“There is no entry to Heaven, but by the Lord Jesus, & his blood: and as he entered into Heaven by his own blood, so there is never one of us, man or woman, shall enter into Heaven, except we carry with us that blood.”
Robert Rollock
John Wycliffe is one of my heroes. His passion, conviction, and desire to get the Word of God into the hands of the people. This week I was able to look at our earliest surviving copy of Wycliffe’s English Bible. The Wycliffe Bible was produced in the late 1300s, roughly 1382–1395, making it the first complete English rendering of the Bible, over 200 years before the King James Version of 1611. If you look closely you’ll notice it’s handwritten, not printed. Every copy had to be produced by scribes. This was before printing arrived in England, so owning a Wycliffe Bible meant owning a massive, labor-intensive manuscript. It became a medieval bestseller.
More than 250 Wycliffite Bible manuscripts survive, which is extraordinary for a banned or controversial medieval English text. Only about 20 of those are complete Bibles.The copy you see me looking at in this picture — one of two I was able to take a look at — includes Genesis to Isaiah. The other one was a Wycliffe New Testament from 1390. It was risky after 1408–1409 to produce and own one of these. The Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, Thomas Arundel, restricted unauthorized new Scripture translations and public reading of Wycliffe-associated texts. So later possession or use of these copies could become religiously dangerous, especially if linked with the Wycliffe followers, known as Lollards.
Also, take a look at the last image, a calendar at the front of the second smaller Wycliffe Bible we looked at, from 1390. At the bottoms of the page the scribe has written: “Anno Domini 1348, in festo Sancti Michaelis Magni, evenit prima pestilentia Londoni” — “In the year of our Lord 1348, on the feast of St. Michael the Great, the first plague occurred in London.”
“It is true, their souls went to Heaven immediately: the souls of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, went to Heauen immediately: But how? By the virtue of Jesus Christ, that was to come in the flesh, and by the virtue of his Ascension that was to come.”
Robert Rollock
“Is all Scripture of divine inspiration? It condemns the Enthusiasts, who, pretending to have the Spirit, lay aside the whole Bible, and say the Scripture is a dead letter, and they live above it.”
Thomas Watson
One of the things you should be intentional about as a parent is Catechizing your children.
Especially if you were raised Neo-Pentecostal in Nigeria. Because chances are, you have no conception of what it really means to be catechized. (NB This is my experience too).