Bible-Burners (build it yourself bibles)

Tales continue to circulate about how the Catholic Church opposed translating the Bible into the vernacular. But the Church has never opposed that. After all, the Vulgate was originally translated by St. Jerome to make the Bible available in the vernacular of the day, Latin, which continued to be the lingua franca of educated Europe up to the late 18th century and beyond. Nor were the Reformers the first to translate the Bible into more modern European languages. The Catholic Church approved of Gutenberg's German Bible in 1455. The first printed Flemish edition came out in 1477. Two Italian versions of the Bible were printed in 1471, and a Catalan version came out in 1478. A Polish Bible was translated in 1516, and the earliest English version was published in 1525. Most of these were editions of the entire Bible. Individual books had appeared in the vernacular centuries earlier. The first English-language Gospel of John, for example, was translated by the Venerable Bede into Anglo-Saxon in the year 735.

The Church didn't object to William Tyndale's translating the Bible into English. Rather, she objected to the Protestant notes and Protestant bias that accompanied the translation. Tyndale's translation came complete with prologue and footnotes condemning Church doctrines and teachings. Even King Henry VIII in 1531 condemned the Tyndale Bible as a corruption of Scripture. In the words of King Henry's advisors: "the translation of the Scripture corrupted by William Tyndale should be utterly expelled, rejected, and put away out of the hands of the people…."

Protestant Bishop Tunstall of London declared that there were upwards of 2,000 errors in Tyndale's Bible. Tyndale translated the term Baptism into "washing," Scripture into "writing," Holy Ghost into "Holy Wind," bishop into "overseer," priest into "elder," deacon into "minister," heresy into "choice," martyr into "witness," etc. In his footnotes, Tyndale referred to the occupant of the Chair of Peter as "that great idol, the whore of Babylon, the anti-Christ of Rome."

The Catholic response was not to burn the Bible, but to burn Tyndale's Bible. This was an age when making your own version of the Bible seemed to be all the rage. The Reformers cut out the Deuterocanonical Books, Luther wanted to get rid of the Epistle of James as well as Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation because they didn't agree with his theory of justification. The Reformers themselves fought about which version of the Bible was best. Zwingli said of Luther's German version of the Bible, "Thou corruptest the word of God, O Luther; thou art seen to be a manifest corrupter of the holy scripture; how much are we ashamed of thee…!" To which Luther politely answered, "Zwinglians are fools, asses and deceivers." At the same time Molinaeus, the French Reformed theologian, complained that Calvin "uses violence to the letter of the gospel, and besides this, adds to the text."

The Protestant Reformers may have been revolutionaries, but their revolution was extremist, not unlike that of the Taliban. This is exemplified by their zeal for destruction. Catholics burnt some Bibles, but the Protestants burned books on a scale that makes the Catholic fires look like the odd candle flame. In England, when the monasteries were suppressed, their libraries were most often destroyed as well. So the vast monastic libraries of religious texts encompassing many ancient, rare, and hand-copied Catholic Bibles were put to the flames. In 1544 in the Anglican controlled sections of Ireland, the Reformers put an immense number of ancient books, including Vulgate Bibles, onto the bonfires as they ransacked the monasteries and their libraries. In an effort to reduce the Catholic Irish to ignorance, King Henry VIII decreed that in Ireland the possession of a manuscript on any subject whatsoever (including sacred Scripture) should incur the death penalty.

King Henry VIII even burnt the Protestant Bibles of Tyndale, Coverdale, and Matthew, with the Catholic Latin Vulgate helping to feed the fires.

In 1582 The Rheims Catholic New Testament in English was issued. This Catholic version, with its accompanying notes, aroused the fiercest opposition in Protestant England. Queen Elizabeth ordered searches to seek out, confiscate, and destroy every copy. If a priest was found in possession of it, he was imprisoned. The Bible-burning wasn't limited to England. In 1522 Calvin had as many copies as could be found of the Servetus Bible burned, and later Calvin had Michael Servetus himself burned at the stake for being a Unitarian.

Sadly, the destruction was not limited to the burning of Bibles. Sixteenth-century England and Ireland witnessed the most monumental pillage of sacred property and destruction of Christian architecture, art, and craftwork the world has ever seen. In England between the winter of 1537 and spring 1540 over 318 monasteries and convents were destroyed. Parish churches were ransacked. Beautiful paintings and carvings were smashed. Sacred vestments and altar hangings with rich embroidery were confiscated and recycled into curtains and clothes. Vessels of the altar were stolen, melted down, and sold. The Protestants destroyed a religious heritage with the zeal and fury of terrorists, and what was left by the iconoclasts during the reign of Henry VIII was smashed further during the Puritan regime of Oliver Cromwell.

