[BroJoeK]

jtal: "This allows protestants to offer a timeline going back before the Reformation."

Attempts to reform corruption and suffocating power in the Roman Catholic Church began with false starts and failures long before Martin Luther's 95 Theses in 1517.
Names like Jan Hus (†1415) and Girolamo Savonarola (†1498) come to immediately mind.

But the core essence of Protestantism is devotion to what the Bible actually says, as opposed to what some bishops somewhere claimed it sort-of means.
So where-ever you can see such devotion before Luther, there you might say are pre-Protestants.
But you really can't have serious Protestants until you have a lot of Bibles available, and many people able to read them, and that didn't really begin until Gutenberg's Bibles, circa 1450.

So Cathars-Albigensians could not be considered pre-Protestants, except in their "maniacal" feelings about fundamental corruption and wickedness in the Roman Catholic Church of their day.

[Petrosius]

Correction:
But the core essence of Protestantism is devotion to what the Bible actually says Protestant theologians claim it sort-of means, as opposed to what some bishops somewhere claimed it sort-of means.

Millions of Catholics have studied the Bible and recognized the truth of Catholicism in it but Protestants never seem to grant Catholics the freedom of interpretation of the Bible that they claim for themselves.

[LurkingSince'98]

hey Bro...

you said “that didn’t really begin until Gutenberg’s Bibles, circa 1450.”

however, you left out that Gutenberg was Catholic and printed ...horrors...Catholic Bibles.

Lurking’