I received this about Too Big to Know from Isaiah Hoogendyk, Biblical Data Engineer at Faithlife Corporation:

In chapter 9, “Building the New Infrastructure of Knowledge,” (sorry, don’t have a page number: read this in the Kindle app) you state:

“There was a time when we thought we were doing the common folk a favor by keeping the important knowledge out of their reach. That’s why the Pope called John Wycliffe a heretic in the fourteenth century for creating the first English-language translation of the Christian Bible.”

This is quite false, actually. There was in fact nothing heretical about translating the Scriptures into the vernacular; instead, Wycliffe was condemned for a multitude of heresies regarding rejection of Catholic belief on the Sacraments and the priesthood, among other things. Some of these beliefs were interpolated into the translation of the Scriptures attributed to him (which weren’t even entirely translated by him), but it was mostly his other writings that were censured by the Pope. You can read more about that here: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/wyclif/.

Thanks, Isaiah.

Categories: too big to know dw