Wycliffe+Translation

Because he believed the common person could, through faith and the help of the Holy Spirit, understand and benefit from the Bible, Wycliffe launched into a translation of the Latin Bible starting in 1381. He tackled the New Testament while his student Nicholas Hereford worked on the Old Testament.

As in previous translations of the English Bible, John Wycliffe did not heavily utilize the Greek texts. Instead, Wycliffe and his assistants followed the path of previous English translators by simply translating the Latin Vulgate. Part of the reason for this action is that Wycliffe preceded Erasmus by approximately two hundred years. Considering Wycliffe's evangelistic zeal, one is forced to come to the conclusion that Erasmus was more concerned with putting the Word of God into the hands of the common man than in being recognized as a renowned textual critic. To Wycliffe's credit, he and his assistants spent the rest of their lives attempting to insure that their translation was a accurate as it could possibly be. Linguistic historians credit Wycliffe's translation for being one of the earliest unifying forces of the English Language.

When he finished his New Testament translation, Wycliffe finished the Old Testament work Hereford had started. Scholars give great credit to John Purvey, who later revised the whole work.

Adapted and supplemented from http://christianity.about.com/od/Christians-In-History/a/John-Wycliffe.htm