In defiance of the church, which had actually, not to mention unbelievably, outlawed the reading of the Scriptures in the people’s native tongue, John Wycliffe set out to translate the Bible into English. His translation was taken from the Latin Vulgate, not from the original languages. He finished his translation of the New Testament around 1380. His friends finished the Old Testament translation some time after Wycliffe’s death around 1384. Afterward, for the first time ever, the English-speaking people of our world had their own Bible to read.