Let's get this straight. I am not a Muslim sympathizer or a Christian basher. But, I can't just sit here and do nothing while you sneer at stryker's comments, because everything in his post is historically accurate.
For goodness sakes, please, take a remedial history course. Haven't you people heard of the Hugonauts and the Valdenses? (English spelling--Waldensians) fdcc, you are a teacher? Shame on you.
When a Bible costs more than the average person's yearly income, aren't you going to keep it under lock and key? That is what it was like before the advent of printing. And people DID know that Christ taught of freedom--they heard readings from the Bible at every mass and were taught through pictures and oral instruction. With the advent of the printing press, the Church authorities clamped down on unauthorized translations of the Bible because of the fear that some people would distribute innacurate or heretical versions. As indeed they did, with Luther's butchered Bible, hacking out any and all statements that didn't meet with his approval.
I know that some people were arrested and even killed. But it was not a one-sided deal--the Protestants killed too, and vandalized priceless works of art.
The idea that there has been, from the times of the Apostles until the Reformation, a secret and continuous society of "Bible-only" Christians constantly harried and persecuted by the "Roman" Church is an utter fabrication. Read the Church fathers. Until the Reformation there was only one Church. (Our split with the Orthodox was -- and still is -- merely political; we could be one again so easily.) The various groups of dissenters that cropped up from time to time were 1) temporary and local and 2) heretics.
The world still makes sense if you give up the paranoid history.