I've already stated countless times that assorted manuscripts were floating all over the place. After all, the con men had been flapping their jaws about the stories for centuries. The argument seems to be that that some enterprising soul wrote them all into the Vulgate centuries before Wycliffe and that Wycliffe merely got his paws on the pristine original and translated. Sorry, but I'm not buying it. Even if the Vulgate existed there would be no way that the Pope would allow it to go all the way to dreary England so that some unknown character could play with it. It's simply not human nature.
What Wycliffe and his buddies might have done was to use some of the available manuscripts and their recollections of the stories and write their book. It would be in everyone's vested interest to then claim that the Bible existed before Wycliffe wrote it because otherwise people would lose faith in their religion.
The Vulgate could then have been made as a cover to keep the lie going. As previously mentioned, when a later Pope wrote his version the dummy made thousands of errors. So how did someone know that they were errors? They compared it to Wycliffe's. And if the Vulgate had existed in the Vatican the Pope would have had ready access to it to write his own fairy tale. The fact that he screwed his edition up so badly indicates that it didn't exist.
What Wycliffe and his buddies might have done was to use some of the available manuscripts and their recollections of the stories and write their book. It would be in everyone's vested interest to then claim that the Bible existed before Wycliffe wrote it because otherwise people would lose faith in their religion.
The Vulgate could then have been made as a cover to keep the lie going. As previously mentioned, when a later Pope wrote his version the dummy made thousands of errors. So how did someone know that they were errors? They compared it to Wycliffe's. And if the Vulgate had existed in the Vatican the Pope would have had ready access to it to write his own fairy tale. The fact that he screwed his edition up so badly indicates that it didn't exist.