Mr. Rogers: So...why did the Catholic Church try to keep it out of the hands of those who WERE literate?
Because they didn't.
If you were literate in those days, you were mostly a clergyman or a noble (and that too not all Nobels).
If you were literate in those days, your learning was in Latin, not in your vernacular tongue. Even if you read other books in vernacular tongues, you would still know Latin as that was what the majority of books were written in (case in point, Isaac Newton's works like Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687 were in Latin
If you were educated, you knew Latin and you could freely read any Bible in the Churches (the Bibles, like other books had had to be hand-written and were tremendously expensive)
The Church objected to unauthorized (read Gnostic etc. writings) translations which
“Because they didn’t. / If you were literate in those days, you were mostly a clergyman or a noble (and that too not all Nobels).”
Not true. If it were, there would have been no market for Tyndale’s translation.
Yet at great personal risk, Tyndale’s translation was imported and sold. In 1274, before Wycliffe and the printing press, a Latin Bible would cost the average worker 15 years wages (about 30 Pounds for the Bible). The Wycliffe Bible, done by hand with the goal of getting it to the common man, cost about 1/3 that amount in the 1420s (7-10 Pounds) - still a great amount, but not impossible for a group to buy together, or to buy parts of the Bible. With he help of the printing press, Tyndale’s New Testament - the entire NT, previously unavailable except thru Wycliffe - was down to 1/6th of a Pound.
And people bought them. As Tyndale noted, the Catholic Church had no objection to people buying copies of plays or poems - it only objected to God’s Word being made available.
“Tyndale didn’t make a full translation either. And the 6000 copies published only contained a portion of his partial translation.”
I don’t know how many copies Tyndale was able to produce in spite of the risk to his life, but he had no trouble selling them. The Catholic Church bought a number of copies of his first translation (1526) - so they could be burned. Burned not for notes that didn’t exist, but because it made it possible for a common man to read scripture for himself.
“Since he was a heretic and acting illegally no one should be surprised that anything he produced was viewed as tainted by his heresy. How convenient of you to not mention that he was commonly viewed as a heretic, was printing books without English permission and smuggling them illegally into the country. Little facts like those matter.”
And PRAISE GOD that he did! His translation was excellent. I have a copy next to me as I’m typing, available from Amazon.com! And he was viewed as a heretic by the Catholic Church for saying what scripture says:
“For bi grace ye ben sauyd bi feith, and this not of you; for it is the yifte of God, not of werkis, that no man haue glorie.”
http://wesley.nnu.edu/fileadmin/imported_site/biblical_studies/wycliffe/Eph.txt
He was tried for heresy rather than translation because in Belgium there was no death sentence for translating...so by convicting him of heresy, the Catholic Church could have him killed. Yet his translation lives on, including in the KJV and also in the Douay-Rheims Challoner revision.
If you claim he was a heretic, then why didn’t the Catholic Church make a better translation? The answer is found in an earlier post, or in the post of Cronos:
“In a day and age when books were still expensive and rare, one distorted work could spread havoc not only among the illiterates but among literates who had nothing else to compare with” - which I disagree with, but is at least true to history. The Catholic Church opposed the idea of commoners reading scripture because they couldn’t be trusted with God’s Word.
““The vernacular Bible had been Wycliffe’s great gift to posterity, but he was by no means alone in translating the Scriptures...Did you miss it? THE WYCLIFFE BIBLE MAY NOT HAVE BEEN HIS, BUT MAY HAVE BEEN AN ENGLISH CATHOLIC VERSION PASSED OFF AS HIS!!”
Wycliffe probably did NOT personally translate the entire scripture, but it is silliness to suggest that complete English Bibles were being translated and published by Catholics! Or at least, none has ever been found - just versions of Wycliffe, usually dated to a time prior to the Constitutions of Oxford to make them ‘legal’.
“Also, last time I checked, Tyndale is an all-but-forgotten man remembered by anti-Catholics, a handful of scholars, and some 16th century translation fans while Thomas More is a canonized saint, recognized the world over as a great scholar in his day, and has movies, plays and books about him.”
More was no saint, and it disgraces the Catholic Church to proclaim otherwise. He sought out Protestants to kill them, and hunted Tyndale and lied about Tyndale’s translation. He wrote 750,000 words attacking it, and no one takes his bile seriously. When Tyndale refuted his objections by pointing out Erasmus had translated it the same, he made the point Vlad makes - Erasmus was free to make that translation because he was a loyal Catholic, while Tyndale could not because he was a heretic. As if the truth changes for the person.
Meanwhile, the KJV used roughly 90% of Tyndale’s translation, and the changes made were done by King James for political reasons.
Still, within a few years of Tyndale’s death, copies of his NT - embedded in the “Chained Bible” - were available for anyone to read in every church in England! And that was the victory Tyndale wanted - not fame, no being canonized a saint, not plays, but God’s Word, available to the common man!
If any is interested, I recommend the updated spelling version of Tyndale’s New Testament: