Bible-Burners (build it yourself bibles)

New Oxford Review ^ | February 2004 | Dwight Longenecker

[NYer]

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.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

****. We use the complete Book.***

Oh I forgot to mention I have one of those also (Douai Rheims). Good read.

[Señor Zorro]

It is silly to allege that they were written in Greek, rather than Hebrew.

Oh? Well, according to part of that Britannica article: "Two of the Old Testament Hagiographa (Ketuvim; see above The Hebrew canon)—Daniel and Esther—contain, in their Greek translations, numerous additions." As I understand it, these were the portions removed by the Protestants.

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.

Not according to a Catholic site. At http://www.justforcatholics.org/a108.htm it says:
"The practice of the Church up to the time of the Reformation was to follow the judgment of Jerome who rejected the Old Testament apocrypha on the grounds that these books were never part of the Jewish canon. These were permissible to be read in the churches for the purposes of edification but were never considered authoritative for establishing doctrine. The Protestants did nothing new when they rejected the apocrypha as authoritative Scripture. It was the Roman church that rejected this tradition and ‘canonized’ the ecclesiastical books." It also affirms what I said about Jerome. I think it is you, not I, who needs to check their data. Here is another source asserting that the dispute over the Apocrypha predates the Reformation. Cite your sources, for I see no backup for your contention.

Martin Luther preached people should subscribe to any ungodly passion that occurred to them. His serial adulteries were not moral failures...

Where do you get that Martin Luther was a serial adulterer? I have not heard it before, I have not read it anywhere before, and multiple internet searches failed to yield anything. Cite your sources.

Luther, moreover, preached justification through faith in Jesus. This is a Biblical teaching. "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast." Ephesians 2:8-9. Works are the result of faith, but do nothing to save us. Luther wrote to this affect.

"Works must be done, but it does not follow from this that works save....Works save externally, that is, they testify that we are just and that in a man there is the faith which saves him internally, as Paul says: 'With the heart man believeth unto rigteousness, ande with the mouth confession is made unto salvation'" --Martin Luther (What Luther Says, v.3, p.1509)

"This text, then, applies to our doctrine of justification, according to which a man must be rigteous before all works and is accepted by God without all works, through that grace alone which his faith believes and aprehends the mercy of God which is set forth in Christ. In this confidence in the mercy of God the true church goes about, with a humble confession of her sins and unworthiness, confidently expecting God to forgive her through Christ." Martin Luther (What Luther Says, vol.1, pg. 490)

The term is an invention of Luther; I use it as Luther did.

False. Sola scriptura says that the Bible alone is inerrant. You are not using it as Luther did. If you are, cite Luther.

Without such an assertion, the Pope is merely stating his opinion.

That is all he is doing. The Pope is all too human. "But you are not to be called 'Rabbi,' for you have only one Master and you are all brothers. And do not call anyone on earth 'father,' for you have one Father, and he is in heaven." Matthew 23:8-9

As for 3 Maccabees, it's authorship was believed to be post-Christian, and no pre-Christian publication of it has ever been found.

My point simply being that it was included in the Septuagint and the Catholic church excluded it. As for the other books, your source (http://biblescripture.net/Canon.html)lists them as absent.

One thing you need to understand about the reasons is that they are a conglomeration.

Also, consider the geneaologies of Jesus and the events around the crucifixion for apparent contradictions.

They are not contradictions and you know it. Here is a page listing some ways in which the Apocrypha contradicts scripture: http://www.justforcatholics.org/a109.htm As for your other "debunkings", cite some sources.

[TradicalRC]

The Northern states had eliminated slavery. That was the issue that brought on the war.

Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware. Please read your history before making an assertion.

[muawiyah]

Those are the BORDER STATES. You are confounding "Union" with "Northern". They have different meanings, particular in Souvrn' where "northern" appears in the expression (erroneous btw) "War of Northern Aggression".

