You wrote:
“Odd, isn’t it, that they knew so much scripture, yet risked their lives to buy unapproved scriptures translated by Luther and Tyndale, while the Catholic Church failed to provide a common language Bible that had been ‘correctly translated’.”
Nope. There were 14 German translations of the Bible BEFORE Luther’s. Those, by the way, were the printed Bibles. No one knows how man handwritten Bibles there were before Luther’s. Protestant scholars in fact did a good job of ignoring the existence of these pre-Lutheran Bibles until about 50 years ago: http://www.jstor.org/pss/3723092
Some say there were 19 before Luther’s: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30B10FD3B5A12738DDDA90A94D9405B868CF1D3
These Bibles were printed again and again. Mentelin’s famous German Bibles was printed 13 times before 1518 (in other words before Luther even thought about his translation).
“Odd too, that the Catholic New American Bible and even the Douay-Rheims follows Tyndale’s horrible translation. Of course, the KJV had already substituted church for congregation and bishop for elder, so all that remained was to replace repent with do penance and the Catholic Church was back to a suitably inaccurate translation.”
Tyndale was a heretic so everything he touched was considered suspect in any case.
“Nope. There were 14 German translations of the Bible BEFORE Luther’s.”
Not into the common German. Those were high german, and unreadable by the common man. That is why Luther’s excellent translation sold in incredible numbers.
Of course, the Catholic Church, with access to good scholars and ample money, COULD have made a good translation and put it into the hands of the common man, but they did not - because they didn’t WANT to. 100,000 copies in 40 years opened the Bible to millions.
“Tyndale was a heretic so everything he touched was considered suspect in any case.”
Had More cared about the truth, he would have admitted what he KNEW: Tyndale’s translation was excellent. Tyndale’s translation survived largely intact in the KJV, except where the KJV degraded accuracy for King Jame’s politics.
When the DR was revised to make it readable, it took the KJV and revised it for Catholic theology - so much of Tyndale slid into the DR. Again, the DR was a step down, since it was more concerned with promoting Catholic theology than being an accurate translation.