I have read that Wycliffe and others were martyred by the Church, and also that the Catholic church was not favoring translations of the Bible to the language of the laypeople. I wonder what is the source that can show that alternative perspective.
The Middle Ages were brutal, Catholics killed Protestants, Protestants killed Catholics depending upon who was in charge. If you go to that chapel at the Tower of London you will find the remains of both Catholic and Protestant martyrs. As to not favoring translations of the Bible, that myth, like so many others, has been passed down by Protestants. The grain of truth, which makes such tales sound plausible, is that the Catholic Church was against anti-Catholic translations of the Bible--those who inserted hateful diatribes against the Church, those who added or subtracted from the Bible. It is not true that Catholics wrote the Bible in Latin so that the people could not understand it, the truth is that Saint Jerome translated Biblical text into many languages, the most famous is the Latin Vulgate. By the time of Jerome Latin was the language of the people of Europe--if you could read or write you spoke Latin. Thus the translation into the common, or "vulgar" Latin--from which the Vulgate drew its' name. Latin eventually morphed into Italian, French, Spanish, so there were plenty of translations of Biblical text by Catholics. As to England, before Wycliffe there were many translations by Catholics. To mention just a few of them, Venerable Bede, a Catholic monk, is perhaps the best known for his translation in the 700s. King Alfred the Great had not finished his translation of Psalms before he died, that would have been in the 800s. Now a lot of Biblical texts by Catholics have been destroyed, remember Protestants in England seized Catholic monasteries and gave the land to wealthy Protestants. But some do exist, you can find some of Alfred’s translations in a manuscript dated as around 1050. These are in the English of the Saxons:
The Illustrated Psalms of Alfred the Great: The Old English Paris Psalter When the Normans took over the English changed, the paraphrase of Orm is dated around 1150 and is an example of a translation into Middle English. The Catholic Church has strongly preached, defended, translated, and protected the Bible, and denounced those over the centuries who would add or subtract from the Word of God.
