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.

Minor nit-picks with my own writing:

"The Catholic "religious left" is more a reaction to ... French, Mexican, and Spanish revolutions."

In fairness, those revolutions are not coincidentally from Catholic nations. Just as Lutheranism led, in small part, to the terrors of Nazis, the failings of Catholics led, in small part, to the under-rated but equally horrific Napoleonic wars, as well as the Mexican and Spanish revolutions, and true Catholicism has not reasserted itself entirely from these errors; indeed, the atrocious state of morality in Mexico is in large part because of the corruption of the Mexican church by the Trotskyite Mexican government. (And calling it Trotskyite is no slur; it was essentially shaped by Trotsky and Lenin who lived there.)

>> which are from a very seperate culture from the Anglo-Scot-Dutch cultures that shaped America's protestant religious tradition. <<

Calvinism forms a point of commonality between the German agnostic left and the American religious left. Calvinism assures people that they are going to Heaven, without any experience of purgation, immediately apon their confession of Christ as their savior. On the right, this causes judgementalism, for it motivates people not to see what they have in common with sinners. On the left, this causes libertinism, since the sinning Calvinist believes his sin must not be sin, since he sins despite professing Christ.

>> In this, he was in near-perfect accord with Freud. <<
I must emphasize, I mean this only in this precise point. Luther's position is commendable in some ways, because it presumes that the subject is protecting himself in God's love; Freud's position in undefensible, since, absent an emphasis on the miraculous grace of God, it leads more directly to simply loving sin.

FOr healing to take place, whether one subscribes to Lutherism (a term I invent to be broader than the sect known as Lutheranism, since many non-Lutheran Protestants embrace the three "solas") or Catholicism, one must immediately displace the sinful tendencies with an experience of the love of Christ, or else, roughly as Jesus put it, seven demons will replace the one who left. For this reason, I prefer supplanting Sola Fides with Sola Caritas, rather than simply Sola Gratis, since it emphasizes that the "Gratis" of Christ is "Caritas." Plus it is very biblical. "For these three things abide: Faith, Hope and Love; and the greatest of these is Love" -- St. Paul

>> Protestants will never shake the faith of truly spiritual Catholics with ad-hominems against the Church. <<

I add that in as a tangent to my own issues, not to assert that is Redgolum's intention.

Definitely a different "Luther". I think you are confusing him with one of his buddies.

Surprised you didn't bring up "Luther's antisemitic writings". That would demonstrate that you are not grasping everything going on in the Reformation. Many early reformers and protestants figured out that it was NOT a good idea to badmouth Catholics, Catholicism, or peculiarly Catholic beliefs as long as the local prince (or other government head) was a Catholic, even if only a nominal Catholic.

So, they began preaching against "the Jews". That was considered acceptable. However, when you get into those sermons and you find disputations over Communion, Baptism, the nature of the Trinity, and so forth, it becomes pretty clear that these guys mostly meant Catholics where they used the word "Jews".

It's still a good idea to only bring into the priesthood men of sound morals who should otherwise be married ~ (kind of what the Orthodox do, and those guys are virtually ALWAYS married when ordained, and the community makes sure they get all the really hot babes ~ so I've heard).

>> If by the "Q" school, you mean literary critcism, remember that there are many Roman Catholic apologists who have embraced it. <<

Yes, they did, and for that reason I spoke of the German-speaking culture, and not of Lutherans. Heidegger is also embraced by many Catholics. My point was only that the intellectual movements were related, not that the error of the "Q" school is a necessary conclusion of Lutherism.

>> Luther did hint at various things he saw in seminary, and his out right shock at what he saw in Rome of the time. <<

You do realize that historians, Catholic, secular, and Protestant, highly doubt Luther's claims of Rome, as they were very inconsistent with better-established histories. For instance, most of the funds that the Catholic church was raising was being spent on fighting Islam, not on the wealth and splendor he relates. On the other hand, it is possible that he was merely exaggerating; certainly, Rome at the time was spending significant amounts on very majestic material things such as St. Peter's. (Not purely materialist, since the subjects were chosen to glorify Christ and proclaim that such matters were what the church found worthy of exaltation; nonetheless, I must concede a substantial amount of materialist corruption.)

I recognize what you say about having to go to work; I am feeling quite prolific on FR this afternoon... Must be maintaining 50 WPM with gusts to hurricane forces :^D... I'll look forward to reading more...

