Long before the King James Bible, one Oxford scholar insisted every plowboy deserved Scripture in his own tongue — and paid for it, even after death.
Did you know? 🤔 The first complete English translation of the Bible was produced by John Wycliffe and his followers in the 1380s, nearly 200 years before the Douay-Rheims and King James Versions. Wycliffe’s translation was so controversial that 44 years after his death, church authorities exhumed his bones, burned them, and scattered the ashes in a river!
John Wycliffe never lived to see the King James Bible, the Geneva Bible, or any of the English translations that would eventually become household names. He died in 1384, over two hundred years before any of them existed. But it was Wycliffe, working with a circle of followers at Oxford in the 1380s, who produced the very first complete translation of the Bible into English — the language ordinary people in his own country actually spoke.
At the time, this was a radical, even dangerous, idea. The Church held that Scripture belonged in Latin, accessible only through the clergy who had been trained to read it. Wycliffe believed something different: that every believer, however humble, had the right to hear God’s own words in a language they could understand for themselves. His conviction was memorably put by his followers in exactly those terms — that even a boy who drove the plow ought to be able to know the Scriptures as well as the learned clergy did. It was a threat to the entire structure of religious authority as it then stood, and the Church did not take it lightly.
Wycliffe died of a stroke in 1384, apparently in peace, while celebrating Mass. But his teachings and his translation kept spreading through England for decades after his death, carried by a movement of followers known as the Lollards. That continued influence proved intolerable to church authorities. In 1415, more than thirty years after his death, the Council of Constance formally condemned Wycliffe as a heretic on 260 separate counts and ordered his writings burned and his remains dug up and removed from consecrated ground. It took another thirteen years for that order to actually be carried out — but in 1428, forty-four years after he died, Wycliffe’s bones were exhumed from their grave in Lutterworth, burned to ash, and cast into the small River Swift that ran nearby.
It is one of the strangest acts of posthumous punishment in church history — an attempt to erase a man so completely that even his bones would not be permitted to rest. And yet the very image became, in time, a kind of parable. The English chronicler Thomas Fuller later wrote that the Swift carried Wycliffe’s ashes into the River Avon, the Avon into the Severn, the Severn out into the narrow seas, and from there into the wide ocean — so that, as Fuller put it, his ashes became an emblem of his own teaching, now dispersed across the whole world. The authorities who scattered his remains meant to extinguish his legacy. Instead, English translations of the Bible went on to shape the language, the faith, and the future of the entire English-speaking world — a project Wycliffe had begun, and that no fire or river could ever finish undoing.
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