Yes. exactly. I wrote up and discarded such direct comparisons previous, even while also considering re-posting the exact sentences used, side by side.
It does boil down to "that book" & "them", for that is the variance, that is being put forth as some sort of nefarious deed.
Yes, I agree. We both posted nearly identical proofs and still we see no retractions, apologies or further explanation - though I fail to see what more can be said in defense of the RCC. It is no falsehood at all that for many centuries, the "laity" was discouraged, shall we say, if not outright prohibited from reading the Bible on his/her own. Sure we get the excuse that everyone but the "nobility" was illiterate and couldn't read it even if they wanted to, but this omits several salient points. Many people COULD read and many learned by reading...the Bible. Many heard the Scriptures as they were taught directly from the Bible. Another point seldom acknowledged by our FRoman Catholic friends is that when the Bibles started being produced in languages of the common tongues, they sold like hotcakes. Now, how could that happen if few people could read? Did they only want a Bible for their coffee tables?
I was raised a Catholic and I attended Catholic elementary school as well as middle school but I have NO memory at all of ever reading the Bible in class. We did not have one at home nor were there copies in the pews at church. Granted, there has been a lifting of restrictions on Bible reading by the non-clergy, but it is STILL somewhat restricted to "Approved" translations as well as prohibitions against "interpreting" what one reads in a way contrary to Church doctrine. When I read John 10:27-30 for myself - and I think this may have been the first time I picked up a Bible - I understood immediately that what I had been taught all my life about going to heaven was not true.
I read:
A light went on in my soul and I understood that Jesus GIVES me eternal life through faith in Him and I shall NEVER perish. Now, if I had read that and gone to the Catholic priest to explain what Jesus meant, I don't doubt he would have either said, "Wow, it really DOES say that!" or "Well, this is a mystery. Jesus opened the gates of heaven for us but we must still be good and earn our way there. We must "participate" with God's grace in order to merit going to heaven....". And I would have said, "But, Jesus didn't SAY that." and I probably would have been rebuked. But, thank the Lord, I understood what Scripture said and I have never stopped reading and studying and learning it.
I honestly think that was the reason all along why people were discouraged from reading the Bible. There was a fear that we would see a different gospel than what we had been told was the gospel, and they wanted to circumvent all that confusion. Yet, all throughout the Old and New Testaments we are told to meditate and study and learn the Scriptures. God never intended the Bible to be taken away from believers. We read the comments here all the time about "private interpretation" being bad and how we need an authority to tell us what it all means - that Scripture isn't plain and clear about many things. I get the impression that we are to view it as some kind of puzzle that only the "clergy" has the key to help us understand. But I read where Jesus talked to people - people that were just plain old common folks - and he told it like it is and THEY understood him. People got saved back then just by hearing the gospel and people get saved today based on that same gospel that is recorded in Scripture. Jesus was talking to the Pharisees and "experts" on the religious law of Moses and he told them:
"What sorrow awaits you experts in religious law! For you remove the key to knowledge from the people. You don't enter the Kingdom yourselves, and you prevent others from entering." (Luke 11:52)
In the Barnes' Notes on the Bible, there is this about that passage:
How much I think some of today's "religious" leaders are that way still. They set themselves up as the teachers of the Scriptures and the only interpreters of it but they have perverted what it says through their traditions so that, not only do they not "make it" to heaven, they hold back others from entering it, too. The Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary puts it as:
But, just as I have and millions of others, too, the Holy Spirit breaks through and illuminates the gospel to our hearts when we diligently seek to know Him. Thank you for your diligence for the truth here.