>> So, they began preaching against "the Jews". <<

That's interesting, and certainly helps me make sense of Luther's "antisemitism" which never seemed consistent to me with the rest of his writings. (Nonetheless, one must recognize the moral danger of ascribing all sorts of vicious things to a third party because you know you'll never get away with making such slanderous assertions about your true, more powerful enemies... Certainly, regardless of his intent, Luther's writings did contribute to a feeling of anti-semitism which persisted for centuries and which helped "arm" Hitler's rhetoric.)

By the way, the church scandals leave me more open to the Orthodox policies. And I can say that in good, Catholic faith, since the Church does recognize their position is merely one of discipline and preference, and not an eternal, infallible teaching. I very, very much value celibate priests, however, and could easily imagine the pressures of family life could result in bad priestly priorities; medieval Russia had a different economic structure than medieval Europe or modern America. I am upset with the number of priests around here (Northern Virginia) more committed to running non-profit organizations, from the very noble (Fr. McCloskey) to the very leftist, than they are to promoting the sacraments. Married priests would surely make this worth. The only question is which is the worst outcome! But I do believe that Rome (as opposed to the apostate hell-bound perverts who run much of the American church) is now aiming for the highest idealism, and I can't begrudge them that.

Incidentally, the bible does say that celibacy is superior to marriage, and that the best should be chosen for the priesthood. The particular problem with Luther's day was that the economic structure often pressured people into the priesthood who did not sense any calling.

Don't stop at Luther ~ you have to go backwards in time all the way to the Jewish rebellion against Rome circa 70AD to find the roots of European dislike/distrust of Jews.

They were antisemitic before they were Christian.

Notice that I very carefully said that Luther (and many others) addressed their invective to the Jews because that was acceptable ~ not that any of them were antisemitic. In fact, many of the people doing this had never met a Jew, wouldn't know one if they met one, and might well find many Orthodox services to be, well, familiar!

That doesn't mean they couldn't also be antisemitic, but against who?

Oh, there are many sources of anti-semitism, including Catholic ones. I wasn't laying all the blame at Luther. I was just pointing out that asserting that Luther didn't really mean the Jews hardly sanitizes that episode of significant moral failings.

And, I use "Lutherism" instead of "Reformist" because "Reformist" has now come to connote (although imprecisely) Calvinism. Since Luther was a staunch opponent of Calvin, it doesn't seem fair to me to lump them together; "Protestantism" almost seems closer to what I mean by "Lutherism," but is too broad.

Luther's infamous "On the Jews and Their Lies" was antisemitic. Many were at that time. Luther thought that many Jews would convert to Christianity from his preaching, and was bitterly disappointed when that didn't happen.

In that area of Europe, there was a long standing feeling of antisemitism. It was part of the everyday culture, and was unfortunately very common.

The roots of that are very complex. Some (as you said muawiah) came from the Jewish revolt against Rome. Some came from the kingdom of the Khazzar's (who converted to Judaism in part because they were in between the caliphs and the Byzantines, and wanted to stay some what neutral). Part of it was just the same old theme, "The look and act different, so they are evil!". A thread about this would be interesting, but not very PC.

One more thing before I head home.

I was referencing Luther's reaction to the worldly court he saw at Rome, not the vast building projects. He was scandalized more by the irreverent priests, prostitutes openly soliciting priests (and getting clients!) and the general lack of reverence present in Rome at the time. Luther was very excited to see Rome, and left very downtrodden. His fellow companion on the trip, who had been to Rome before, had tried to warn Luther of what it was like before hand, but he was still shocked.

The problems he had with the building projects came later during the indulgence scandals. That was because many people viewed the buying of the indulgence as a license to sin (which it was not, but many sellers didn't correct the impression).

Still, in Luther's day, the so-called "Rhine Valley Jewish Communities" had been gone for since before the pograms of the plague years, and the more recent immigration of Jews from Poland to the German states had not yet begun.

Actually, outside of Spain, there had not been any large Jewish populations, and that one involved something between 60,000 to 100,000 people at the time of the expulsions.

Populations were far smaller in those days than we are used to in modern times, so 60K folks is, for the time, a fair population. Still, when you consider that at least half of the Spanish Jews ventured East to Baghdad, or just to Morocco rather than North to Poland, it's not difficult to believe that they were able to do so without some degree of certainty that they would arrive ~ it's not like millions of people being driven into the wilderness.