In France the Calvinists, in one year alone (1561), according to one of their own estimates, "murdered 4,000 priests, monks and nuns, expelled or maltreated 12,000 nuns, sacked 20,000 churches, and destroyed 2,000 monasteries" with their priceless libraries, Bibles, and works of art. The rare manuscript collection of the ancient monastery of Cluny was irreparably lost, along with many others.

Living in England, as I do, the legacy of this mindless destruction by anti-Catholic forces is present everywhere. A map of the countryside marks countless bare ruins of medieval monasteries, abbeys, and convents. Visit the medieval parish church in any village and you will notice the empty niches, the whitewashed walls, the side chapels turned into store-rooms, the stained-glass windows once riotous with pictures of the saints and stories from Scripture, now merely plain glass windows. The iconoclasm was followed by a campaign which, for three hundred years, continued to persecute Catholics relentlessly, while it concealed the destructive fury of the Protestant forces and continued to paint the Catholic Church as the incarnation of evil.

The final irony is that the very forces that pulled down and smashed the images of the saints in the medieval churches soon filled those same churches with carved memorial stones and statues of the rich and famous of their day. The figures of the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints and angels are now replaced by figures of English military heroes, prime ministers, and forgotten landed aristocrats. The church which exemplifies this most is Westminster Abbey. Any Catholic visitor to London will be amazed at how this once proud Benedictine Abbey has been turned into a museum of English civil heroes. At every turn one finds statues of statesmen, kings, and politicians, while the heroes of the Christian faith are relegated to the margins.

Time does not heal all wounds. Terrible and violent events cannot simply be forgotten. Telling ourselves that certain things never happened is a lie. Saying that they don't matter now after so many years is another form of the same lie. Terrible events need to be faced, acknowledged, repented of, and forgiven. The violent events and terrible persecution of both Catholics and Protestants can only be put right through repentance and mutual forgiveness.

Catholics must own up to their own faults and sins of the past. In the Jubilee Year, Pope John Paul II took an amazing step forward with his historic mea culpa for the sins of Catholics. On Ash Wednesday in the year 2000 he led the Catholic Church in a public act of repentance. However, this admission of guilt and act of repentance has been met here in England and throughout the Protestant world with stony silence. Not one Protestant leader has offered a similar corporate examination of the past. Isn't it time that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Queen of England took the lead as international Protestant leaders, and offered their own reassessment of the past? If they did so, maybe others would follow and the process of healing could begin.

If you followed the links, you would see that, even in the preview portion of the articles, the encyclopedia addresses the fact that the sections of Daniel were part of the pre-Christian cana.

It is silly to allege that they were written in Greek, rather than Hebrew. The reason the Hebrew texts aren't found is because the Jews acknowledge destroying them. One can only say that the Septuagint versions of Daniel 13 include Greek idioms, but the same can be true for many portions of the Septuagint. The very loose translations of the Septuagint are precisely why Jerome endeavored to write a translation based on the Masoretic texts.
>> As I am sure you are aware, the Apocrypha was not first disputed by Luther. Jerome disputed it in the fifth century. <<

Some people at the time interpreted Jerome's words at the time that way, accusing him of heresy. Jerome strenuously denied that interpretation, considering it outrageous slander. His cordonning off of the deuterocanonicals into an appendix had a very obvious reason: What he was writing was a translation of the Hebrew scriptures, and there were no Hebrew scriptures available to him. He pointed out that the Jews rejected the deuterocanonicals not because he believed the Christians should only accept as scripture what the Jews do... that's ridiculous, since the Jews reject the gospel!... but because he was explaining that there were no manuscripts to translate!

>> The Catholic church itself did not declare the books canonical until the Council of Trent in 1546. <<

Ignoring previous posts, you suffer from a common Protestant delusion about the nature of ecumenical councils. That's the first INFALLIBLE statement; it's not the first statement. They only state something infallibly after a heresy has emerged making a false assertion. the Catholic church upheld the canonical status of the books by word and deed throughout its entire history. Your assertion is like claiming that that the Supreme Court only decided in 2000 that states couldn't change election laws after an election had already been completed.

>> I believe you have misrepresented sola scriptura. <<

Sola sciptura is used 1000s of times a day around here to declare something is false because it is not in the bible. The term is an invention of Luther; I use it as Luther did.

>> This is opposed to the teaching of the Catholic church, which declares that the pope, when acting in the capacity of his office, makes a declaration it is also inerrant (divinely inspired). <<

Infallibility is used to CLARIFY doctrine, not to invent doctrine. Read the phrasing of an infallibly issued text. The Pope is careful to establish that the doctrine is the way that the Church has unanimously interpreted scripture throughout history. Without such an assertion, the Pope is merely stating his opinion.