You will notice, also that Northern Virginia itself had a "rump" Union government, as did Arkansas ~ in fact, Arkansas had essentially two separate and functioning state governments during most of the Civil War.

That was the last time Arkansas had "any" functioning state government ~ since then it's been pretty much "Bill Clinton", one right after the other.

Louisiana also had a Union "military government" pretty early on when it was retaken by the Union.

So, the answer is that ALL Northern states had abolished slavery. Some border states retained slavery. All Souvrn' states had slavery, even when reclaimed by the Union.

Full abolition had to await a Constitutional amendment.

You have to treat the breakup of the Holy Roman Empire after Charlemagne's death pretty much the same way. It didn't turn into just France, and just Germany ~ there was another country in the middle stretching from Nederland to Sicily. I believe it was called Thurungia.

[dangus]

Just for Catholics is NOT a Catholic web site. It is a Protestant web site which targets Catholics for conversion/apostasy by attacking Catholic beliefs.

>> My point simply being that it was included in the Septuagint and the Catholic church excluded it. As for the other books, your source <<

And my point is that the Septuagint, as defined as the pre-Christian canon which was popularized by Hellenic Jews and became the basis for the Christian Old Testament, included 1 and 2 Maccabees, but not 3 Maccabees.

[dangus]

>> The LCMS was a participant in the talks until the Appendix of the agreement was added, which basically recended the rest of the document. At that point, signing the document would have been wrong since it really didn't say anything. <<

I have encountered many LCMS who were very, very disdainful of such ecumenical dialogues (and frankly, I respected their reasoning on occasion). If I have mischaracterized the LCMS' rejection of the document, I regret it.

>> Second, you mentioned Luther's "serial adulteries", which were those? Or are you talking about Luther's friend Phillip of Hesse? <<

No, I meant Luther. Right now, I can't find the source. But since my intent was not to commit ad-hominem against Luther, but to point out that his notion of Sola Fides was very much different than what most modern Protestants believe it to have been, and that modern Protestants' notion of Sola Fides is much closer to the Catholic church, I hope this quote will suffice at making the point:

" Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong, sin boldly, but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where justice resides. We, however, says Peter (2. Peter 3:13) are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth where justice will reign. "

Luther believed that sinning, while having faith in Christ, was virtuous because it enabled the sinner to experience even more greatly the love that Jesus has for the sinner, rather than allow guilt and feelings of unworthiness to prevent him from coming to Christ. Luther is further from the "religious right" than he is from Freudianism and biblical skepticism that 20th-century Germany.

[Señor Zorro]

Just for Catholics is NOT a Catholic web site. It is a Protestant web site which targets Catholics for conversion/apostasy by attacking Catholic beliefs.

I apologize. Simple misunderstanding. Are you saying then, that Protestantism is apostasy? Do you really believe that Protestants are damned?

You still haven't answered any of my epistemological questions. Until you do, I shan't answer any of your objections. Can't you handle this young cockerel?

[TradicalRC]

Are you saying that the four states mentioned were NOT considered Union states?

[redgolum]

The "Sin Bravely" reference comes from two places.

One was a letter to Phillip Melanchthon. Phillip was worrying over something, (can't remember what) and was bouncing back and forth. Luther basically told him to make up his mind, and go forth boldy. In the Small Catechism that Luther wrote, "Sinning that grace might increase" is condemned.

The other reference came from a few of his "Table Talk" conversations. The students asked one of the classic questions: What do you do in a situation where any choices you make will result in a sin? Luther's answer was again, make your choice with prayer, and then go bodly.

As for serial adultery, Luther never really wanted to get married. There were several nuns who wanted out of the convent, and he helped them escape. Most of them were married off rather quickly but one (Katie) refused to be, unless it was to Luther himself.

