“WHERE WAS THE
BIBLE BEFORE 1611?”
(Part 1 of 2)
MYTH
#1.
“THERE
WERE NO ENGLISH BIBLES BEFORE THE 1611 BIBLE SUDDENLY POPPED UP OUT OF
NOWHERE.”
In the last half of the 1300’s, some 300 hundred years before
the 1611
Authorized Bible, a fellow called John
Trevisa, published an English edition of the entire
Bible. In reality, he and others, were merely putting a
polishing touch to the idioms and spelling of the Anglicized
scriptures, that already
were in existence. Such that, when Wycliffe produced the first of his many
editions of the Bible in 1380, there
was no translation to be done as such, but merely a TRANSCRIBING
of already existing versions!
MYTH
#2.
“WYCLIFFE
PUBLISHED THE FIRST ENGLISH BIBLE.”
You see, right
from the start
in AD 57 when Paul writes Romans, God
states that the scriptures were already in all the
nations –
But
now is made manifest, and by the scriptures
of the prophets, according to the commandment of the everlasting
God, made known to all nations
for the obedience of faith: (Rom 16:26)
And
so when ‘The Morning Star of the Reformation’, John Wycliffe,
put
his pen to paper to compile, not
invent,
the New Testament in 1380, the New Testament
scriptures, the
written words of God, had already been in existence since AD
37
when the gospel of Matthew was written.
The
fact is that whole New Testament was compiled, canonized and accepted
before
the end of the first century, and so we have a conservative 1500
years
till 1611, for the total Bible to have been in existence and circulating
around the entire known world.
The
Old Testament had already closed around 400BC with
the
last book of Malachi.
MYTH #3.
“THERE WERE
FEW BIBLES, AND
ANYHOW, PEOPLE COULDN’T READ.”
Foxe, in his eight
large
volumes called “Acts and Monuments”, clearly
tracks Christianity from the 1st
century through
to the 1500’s.
In fact, a
contemporary of
Wycliffe’s in the 1300’s, said that every second
man he met was a true Christian
and it is recorded that Wycliffe’s
Bibles were widely used by all classes of men, and most
significantly by the common
people.
Foxe, in 1496,
states that many
were burned at the stake for having in their possession ‘a
little book of Scripture in English’.
Christians
were called ‘known men and women’ because they knew the scriptures, memorizing whole
books of the Bible.
For 125 years after Wycliffe, the law stated that it was illegal to own a Wycliffe Bible.
Why? In
its notes, it exposed the sodomy of
priests and monks, with their lechery and defiling
of virgins, treachery, gluttony,
covetousness, greed and hypocrisy.
Describing the popes as ‘the
damned limbs of Lucifer’, Wycliffe exposed the evil deceit
of transubstantiation, whereby a wafer could be
transformed in the actual body of Christ. Furthermore, his Bible condemned the Apocryphal books as not
scriptural.
MYTH
#4.
“WYCLIFFE
USED THE CORRUPTED ROMAN CATHOLIC LATIN VULGATE OF JEROME.”
In the 1st century, the common Latin scriptures were
called the
‘vulgar (meaning common language) Latin’.
However in the 4th
century, these true scriptures were cannibalized
and corrupted by Jerome to
become the official Roman Catholic Latin
Vulgate. Wycliffe translated
into English from the vulgar Latin
not the Latin Vulgate!
MYTH
#5.
“BIBLES
WERE TOO EXPENSIVE.”
In
1420 An entire
handwritten Bible was four marks and
forty pence which was not an
impossible sum if a group of people bought a copy between
them. In 1525,
with mechanical printing, a William
Tyndale New Testament could be bought
by a labouring man for an affordable
7 groats.
In 1535,
Miles Coverdale
put some polish on the English Old Testament and with his English
New Testament, produced an entire
Bible.
In 1537
John Rogers produced The
Matthew’s Bible.
In 1539,
the Great Bible
was published and authorized by the
King to be used in every church.
Then followed
the 1560 Geneva Bible and the 1568
Bishop Bible and then the Authorized
Bible, the King James Bible of 1611.
In
summary:
There has always been a godly line of
Bibles since the 1st century ending with God’s final written authority in 1611.
Similarly,
there is the ‘parallel’
ungodly line of counterfeit ‘bibles’.
Note: The oldest manuscripts support the godly line of Bibles, not the other way!!!
GODLY line of Bibles |
The UNGODLY line |
Peshitta
Bible 150AD |
Sinaiticus
331AD |
Itala
Bible 157AD |
Vaticanus
331AD |
Wycliffe’s 1380AD 1 |
Jerome’s
Vulgate 382AD |
Erasmus’s
1522AD |
Alezandrian
450AD |
Tyndale’s 1525AD 2 |
Ephraem
450AD |
Luther’s
1534AD |
Douay
1582AD |
Coverdale’s 1535AD 3 |
Clementine
1592AD |
Matthew’s 1537AD 4 |
Griesbach
1805AD |
Great Bible
1539AD 5 |
Lachmann
1850 |
Stephen’s
1550AD |
Tregelles
1870AD |
Geneva 1560AD 6 |
Tischendorf
1872AD |
Bishop’s 1568AD 7 “…purified
seven times…” |
Alford
1872AD |
Beza’s
1604AD |
Westcott
& Hort 1881AD |
AUTHORIZED BIBLE 1611AD The King James Bible 8 Three quotes
from the King James Translators: 1. “… out of many good
ones, one principal ....good one,
not justly to be excepted ....against.” No critic will have any argument over what we 2. “The same will shine
as gold more brightly …..being
rubbed and polished. THEY DID NOT WRITE A NEW BIBLE! 3. They came to the work “… learned, not to learn:” They forgot more Greek than the modern
translators will ever know. This wasn’t arrogance on their part. They were just stating the obvious … they
knew it all. |
RSV,
ASV, Amplified, Good News, NEB, NIV, Message, New King James Version,
Living, Jerusalem + at least 300 others |
Harley Hitchcock
www.
AustralianBibleMinistries
.com