Bible black 2 new series#

It was obvious that the church was powerless to control it. It killed priests and monks just as readily as it killed ordinary people. It was obvious to everyone that the Black Death was a judgement from God for the cruel excesses of the past. Mass graves were dug and bodies simply thrown in. At first the bodies were buried decently, but towards the end there was none to bury the dead.

People often died within hours of contracting the disease. It killed rich and poor alike, nobles and peasants alike. It killed indiscriminately, sparing neither men, women nor children. The Black Death was no respecter of persons. While the exact causes of the Black Death are still debated, it seems clear that bubonic, pneumonic and septic forms of this terrifying disease were involved. The Black Death was more cruel and unforgiving than the Crusades which had preceded it. In just three years, from 1348-1350, it is estimated that up to 200 million people died, or between a third and one half of Europe's population. It would become one of the most devastating pandemics in human history. Because in 1348, while Wycliffe was in his late 20s, and by which time he was educated in the Bible and understood the Holy Scriptures, when he knew that the church's teachings did not match what he was reading in the Bible, the Black Death suddenly happened. Something which would shake that world to its very foundations. Martin Luther would later pick up the same theme, eventually giving rise to the Reformation.Д«ut into this Medieval world in which the Roman Catholic Church held universal power, something cataclysmic was about to happen. It was these fundamental conflicts between what the Holy Bible said, and what the church actually taught and did, which many others also found as they started to read the Bible. Instead of finding harmony, he found only differences - differences with the doctrines and beliefs of the established Catholic Church, and conflicts with practices which had no counterpart in the Biblical manuscripts that Wycliffe was studying. As he studied the Holy Scriptures and learned Latin and Greek, he started comparing the teachings of the Scriptures with the church of his day. Wycliffe was born in Yorkshire in England around 1320, and was educated at Oxford University, where his main interest was Biblical studies. He would know no other world other than this one - a cruel Medieval world of fear, death, torture and the tyrannical excesses of power. The Ninth Crusade (1271-1272) was still within living memory when Wycliffe was born.

Bible black 2 new series#

The Crusades, starting in 1096, illustrated the sheer power of the Pope, in that at his command, out of fear and duty, vast numbers of people in Europe launched a series of persecutions of Jews across Europe, with incredible numbers migrating to the Middle East to kill Muslims and Jews alike, plundering and looting as they went, and slaughtering everyone who stood in their way. Everything and everyone, ultimately even kings, were subject to the decrees and decisions of the Roman church. The church, and the Pope at the head of it, held total power over all. At that time, the Roman Catholic Church held universal jurisdiction over the whole of Christendom. Wycliffe lived from 1320-1384, in the late Middle Ages. Let us then, with justified fear and trepidation, travel back in time, and enter the world into which Wycliffe was born. We shall then examine some dramatic events that shook the known world in Wycliffe's day, events which caused revolutionary ripples that are still felt down to the present day. In fact, so profound was the revolution Wycliffe caused that he is called, 'The Morning Star of the Reformation' - in other words, Wycliffe marked the start or dawn of the Reformation, and sparked the events that would soon follow.Д«ut in order to understand why Wycliffe's translation was so profound and why it started a revolution, we need to step back and take a look at the world as it existed in Wycliffe's day - the world into which he was born. His translation started a revolution, and enabled ordinary people to finally have access to the Bible in a language they could understand. Although translations of parts of the Bible into Anglo-Saxon existed hundreds of years before Wycliffe's translation, John Wycliffe is credited as being the first translation of the entire Bible (both Old and New Testaments) into English.