[dangus]

>> I apologize. Simple misunderstanding. Are you saying then, that Protestantism is apostasy? Do you really believe that Protestants are damned? <<

Apology accepted; I did think that you merely deceived by "Just for Catholics," and meant no deceit yourselves. My main point for including "/apostasy" is that the web site aims at promoting Protestantism not by displacing the Catholic faith with a "better" Protestant one, but by destroying the Catholic faith in a vague hope that once the person's Catholic faith is sufficiently undermined, they may happen to find a Protestant faith. That's just plain evil.

I do not believe all Protestants are bound for hell. I do believe that absent the surety of the one, true faith founded by Christ, Protestants must rely on the extra-ordinary graces of Christ. While that sounds harsh, I'm sure you'll recognize that ANY faith must believe that about itself, or be simply inter-religious mush. I may, however, put far more faith in those extra-ordinary graces than Mel Gibson and certain other traditionalists partly because I believe I have witnessed the Holy Spirit working amid Protestant faiths and partly because I find far greater conciliation between modern Catholic ecumenism and traditional triumphantalism; but I don't know whether what I have witnessed is signatory grace or prevening grace (i.e., signs that the person IS saved, or signs that the person is being called TO salvation.

>> You still haven't answered any of my epistemological questions. <<

I'm sorry. I haven't been dodging your questions, but trying to do the best I can with limited resources. Can you please restate which questions I have inadequately addressed?

[Gamecock]

***I do not believe all Protestants are bound for hell.***


That's the nicest thing you've ever said.

[dangus]

I think you are trying to reverse-engineer a defense for Luther's position, or your formation has been led by those who have. It is not a coincidence that the "Q" school, Freud, Marx, and Hegel (and even the more Catholic Heidegger) all spoke German; theirs is a natural extension of Germany's incumbent religious beliefs, which are from a very seperate culture from the Anglo-Scot-Dutch cultures that shaped America's protestant religious tradition.

The protestant "religious right" seems unaware that the protestant "religious left" comes from the same traditions as itself. (The Catholic "religious left" is more a reaction to hardships of the political and religious isolation of the industrial revolution, and the invidious, pernicious corruption introduced by the French, Mexican, and Spanish revolutions. One thing I think conservative Catholics (Thomas, Roberts, Scalia, etc.) deserve credit where they sometimes get blame is that they still understand the catholic left.)

The Catholic church held that both faith and works were signs of grace, and that they inherently led to each other. Luther rejected this. He also, like Freud, Hagel, and Marx, also rejected reason, whereas the Church Fathers defined the "catholic faith" as innately unified through reason. To Luther, reason was a stumbling block, and worked to convince Man that he was unworthy of God's love. Luther, therefore, believed that an experience of redemption, as witnessed through a healing from sinfulness, was a necessary part of the process of experiencing God's love.

It's not that he believed that sinning results directly in grace, but he believed in something close enough that he felt it necessary to clarify that point in the Small Catechism and elsewhere. It's that he felt that the temptation to sin was a result of a lack of faith and that having faith was the only issue. Luther's point, which was adopted by Freud and Hegel, was that the fear of the sin prevented the experience of grace. One shouldn't sin for the mere sake of sinning, but if fear of sinning held one back from doing what one must do to experience grace, than the person should not fear sin at all.

The problem with this is that Luther expected that the Catholic Church's religiosity was the only thing that made sinful people shameful. Destroy the source of that religiosity which he considered false, and Luther believed that you would destroy that shamefulness. In this, he was in near-perfect accord with Freud. Unfortunately, the true human condition is that we can innately be ashamed, and that the experience of greatly sinful acts can result in a state of "scandal."

"Scandal," as used here and by the Catholic Church, is a state where psychological and spiritual harm have resulted in a soul which is resistant to evanglization and accepting of the Love which is true precursor and fulfillment of both faith and works.

If you search, you will find me asserting that the sexual-abuse "scandal" of the Catholic church ("scandal," here, fulfills both the classical and modern use of the word) is nothing new. I believe firmly that Luther was reacting to sexual abuse he experienced in seminaries; In fact, since gaining such a supposition, I discovered that indeed he did reference "unspeakable horrors and perversions" which went on the seminaries, and, since he blamed them on celibacy, cannot one safely presume that such perversions were sexual in nature?

