English their first direct contact with the word of God in their own language” ...
“The impact of the translated Scripture was strong and immediate. It was said that a man would give a cartload of hay for a few handwritten pages of St Paul, and the Church took vigorous steps to suppress both the English Bible and Wycliffe’s following.” ...
"Fresh translations, and the use of any made “in the times of John Wyclif or since”, were forbidden in 1407. Wycliffe’s translation made the Scriptures the “property of the masses,” noted Knighton, a leading observer of the day, and the Bible was now “more open to the laity, and even to women who were able to read, than formerly it had been even to the scholarly and most learned of the clergy.” Knighton did not find this admirable. To him it meant that “the Gospel pearl is thrown before swine and trodden underfoot . . . and become a joke, and this precious gem of the clergy has been turned into the sport of the laity. . . “
[quotes from *The Faith: A History of Christianity* by Brian Moynahan (Pimlico, 2003)]