>> Martin Luther was a godly man (though by no means inerrant) <<

Martin Luther preached people should subscribe to any ungodly passion that occurred to them. His serial adulteries were not moral failures, but actual recommended prescriptions. It is in response to such teachings that the Catholic church asserted that works are an essential element of salvation, not because salvation occurs through works (the Catholic church has proclaimed it does not throughout history, contrary to Protestant misconception), but because, as St. Jude's epistle points out, faith without works is death; Luther's "faith" was not the saving faith, as demonstrated by his wickedness.

The modern Lutheran church's understanding of Sola Fides is not what Martin Luther taught, and is in full accord with the Catholic Church's teachings on Faith and Works, as attested to by the leadership of both churches (Missouri Synod excluded, not because they disagree, but because they refused to consider the issue with them evil Catlicks).

>> The Catholics themselves have rejected books from the Septuagint. III Macabees, I Esdras, and the Prayer of Manasseh. <<

False. The Prayer of Manasseh occurs at the end of the book of Jeremiah in the Catholic bible. "I Esdras" (actually, you mean 3 Esdras) was very rarely published alongside 1-2 Esdras in the Septuagint. Various versions of the Septuagint used either 1-2 Esdras or 3 Esdras; 3 Esdras is merely a truncation of 1-2 Esdras, which has become known as the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.

As for 3 Maccabees, it's authorship was believed to be post-Christian, and no pre-Christian publication of it has ever been found. It is not part of the Septuagint, but is merely an optional addition found in many versions of the Septuagint. It was not deemed inauthentic or heretical. The Catholic church simply could not make the claim for it which it did for the deuterocanonical books, that it had been universally accepted by the entire church since the first preachings of the apostles.

As for your sources, "Jesus is Lord," it is amusing to me that your bible "expert" didn't even know that Susanna and Manasseh are IN the Catholic bible.

His other reasons, debunked;

1. Not one of the apocryphal books is written in the Hebrew language, which was alone used by the inspired historians and poets of the Old Testament. All Apocryphal books are in Greek, except one which is extant only in Latin.

False. At least five of the "apocryphal" books have been proven to have been written in Hebrew or Aramaic. The fact that there is no proof for the other two is thoroughly consistent with the fact that our only pre-Jamnian, Hebrew-language books is the Dead Sea Scrolls, a compilation which also lacks certain books in the Protestant old Testament.

2. None of the apocryphal writers laid claim to inspiration.

Silly. Most of the other OT writers didn't do so either.

3. The apocryphal books were never acknowledged as sacred scriptures by the Jews, custodians of the Hebrew scriptures (the apocrypha was written prior to the New Testament). In fact, the Jewish people rejected and destroyed the apocrypha after the overthow of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.

False. The apocryphal books were regarded as sacred scriptures by the Essenes. The Sadducees did reject them, along with all other Old Testament books, except the five books of Moses. The Pharisees' canon was not fixed, and the New Testament actually even makes reference to books which were eventually rejected by Christians AND Jews, such as the Book of Jubilees (also known as the Apocalypse of Moses).

4. The apocryphal books were not permitted among the sacred books during the first four centuries of the real Christian church (I'm certainly not talking about the Catholic religion which is not Christian).

There is no historical evidence of there being ANY church besides the Catholic/Orthodox Church, which accepted the Septuagint in its entirety. Except for a few side-by-side translations, there are no otherwise complete, extant copies of an Old Testament known to history that did not excluded the deuterocanonical books.

>> The Apocrypha contains fabulous statements which not only contradict the "canonical" scriptures but themselves. For example, in the two Books of Maccabees, Antiochus Epiphanes is made to die three different deaths in three different places. <<

This obviously stems from the author's misunderstandings. It's quite silly, actually. Does he not think that anyone ELSE noticed that for the first 1800 years? Also, consider the geneaologies of Jesus and the events around the crucifixion for apparent contradictions.

>> The Apocrypha includes doctrines in variance with the Bible, such as prayers for the dead and sinless perfection. <<

Thus proving only that Martin Luther and his followers misunderstood the bible.

>> It teaches immoral practices, such as lying, suicide, assasination and magical incantation. <<

Nowhere does it condone suicide or magical incantation. As for assassination and lying, those are also depicted in the rest of the Old Testament (reference Deborah and Abraham).

>> No apocryphal book is referred to in the New Testament whereas the Old Testament is referred to hundreds of times. <<

That is both false and a ridiculous standard: There are 22 Old Testament books in the Protestant canon which are never directly referred to in the Old Testament. There are three books in the deuterocanonicals which are, in fact (Wisdom, Sirach and 2 Maccabees). There are also at least two non-canonical books which are referenced.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.