by Mike Gray

I missed it the first time around three years ago, but I recently watched a surprisingly even-handed (for PBS) documentary on the struggle to get the Bible into the hands of the average people and out from under the exclusive control of the ecclesiastics.

It was called Secrets of the Dead: Battle for the Bible. The PBS website talks about it:

In the United States, there are more than 150 million Protestants divided among some 630 denominations. They worship in vastly different ways but they all trace their roots to one book — the English-language Bible. Today, that ubiquitous book is largely taken for granted, but for the original translators, producing and distributing the Bible in English was a dangerous pursuit involving subversion, obsession, intrigue, treachery, imprisonment, and death.

Secrets of the Dead: Battle for the Bible tells the compelling story of faith, flames and martyrdom behind the world’s most famous book. The Biblical texts, translated from the original ancient Greek and Hebrew into equally obscure Latin, were staunchly guarded, making common interpretation impossible and ensuring that no one would question the authority of the Church.

Through the stories of John Wycliffe, William Tyndale and Thomas Cranmer — the brave reformers who paid the ultimate price to bring the Bible to the people in a language they could understand — Battle for the Bible reveals how a seed planted on English ground inspired a new, progressive way of thinking and living that crossed an ocean. Nurtured in terrible adversity by patient and persistent hands more than 600 years ago, it continues to bear the fruits of freedom and individualism.

Also on the PBS site is an extensive interview with Lori Anne Ferrell, some of which made it into the video but most of which didn’t:

Q. Can you illuminate the circumstances surrounding [John] Wycliffe’s turn to endorsing direct access to the Bible? Wycliffe had been an establishment figure and an ecclesiastical politician of some prominence, so it’s somewhat surprising that he would become a figure so disliked by that establishment that his body would eventually be exhumed and burned. How did his ideas develop?

A. Wycliffe was an establishment clergyman — and establishment clergymen in this period often came into conflict with their bosses in the Church (often the issue with the overly educated, I’d say). Thing is, Wycliffe based his sense of ultimate Christian authority on the words of the Bible rather than the authority of not only the pope but also the entire succession of popes and Church councils that had adjudicated Christian orthodoxy through generations of human decision making and authoritative doctrinal pronouncements since the early centuries of the Christian era.

To advocate a sacred text (a collection of words, really, as set down in orthodox and material form since the 4th century in a book called “the Bible”) as the source of authority rather than the pope and Church tradition was Wycliffe’s remarkable contribution to the pre-Reformation era. He was no proto-Protestant (I happen to disagree with the many scholars who believe he was, as I think it’s impossible to be “proto” anything before the fact in historical reckoning) but instead a radical medieval. As that alone, he did plenty.

The reason I resist this characterization is that the claim has this way of advocating Protestant “orthodoxy,” as in: if Protestants have a past that can be traced through ideas that are passed from generation to generation, then they have a past distinct from the Roman Church, a kind of continuity that came from always resisting what the church of Western Christendom represented. And that’s simply not true. In so many ways, especially in issues of church authority, what became Protestantism was of the same opinion as the Catholic Church on more issues than not. They simply differed on what defined that authoritative church — Protestants claimed “the Bible only” (although they really couldn’t live that out; it’s an impossible claim — they needed institutional structure and history as well as a text) whereas the Roman Catholic Church claimed its long-standing historical tradition (a powerful claim indeed) plus the Bible.

Indeed, Wycliffe played a major role in the battle for the Bible:

John Wycliffe, born around 1320, was a prominent theologian at Oxford University and a leading ecclesiastical politician in the dark period of English history following the decimation of Europe’s population by the Black Plague. He became convinced through his own scholarship that Scripture itself, rather than the Mass, should be seen as the source of Christian authority.

Wycliffe’s notion that the Bible should be translated into the common tongue for the edification of all believers was a radical innovation, and one that spawned a movement. Working outside of the Church, translators eventually produced perhaps hundreds of so-called “Wycliffe Bibles,” translated and hand-copied from the Latin. It is not clear that Wycliffe himself produced any translations into English, so they are more properly known as “Wycliffite” Bibles.

With or without Wycliffe’s active involvement, the English Bible became part of an underground movement that became known as Lollardy and continued to spread after Wycliffe’s death in 1384. It worried Church authorities enough that by 1407 the English translation was denounced as unauthorized, and translating or using translated Bibles was defined as heresy — a crime for which the punishment was death by burning.

Read more here — PBS links: Page 1 — Page 2 — Page 3 — Page 4.

Battle for the Bible is available on Amazon.com.