Did Martin Luther save the bible from the Roman Catholic Church? Was John Wycliff the first to translate the Bible into the English language in 1382 so the regular-Joe could read the Bible too?
Many people answer yes to these questions. The same people also commonly accuse the Catholic Church of things like “hiding the Bible from the people.” And not letting the laity read the Bible for themselves in fear that the people would learn how wickedly warped and un-biblical the teachings of the Catholic Church truly were. So, naturally, for these reasons the Catholic Church kept Bibles locked up, hard to find and in languages nobody could understand.
This absolutely ridiculous, academically inept, historically false and blatantly ignorant point of view oozes with irony. Here are just a few reasons why:
1) Throughout much of Church history, if you could read, you could read Latin. The Church translated the Bible into Latin in the first few centuries of its inception so that all who could read would be able to do so.
2) The Church distributed the Bible in every country it was in and in the common language of the people from the 7th down to the 14th century and beyond.
3) There were “626 editions of the Bible, of which 198 were in the language of the laity…before the first Protestant version of the scriptures was sent forth into the world.” (Where We Got The Bible)
4) There were 27 versions of the Bible in the German language before Martin Luther’s version came out.
5) It was almost solely in those countries which have remained most Catholic that popular versions of the Bible had been published; while it was precisely Protestant countries (like England, Scotland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway) that no bible existed when they embraced Protestantism (Dublin Review - Oct 1837). So there is no evidence that access to a Bible in the vernacular caused people to become more protestant. If anything, it made them become more Catholic. It was the spread of such “traditions of men” as private Judgment and Sola Scriptura which caused the spread of Protestantism and further division within the Body of Christ.
The reasons many people still didn’t have access to a Bible was not because of the Catholic Church (The Catholic Church supported access to it). One of the main reasons was the high cost and labor to produce and/or obtain one. That changed drastically with the printing press, of course.
So why then did the Catholic Church reject and forbid the use of protestant “bibles” such as the one published by John Wycliff? It was not because they were in English or another vernacular. It was not because they were being made available to the laity. It was because they were corrupt versions of the Bible. They were bad translations. And were often being used to spread false doctrine. It’s that simple.
If the Catholic Church had wanted to destroy or alter the Bible, it could have done so at just about any time in its long history. The Catholic Church is the reason we even have the Bible today. It is the institution that protected and preserved it. It would have been easy for those in the Church to destroy original documents and come up with something else if they didn’t like what the Bible taught. But they didn’t do that because of their love for Scripture and genuine desire to share it with the entire world.
If you can read, thank a teacher. If you can read a Bible, thank the Catholic Church.
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pray for me as I share this on FB… while seemingly innocuous, it is not so when most of my friends are complete and total protestants.
Matthew - great post, thanks. I know what Sola Scriptura is but am familiar with private Judgment. Can you clarify? Thanks - enjoy your site! God bless.
sorry - meant “not familiar with private Judgment” - thanks!
Great finishing Line.
Prayers for Dee. Pray for me as am in a mixed marriage and just now am learning the Catholic Faith!
Thanks for this great defense of a ridiculous accusation. I am a Catholic who works at a “non-denominational” (see Evangelical) publishing firm. One of our VPs made an assertion today at an all-staff meeting that the Catholic Church had been hiding the Bible from the people from the 11th to the 18th Century. I hope to begin a dialog with him in defense of the Church. Do you have any other resources that I can reference?
Peter this could help: http://www.catholic-convert.com/2010/01/05/questions-for-bible-christians/
Peter - A great book for you to start with would be “Where We Got the Bible - Our Debt to the Catholic Church.” You can find it at many Catholic book stores and just about any online Catholic bookstore. If/when you get the opportunity to engage your VP, a good place to start may be just in the comments he made at your meeting. Ask him to back up his claims and then present your facts of the case. The Truth will speak for itself. GL.
Michael - “Private Judgment” is just referring basically to the protestant belief that each person has the authority and ability to interpret sacred scripture privately (all on their own, with the Holy Spirit of course) without regard to The Church.
Thanks for a clear, concise article on this subject. There are times I get the opportunity to address these kind of issues, but people only want a 30-second sound bite. This one I’m saving to my files!
Thanks Matthew,
I hope to get my hands on a copy of the book you recommended
FYI, Many of the references made by our VP were similar, if not identical to the ones found on this site:
http://www.hol.com/~mikesch/banned.htm
Could you provide specific sources for your 5 point list?
This is very helpful.
Thanks.
I am a fairly recent convert to the Catholic Church and as a former Evangelical I remember hearing all the accusations that the “bad old Catholic Church” locked the scriptures away and published it only in languages the laity could not understand to keep them ignorant of what it “really” says and keep people indoctrinated in “false” Catholic teaching. Now that I have “crossed the Tiber” I find it was all a bunch of bull. I can’t say I will never go back to being a protestant but if I ever do it will be too soon!
Having been raised Lutheran I don’t ever remember ministers accusing the “bad old Catholic Church” of anything. However i think you would have to agree there was corruption in the church during those years.
What is the source of these statements in this article? The Catholic Church?
In the 1300’s there were people that spoke and read in the English language.
Who is Mathew Warner?? What’s his background?
Hi Matthew,
I see you want to fight false portrayals and common misunderstandings of Church History, and that is good. I would have to say your polemic does a little whitewashing of that history though. First Wycliff’s theology was attacked, and he was condemned on a theological basis. His translation was from Latin into English, probably himself having translated the Gospels, others (Lollards) doing the remainder. The translation was associated with the Lollards, and the RCC did not have a middle english translation at the time, a fact of history. If you owned a Wycliff Translation, you were tried as a heretic. The Roman Catholic Church would not in principle accept a Lollard translation for one hot minute, not in that environment- where errant theology led to a death sentence. You have not demonstrated that in fact the translation itself was bad, you merely proclaim that it was a bad translation, which implies tampering.
