With dissemination of the Word of God being central to the commitments of the Reformers, this video series provides a detailed introduction to the story of the English Bible as depicted on the windows of Founders' Chapel, Wycliffe College.
When the earliest students met for class in the school house at St. James’ Cathedral in 1877 we can assume that the students attended Morning Prayer together. When the college was moved to its first building on College Street it appears from architectural drawings that there was a chapel included in the design. When the college moved to Hoskin Avenue in 1891, the chapel occupied today’s Cody Library until 1910. Founders’ Chapel opened in 1911, originally its interior was a crowded place with the small chancel filled by a pulpit, prayer desk, choir stalls, and organ. A brass rail separated a sanctuary where the Lord’s Table stood against the red wall under the painting. At either end of the table, large copies of the Book of Common Prayer stood on brass lecterns. By the mid-20th century it was time for Wycliffe to adapt its chapel to a changing church. By the 1990s the low church way of worship had softened without doctrinal compromise. Today the chapel continues as a place for daily prayer and worship.
Wycliffe College is named after John Wycliffe who supervised and assisted in the work of bible translation but it is doubtful if he did much of it himself for we know that he had collaborators. The New Testament first appeared c. 1380 and the whole work was finished in 1382, two years before Wycliffe’s death in 1384.
William Tyndale was convinced that people needed to have access to the Bible in their own language. He tried to get permission to work on a translation while he lived in England, to no avail. So because of persecution, he worked on the continent mostly in Antwerp from 1524 to1536. He worked on the translation of the Old Testament, and a revision of the New. He completed the translation of the New Testament, had it printed in Worms, and within a short time copies were being smuggled into England.
Originally an Augustinian friar, Myles Coverdale came under the influence of Lutheran teaching, and of Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More. As a result he left the order and graduated from Cambridge. In his 1537 translation of the Bible, Coverdale, like Tyndale, made use of the Greek Testament of Erasmus. Tyndale’s translation of the Old Testament was incomplete. For the Old Testament, Coverdale depended on a Swiss-German translation by Zwingli. His New Testament translation was a revision of Tyndale’s.
When King James succeeded Elizabeth in 1603, he called a gathering of bishops and Puritan clergy to settle differences. The suggestion was made that a new translation be made from Greek and Hebrew texts, and this appealed to the king. He appointed 54 of the best scholars drawn from Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster, to undertake the task. They were divided into 6 groups, whose work was forwarded to a committee of 12, 2 from each group. Final differences were settled by a general meeting of each group. The work of a committee had the potential to be difficult, deficient, and cumbersome, but the work of Wycliffe, Coverdale and Tyndale was so considerable that no committee could undo it.
The fifth window captures the task of translation from early medieval to modern times, and something of its worldwide distribution. The contribution beginning with Bede and stretching to the version of John’s gospel in Mohawk-English, the New Testament Revision Committee in 1870, R.F. Weymouth, James Moffatt, and Powis Smith are noted.
