n the years leading up to the turn of the century (1996-1999), several publications ran “Man of the Millennium” features, presenting various candidates for the title. TIME Magazine featured extensive reports on various candidates, Einstein, Newton, etc. Theirs was perhaps the most closely watched process, and when the winner was revealed (as “Person of the Millennium”), the TIME Magazine laureate was Johannes Gutenberg (ca. 1400-1468), inventor of the moveable-type printing press. It was to be expected, I suppose, that media people would choose someone who enabled their craft in a remarkable way. And truly, modern literature, scholarship, reporting, propaganda, advertising, and spam all owe a great debt to Gutenberg’s invention.

The trouble is, Gutenberg had nothing to say. The purpose of printing, after all, is to utter something of value (to someone) in an inexpensive and easily distributable way. Luther took great advantage of the printing press: at his death (1546), according to some estimates, over 700,000 copies of various of Luther’s writings were in circulation, having a profound effect on the Protestant Reformation. Since then, the printing press has accelerated literacy, scholarship, and cultural cohesion everywhere, and the story has not yet ended.

But from Gutenberg himself—silence. And from the printing press itself, also—silence. The printing press only has meaning if someone uses it to say something. Such inventions, no matter how clever, do not change societies—ideas do. So, it seems to me that the Man of the Millennium should be someone who proposed ideas that changed the society of the second millennium. Of course, you know all the popular candidates—Luther, Newton, Jefferson, Nietzsche, Einstein, etc. Let me propose one from a little earlier, one whose influence still resounds above all the others today: John Wycliffe (1320?-1384).

Robert McAnally Adams is a retired mathematician and curator of The Christian Quotation of the Day. See cqod.com