Info from “A Visual History of the English Bible”, Donald L Brake, Chapter 2
It would be impossible for the church to destroy the Bible at any time, unless God willed it of course. Manuscripts are recovered continually, and it would have been impossible to alter the Bible, as the archaeological discoveries would show severe tampering and prove it.
Thanks, and God bless
Garret
Garret - you say “It would be impossible for the church to destroy the Bible at any time, unless God willed it of course.” What is this belief based on? It seems you believe that somehow the Church has the ability to go against God’s will on other matters, but yet this one is different.
And I apologize for not fitting the entirety of the history of the bible in a short blog post. But if anyone is “whitewashing” anything it is you. Many of the facts you are citing have long been discredited and are known to embarrassingly be held as still credible “facts of history” by many anti-catholic “scholars.”
If you’d like a good summary of where we got the Bible, check out “Where we got the Bible” by (Bishop) Rev. Graham. But if you don’t want to believe that source, even Wikipedia recognizes that Wycliff did not translate the first English (or even “middle English”) Bible.
Here is another site that has a more detailed account of Bible translations and study (and in particularly the English language): http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15367a.htm#english
I’m a protestant, so am I “anti-catholic” Matthew? Am I so blinded as to not be able to recognize history, or want to distort it for gain if it damages the Catholic Church? You ask you say “It would be impossible for the church to destroy the Bible at any time, unless God willed it of course.” What is this belief based on? Its right there in my last paragraph- archaeological discoveries would uncover tampering with the text of the Bible, therefore the church could not have succeeded in altering the text of the Bible (I’m NOT saying it chose to or did) as older manuscripts coming to light would reveal the change. That was not a controversial statement, we get the Bible from ancient manuscripts, some of which are literally dug up from ancient trash heaps in Alexandria, for instance.
The Brake book (protestant) is accurate and comports completely to the Catholic encyclopedias version of English Bible history. The Catholic encyclopedia states “In general, if we may believe the testimony of Archbishop Cranmer, Sir Thomas More, Foxe the martyrologist, and the authors of the Preface to the Reims Testament, the whole Bible was to be found in the mother tongue long before John Wyclif was born (cf. “American Ecclesiastical Review”, XXXII, Philadelphia, June, 1905, 594). ” It does so by not appealing to A bible proper, but rather, the sum total of fragments translated by different persons at different times, not for the purpose or goal of creating a translation “en toto”. Also you appeal to anglo-saxon psalters, the Lindisfarne gloss, etc- anglo saxon is not English, it is Pre-english language that we would understand very little of. That was the common language of the time, so your thesis stands that common language translation was not disallowed by Rome in principle, that is not controversial to protestants. That being said, your reference to the Catholic encyclopedia PROVED ME RIGHT by showing the entire text of the Bible, THE Bible ‘en toto’ first came into existence in English in the Wyclif version! It calls it a bad translation, and I have no reason to doubt that from the reasons they state in that article. Also from that site- “It is small wonder that the ecclesiastical authorities soon convened in the Synod of Oxford (1408) and forbade the publication and reading of unauthorized vernacular versions of the Scriptures, restricting the permission to read the Bible in the vernacular to versions approved by the ordinary of the place, or, if the case so require, by the provincial council.” This is what is controversial to protestants- restriction of permission to read the Bible in the vernacular, unless said translation was approved by the church. The Church condemned Lollardy and would not stomach its spread.
Anyway, we have fragments translated vesus the whole Bible translated, English versus precurser languages- I am vindicated in my response by your own Catholic encyclopedia demonstrating Wyclif as the first English translation of the Bible, portions in the same language predating Wyclif, but not in the whole.
God bless,
Garret
Garret, I don’t know if you are anti-catholic or blind or anything else. Nor did I accuse you of being any such thing.
I thought when you said “It would be impossible for the church to destroy the Bible at any time, unless God willed it of course” you meant that it would be impossible for the Church to destroy the Bible at any time, unless God willed it of course. I must have misunderstood you.
We will just have to agree to disagree on the existence of an English translation of the Bible prior to Wycliff. Of course those links do not “prove you right” at all. They actually show that there is a whole lot of evidence that Bibles in English existed prior to Wycliff and that it is most (and extremely highly) likely that many of them were in totality. And, yes, I do in fact believe the testimony of St. Thomas More and many others when they testify to the fact that “the whole Bible was to be found in the mother tongue long before John Wyclif was born.”
We have to step back and use a little common sense, too. The Catholic Church was translating the Bible into many, many languages all over the world prior to that time. It would have been an anomaly for it to not have done the same in English.
But let’s be clear: The gist of this post was to address the crazy view that the Catholic Church did not want the laity to be able to read the Bible for themselves because they were scared people would find out the “truth.” This is a ridiculous, but common, claim. I’ve had it made to me personally by countless protestants.
It sounds like you don’t agree with this view. That’s great. We agree on that. But many other protestants disagree with you and I on this point.
It seems that Garrett objects to the Church restricting the reading of the Bible to “approved” versions. Why? Does he not want to read something that is known to be correct in its translation and theology? That seems very strange to me indeed, and I am a convert to the Catholic Church from the Baptist church. The reason I crossed the Tiber was that I noticed that Biblical interpretation varied from minister to minister. One would interpret a passage this way, the next some other way, and yet, both were supposedly the correct interpretation even when they disagreed with each other. That is what started me on a search for a church where the interpretation of the Scriptures was always consistent and reliable. It finally, in desperation, lead me to the Catholic Church, and on March 19, 1967, I swam the Tiber.
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