John Wycliffe

John Wycliffe (c. 1330–1384) was an English theologian and philosopher at the University of Oxford who became the most radical ecclesiastical critic of the fourteenth century. He argued that Scripture alone — not papal decree or conciliar tradition — constitutes the supreme authority for Christian life, and that a corrupt church could be legitimately stripped of its temporal holdings, doctrines that placed him in direct conflict with Rome. His followers, the Lollards, carried his reform program across England and into Bohemia, where Jan Hus built upon his ideas; Luther later invoked him as a forerunner of reform. He oversaw or inspired the first complete English translation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate, making Scripture accessible to laypeople who could not read Latin. He died of natural causes at Lutterworth in 1384, though the Council of Constance later condemned him posthumously and ordered his remains exhumed and burned — a sentence carried out in 1428.