81. The Vulgate was written by Jerome (340-420) in A.D. 382. It was a translation in Latin from the original Old and New Testaments' original languages (Hebrew and Greek). The Vulgate has long been the Roman Catholic Church's authorized version.
82. The Synod of Toulouse in 1229 forbade everyone except priests from possessing a copy of the Scriptures. At that gathering Pope Gregory IX asked Dominican friars to question suspects and prosecute heretics, making the friars a powerful force and keeping the Bible out of the hands of laypeople.
83. John Wycliffe (ca. 1328-1384) was a reformer who wanted to make the Christian Scriptures accessible to common people. In the Middle Ages it was common for only officials in the church to be able to read or even have access to the Scriptures. Wycliffe's work is considered the most historically significant in the effort to make the Bible available to all people.
84. The Wycliffe Bible was translated from the Vulgate Bible into English by John Wycliffe in 1384. The Vulgate Bible was a Latin translation composed by Jerome. The Catholic church denounced Wycliffe as heretical for doing this as it was a forbidden act to translate the Bible into English at the time.
85. The invention of movable type by Johannes Gutenberg was recently hailed as the most important technical advancement of the last millennium. Gutenberg, a printer in Mainz, found a way to make many copies of a page by using letters made of lead. By 1456 he and his fellow printers had created nearly two hundred copies of Jerome's Vulgate Bible. Prior to that time, all books were hand printed on papyrus sheets or animal skin, making them expensive, time-intensive, and rare. Consequently, few people could read, and even fewer owned any books. Within twenty years of Gutenberg's first printed Bible, the printers of Mainz had created more Bibles than had been produced by hand in the previous fourteen hundred years.
86. The printing press not only allowed for the dissemination of the Scriptures but also for the spread of critical, sometimes satirical, examinations of the church's excesses. These writings fit the growing mood in Europe that the Roman church was out of touch with common people's lives.
87. The first copy of the Gutenberg Bible took three years of constant printing to complete. It was finished in 1455. It was done in two volumes, with 1,284 pages total. Nearly two hundred original Gutenberg Bibles were printed, and forty-eight still exist.
88. William Tyndale (ca. 1494-1536) believed the Bible should be read by everyone, not just the few who understood Latin, the language of the church. So he set out to translate the Bible into English.
89. Accused of perverting the scriptures, Tyndale was forced to leave England, and his New Testament was burned as an "untrue translation." Arrested and imprisoned as a heretic, Tyndale was executed in Antwerp by strangling. His body was then burned at the stake in October 1536.William Tyndale is now honored as the "father of the English Bible." The Tyndale New Testament was published in 1526 from the ancient Hebrew and Greek texts. This version, too, was condemned by the church.
90. An English Bible was prepared by Miles Coverdale at the same time the Tyndale Bible was being written. the English Bible was published in 1535, though it was translated by a man who was not versed in Hebrew and Greek. Coverdale drew from the Vulgate, some early German versions, and partly from the Tyndale Bible. This was the first Bible that placed the Apocrypha in a separate section, under the title of "noncanonical."
91. The Matthew Bible was published in 1537 as an English Bible. It claimed to be "truly and purely translated into English by Thomas Matthew." In fact John Rogers wrote the Bible, which was a compilation of the English Bible and the Tyndale Bible.
92. The Taverner Bible was written just two years after Coverdale finished Bible. In reality it was only a revision of the Matthew Bible.
93. The Great Bible (1539) was the first widely popular English translation of the Scriptures to be owned and read by the common people. Produced by Miles Coverdale and John Rogers, it was based on translations from the Latin Vulgate, with additional notes from the writings of Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli. It was a significant improvement over the earlier Coverdale and Matthew Bibles due to its readability and understanding of poetry.
94. The Geneva Bible (1560) was a product of the Calvinist movement in Northern Europe. Rather than simply relying on Roman Catholic translations, the English exiles in Geneva created prologues to each book of Scripture, added marginal notes to aid understanding, and spent considerable time recrafting the poetic elements of the various books. One outstanding feature that the translators developed was the numbering of chapters and verses-something that not only made it a popular Bible, but which has been copied by translators ever since.
95. The Bishops' Bible appeared in 1568 at the order of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker. The Geneva Bible was not given official endorsement by Queen Elizabeth. As a result a new edition was started shortly after the Geneva Bible was printed.