I believe that receiving such horrible, sinful, abuse made Luther incapable of successfully dealing with the rigors of celibacy, as Pope Benedict XVI and John XXIII both warned would happen if sexually unhealthy persons enter the priesthood. I further believe that what Luther needed was an experience of pure and unconditional love. I believe that what Freud could not recognize was that a fourth fixation exists, sexual fixation, and that he could not recognize it because he was in the midst of it, and that Luther, also, was sexually fixated. I believe that Luther is a very pitiable, even empathetic man, who sought only assurance that God did indeed love him, and was angry at a Church which was incapable of communicating that love to him. I believe that as a Catholic, I am compelled to believe in the possible redemption of such a man, in spite of what horrors he may have unintentionally released, and I am urgently led to pray for him by the church when we pray, as a church, for Jesus to "lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of [His] mercy." I believe that Luther was wrong, but was driven to his positions by the inadequacy and sinfulness of the representatives of His church, who are protected as a collective from proclaiming false doctrine, but not from performing unspeakable acts of wickedness.

Protestants will never shake the faith of truly spiritual Catholics with ad-hominems against the Church. As one faithful and, yes, very Catholic, church father said, "the highway to Hell is paved with the skulls of bishops."

[dangus]

>> That's the nicest thing you've ever said. <<

*scratches his head for a while, pausing to consider how to respond to what may have been nice, but very well may be the most left-handed comment he's ever received. Ah, here's a way:*

"Thanks. I had you in mind when I said it."

:^D Just teasing...

[dangus]

By the way, I was in a bit of a rush, and regrettably overlooked stating the most important comment:

Herm! Where've you been? I've missed reading your comments! It's good to hear from you.

[dangus]

( In the computer-based Role-playing games I regrettably got into in college, there was often a "senseii" or "liegemaster" who aided newbies in their initial forays into combat, and then typically faded into the background once the player has learned sufficient combat skills to survive. I kinda feel like you were my senseii on FR's religion forum. :^D )

[Gamecock]

LOL!

[dangus]

Based on your kind words last week, I thought you might be interested in this take of mine of Martin Luther, and also this seperate issue, on the battles with the French "Reformers" : http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1597455/posts?page=158#158, which was substantially modified on post #161.

[dangus]

It's good not to take ourselves too seriously. This IS supposed to be a FRiendly discussion. Cheers!

[redgolum]

It is not a coincidence that the "Q" school, Freud, Marx, and Hegel (and even the more Catholic Heidegger) all spoke German; theirs is a natural extension of Germany's incumbent religious beliefs, which are from a very seperate culture from the Anglo-Scot-Dutch cultures that shaped America's protestant religious tradition.

Now that is a thread all by itself. Problem is you see, the "germans" were all over by the that time. We usually talk about them as Normans, Lombards, etc. One of the charges that the Eastern Orthodox make (with some merit) is that the Western Christianity changed its view point after the Barbarian invasion.

If by the "Q" school, you mean literary critcism, remember that there are many Roman Catholic apologists who have embraced it. Despite the pitfals and dangers it so obviously has. It did indeed develop in Germany, but not just in the Protestant areas. Germany was not unified until late in the 1800's, and the trend to skepticism was endemnic in both the Protestant north and Catholic south. In many ways it was such things that led my great grandfathers to leave and come to America (that and the Prussian Union).

Interesting point about the reoccuring sexual scandals. Luther did hint at various things he saw in seminary, and his out right shock at what he saw in Rome of the time.

I feel that there is more to say here, but I have to go back to work. I will try to type more later.

[muawiyah]

They were NOT considered "Northern States". They certainly were "Union States", and so was Northern Virginia (under occupation).

Again, let's try this again ~ All America was divided into three parts. The Northern States ~ the Souvrn' States ~ the Border States.