“dear sir, without the Catholic Church receiving the original books and hand copying them for 1,500 years ( thank a monk next time you see one! ) you would have no Bible and in all likelihood, would be a pagan.”
You mean hiding them and keeping them from people, refusing to allow any but selected individuals to read them.
hiding them? LOL! attend Mass and you will hear practically the entire Bible read in a three year period. they sure went to a lot of trouble to copy and preserve the Word, if they were trying to hide them. wouldn’t it have been easier to order no more copies made? such nonsense!
you do agree the Church was given the authority to teach in Matthew 28 and scripture is not supposed to be privately interpreted against doctrines taught by the Church?
In the West nearly any person who could read could read the Vulgate Bible, since for most of the period Vulgate Latin was the only written language in Western Europe. The first appearances of proto-French and proto-German were in the Treaty of Verdun, written for Charlemagne's grandsons. There was no significant literature in these languages, or Anglo-Saxon or Welsh for well into the second millennium AD. At that time Italian WAS Vulgate Latin and Spain was essentially an islamic country. The problem was the absence of libraries and the high cost of buying a bible, since it involved thousands of hours of hand copying, not something your average shopkeeper could afford.