The more I study the movement of the Ladino speaking population of Medieval Spain the more I wonder just who could have been the "Jews" Luther was disappointed about not being able to convert. The suspicion grows that we are discussing a few dozen, or maybe as many as a hundred, and not at all the tens of thousands of popular imagination.

Fur Shur, if I'd been there at the time I'd have moved to Poland and left the Germans and their nasty little manure clogged towns alone, and that's a thought not to be scoffed at. Although Poland was less developed, populations were lower, food was more plentiful, the people were obedient to the local lords, and the king thought highly of Jews ~ his ambition was simple ~ to gain in a single generation the sort of economic and industrial development it took centuries to build in Spain and Italy. A progressive guy like that just had to be attractive to what was then the world's largest industrial class.

Not that this justifies Luther's ravings, but the strong suggestion is there that ALL of them were directed at the Catholics, including the need to "convert" them to his point of view.

If I can jump into being un-PC: The Jews "started it." By stripping Christians of their status as members of various synagogues, Christians were exposed to the Roman draft, which had exempted Jews. Of course, laying this fault on the Jews is desperately unfair, since the Jews could very reasonable be afraid that Christian goal of gaining converts would be taken as a deal-breaker between the Jews and the Romans: The exemption was insignificant to the Romans, and worth the price to keep the peace with the Jews who were an amazingly strong threat to the empire, having prevously been the catalyst for the destruction of the Hellenic empire. It's a totally false notion that the Jews were a small, insignificant portion of the Roman population; in fact, a long secession of emporers preceded Pilate as governors of Judea. Christianity threatened to make the numbers of the Jews overwhelming. Excluding the Christians was likely the only way of maintaining the exemption for any Jews at all.

However, once excluded, the Christians became the focus of many brutal, vicious persecutions because they refused to worship the Emperor and related Roman gods, as all soldiers were required to do.

Because of the sharp split between Christian and Jew, initiated by the Jews, by the time the gospels were in their final edits, "Jew" became not synonymous with the children of Abraham, but referred exclusively to those Jews who explicitly rejected Christ. Hence, "the Jews," as used in the gospels never included the apostles, Jesus and his family, or the throngs who came to hear Jesus preach, even though most Christians at the time they were written would have considered themselves Jewish. (Paul gives a false impression by suggesting that his people had rejected Christ. By this, he meant only the residents of the Kingdom of Judea and of Galilee; Many Hellenic Jews did become Christian.)

Nonetheless, throughout history, Christian attitudes towards Jews ranged from condescending to hostile, in clear violation of the message of Christ. No denomination in Europe is sinless in their mistreatment of Jews.

By the time of Luther, Jews were seen as resistant and contrarian outsiders living in the midst of Christians, belying the supposition that everyone would become Christian if only made aware of the benefits. As such, they were reasonably, but unjustly seen as a threat to any consensus necessary for maintaining a strong nation.

Whatever Western Europeans thought about Jews, by the late 1400s there were remarkably few of them anywhere in Western Europe.

Martin Luther was born 1483 and died in 1546.

His life overlaps most of the expulsions, although the "big one" was in 1492, and he was just 11 years old.

By the time he was a young man there were few Jews around Western Europe that he could encounter.

This reminds me of the Ku Klux Klan in the Midwest in the 1920s. They were against Negroes, Catholics and Jews. For the most part there were few Negroes and fewer Jews in that part of the world ~ there were, though, plenty of Catholics. Still, your typical Ku Klux Klan member in those days reserved his invective for the Negroes and Jews.

I've often suspected that if they'd been equally noisy about the Catholics (who lived there in the millions), the Klan would have been shut down far sooner than was the ultimate case.

I see you are the moderator of the Jewish ping list. I have written as a part of this thread a very curt history of relationships between Jews and Christians... although not nearly as unfair (hopefully) as it mind seem from the first sentence, so please read more than the first sentence.

I hate to talk about people behind their backs. Especially when they are The People (hehehe...) I tried to be balanced... but not terribly hard, at all... and I was taking one side. I really am not looking to hijack this into an entire new thread, and certainly not looking to start a flame war with Jews, who I highly admire for loving God without expecting the goodies that too many of us Christians expect to get. (I probably admire the faith of conservative and Orthodox Jews more than I do of most Christians.) But I thought that some Jewish people may be better at balancing my statements that I am, so invite them to do so, if anyone feels it necessary to do so.

I promise I won't get bogged down into a back-and-forth... probably I'll be too busy saying, "sorry, that's not how I meant that" or "oooh, I shouldn't've worded it that way."

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