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Did the Catholic Church Keep the Bible out of the Hands of the Common People?

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It is not uncommon to hear "It was the Protestants reformers who made the Bible widely accessible to everyone and first brought the Bible to the people in their own language, so that it could be finely understood by everyone" of course this statement is not a true pretrial of history. Luther himself noted "it was an effect of God power, that the Papacy should have remained, in the first place, sacred baptism; secondly, the text of the Holy Gospels which it was custom to read from the pulpit in the vernacular tongue of every nation..." (De Missa privata, ed by Jensen, VI, Pg 92)



Latin and Greek manuscripts of the Old and New Testaments were diligently copied by medieval monks. Each monastery had its writing room or scriptorium, where the monks patiently and carefully copied the Scriptures by had. Manuscripts were produced on a large scale by having one monk read for many copyists. Some Bibles or required the work of many Monks such as "the worms Bible" was created by a team of 11 scribes and artists. to copy a Bible took years to complete, making them expensive, by the 13th century, portable, compactly written Bibles were made in great numbers.


This Latin Biblical leaf (circa 1260AD) has been written by hand, in black ink using miniature gothic texture on animal vellum. Rubricated initials and marginalia can be seen in red and blue. It was originally owned by William Foyle of Beeligh Abbey England.

There were many Latin manuscripts in the Middle Ages because anyone who could read could understand that language, but it is false to say that the Reformation, or its predecessors, first brought the Bible to the people in their own tongue. It is historically certain that between the seventh and fourteenth centuries, in all European countries, there were translation in sixteen vernacular languages. That these were no more widespread can be readily explained by the lack of demand for works so costly to produce. Indeed the Bible was "the most widely circulated book in the Middle Ages, and had a great influence on the life of the nations" (Michael, Geschichte der Deutschen Volkes, iii., 223). The priests used it in preparing their sermons, and knew it from their daily reading of the missal and the breviary. The monks copied the Scriptures in their scriptoria, and meditated upon them frequently as we learn from the pages of St. Bernard and Thomas a Kempis (The Imitation of Christ, iv., 11; Luddy, Life of St. Bernard). Every church had to have at least one Bible for the Mass readings, and most had an extra or two in the public space of the church, chained down the way we chain down directories at public telephones now, and for steal it. We must remember that a new Bible would cost a community about as much as a new church building, and the finished book was easily worth a manor. Books in the Middle Ages were done on parchment or on vellum (made from the skins of young sheep or cattle) and lettered, gilded, and illuminated by hand. A whole Bible took maybe four hundred animals and years of work by a score of scribes and artists. Then as now, there were plenty of unscrupulous collectors, so a stolen Bible could always be converted into an immense sum of cash. Plus there were the customary "garnitures", the covers and bindings that could run to twenty pounds of gold, decorated with jewels and enamels (when Henry VIII burned all of the Bibles in England, lie was careful to keep the bindings for himself). The miracle is that so many still survive.

The laity, before printing was invented and when Bible manuscripts were rare and costly, knew the Scriptures from listening to sermons, and from studying the sculpture, paintings, frescoes and mosaics that filled their churches. What a comprehensive view of both the Old Testament and the blew could be had by a parishioner of St. Mark's in Venice in the thirteenth century. As Ruskin says: "The walls of the Church became the poor man's Bible, and a picture was more easily read than a chapter" (The Stones of Venice, ii., 99).

Many non-Catholics have answered the above question in the negative. "It is no longer possible to hold," says Kropat. scheck, "as the old polemics did, that the Bible was a sealed book to both theologians and laity. The more we study the Middle Ages, the more does this fable tend to dissolve into thin air" (Das Schriftprincip der Luth. Kirche, 163). "We must admit," writes Dobschiitz, "that the Middle Ages possessed a quite surprising and extremely praiseworthy knowledge of the Bible, such as might in many respects put our own age to shame" (Deutsche Rundsckau, 1900, 61). "There is," writes Dr. Cutts, "a good deal of popular misapprehension about the way in which the Bible was regarded in the Middle Ages. Some people think that it was very little read, even by the clergy; whereas the fact is that the sermons of the medieval preachers are more full of Scriptural quotations and allusions than any sermons in these days; and the writers on other subjects are so full of Scriptural allusion, that it is evident their minds were saturated

The invention that revolutionized the distributions of sacred scriptures was the printing press invented by a Catholic named Gutenberg in 1454. Gutenberg caused great excitement when in the fall of that year he exhibited sample pages at the Frankfurt trade fair. Gutenberg quickly sold out all of the 180 copies of his Vulgate Bible even before the printing was finished. Italy soon rival Germany as the leading center of printing by the 1470's Venetian Latin Vulgate Bibles had glutted the book market. By the end of the 15th century Catholics were operating print shops in some 250 cities and towns across Europe. with the advance of the printing press these Bible became more common among the people. So brisk was the trade in Latin Bibles in literature that many printers in England gave up printing these books which they could import and concentrated instead on English literature.


These are incunabula leafs from a Pre-Luther Biblia Germanica or German Bible. Printed by the Catholic Anton Koberger printed it on February 17, 1483 in the city of Nuremberg.

When the invention of movable type made the printing of inexpensive Bibles possible, numerous editions were published. In the seventy years before Luther's Bible was published (Luther's Biblical translations, begun in 1522, when he issued his New Testament, and carried on to 1545, when he finished the Deuterocanonical books and the first complete edition of his Bible.) there were 626 editions of the whole or of part of the Bible. Of the 198 in the language of the common people, 104 were complete editions. There were 20 in the Italian, 26 in French, 19 Flemish, 2 in Spanish, 6 in Bohemian, 1 in Slavish, and 30 in German for example the German Strasbourg translation published in 1466. To these editions of the whole Bible, must be added 94 printings of single sections, in the dialects of Europe. Besides these editions in the vernacular, there were 62 editions in Hebrew such as the 1477 Bologna Hebrew translation., 22 in Greek, and 343 in Latin, a language known to all the educated classes. A fitting climax to this period of popularizing the Bible, was the completion of Cardinal Ximenes' Polyglot Edition in 1517.

A good example of the influence of these Catholic bibles is the Rheims (English version of the new testament) first printed in 1582,which historians tell us was a source for the King James version. It is interesting to note that while the Catholic Church promoted the wide spread publishing of its Bibles the Protestants did not. The crown of England claimed a copyright on the King James version and printing of that version was a privilege accorded exclusively to the King's printer at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. for this reason English Bibles in the colonies were scarce. the first complete Bibles published in 1743 in the English colonies were not in English language but rather these English speaking settlers had to publish a copy and use Luther's Germans translation. it was not until after the outbreak of the American revolution and the end of the English rule over America that the first colonial presses began to publish the King James version openly. The first King James Bible to be published in Americas was a new Testament versions printed in 1777 by Robert Aitken, it was not until 1782 that the first complete American edition of the King James Bible. Aitken's KJV Bible was the only Bible ever to be sanctioned by the American Congress. By 1790 a Catholic named Matthew Carey had already begun to publish the Douay-Rheims Bible in United States.

[And now...]

[the_carpenter]

The Catholic Church most definitely forbid her people to read Bibles which were not authorized by her. I understand she even destroyed some of these not so good translations. This was a very laudable thing for it stopped people from being led into error by the translator's innovations.

[the_carpenter]

The Catholic Church most definitely forbid her people to read Bibles which were not authorized by her. I understand she even destroyed some of these not so good translations. This was a very laudable thing for it stopped people from being led into error by the translator's innovations.

[alfredo123]