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Why were the priests and bishops of the WCC (RCC) so intertested in burning piles of well-translated Bibles and desirous to do away with their translators and publishers and distributors in Europe, say, from 1300 to 1600 AD ? One example would be Brother Wycliffe.

The CHURCH of Jesus Christ is a spiritual Body made up of Jew and Gentile baptized by the Holy Spirit into Christ and made one in Him (1 Corinthians 12:12, 13; Colossians 2:11, 12; etc.) So THE CHURCH (Many of God’s children), who were never a part of the WCC (RCC) were involved in the copying of thousands of copies of the Scriptures, which became the Majority Text; the Textus Receptus. Everything being used by the RCC today is from an Alexandrian type text. Many Orthodox Catholics (Greek Orth.; etc.) still use a Majority Text derivative Greek Bible. But not the RCC.

There are some fine folks at Ex-Orthodox for Christ who can explain the history of textual evidence to you.

exorthodoxforchrist.com

You still haven't admitted the base point of your entire argument (Peter wasn't in Rome because the Bible doesn't say so) is wrong as proved in post 251. The problem is that you misinterpret the Bible, you say Peter wasn't in Rome because the Bible doesn't explicitly say so. You would by extension say that Japan never existed / exists because the Bible doesn't say so -- it's ridiculous. Then, you say that you think the Bible underwent tampering because it came to you through The Church.

Your own personal misinterpretations would also lead you to deny the Trinity (as unitarians do) as that specific word isn't there in the Bible. your own personal misinterpretation would lead to errors like that of Arius or Mohammed (the latter probably intentional) where you would state that Christ was not God.

The Bible as given through The Church (btw The Church consists of the Latin, Maronite, Eastern Orthodox etc. Churches -- all branches of The One Holy, Catholic and Aspotolic Church) Bible as shared by Roman Catholics and other Churchs in communion with Rome is the same as the Eastern Orthodox Bible.

The problem is that many groupings like your own erroneously come to the laughable idea that the Catholic Church did not come into being until the fourth century. when Emperor Constantine legitimized Christianity in the Roman Empire. They believe that somehow, Christianity was a pure religion until A.D. 325 when Constantine converted to Christianity. At this point, he "Romanized" it and somehow corrupted the faith of all of the believers. This same theory teaches that the Christian faith was brought back to purity through the Protestant Reformers when Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses on the door of the church in Wittenburg in the sixteenth century and started the Protestant Reformation. A similar theory is taught by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons). The Mormons believe that the Church became corrupt directly after the deaths of the Apostles and was "restored" by Joseph Smith in the early 1800s. Once examined, these theories fall apart. First of all, if the Faith were impure from 325 (or some earlier date) until the early 1500s, what happened to all of the Christians who lived between those dates? How could they have come to know God if the Faith had been corrupted? The answer is that the Faith has NEVER been corrupted. Remember, Christ told His disciples in the Gospel of St. Matthew (verses quoted two paragraphs below) that the gates of Hell would never defeat His Church. If God allowed Constantine (or anyone, for that matter) to corrupt the Faith for almost twelve centuries (or any other length of time), then Jesus would have lied when He made that statement. Of course, those of us who are Christians know that Christ never would have lied about anything. Therefore, those theories must be wrong.

you talk about how the "true Christians" hid from the "corrupted Church" for hundreds of years until the Protestant Reformation. This was taught in order to make it seem like a small fraction of the original Church must have survived despite the "corrupted Church." The problem is, history does not support this claim. The only groups that hid from the Church were groups of heretics, many of whom believed things inimical not only to Catholicism, but even also to Protestantism. These "heretics", as we Catholics call them, definitely did not believe all of the same things as the early Church. Many of them did not believe in the Divinity of Christ, or the Holy Trinity, or believed various other pernicious errors. Also, none of these groups ever survived for very long. Eventually their causes died because they could not gain enough support to last for more than a few hundred years, at the very most. In actuality, Christianity was made legal in the Roman Empire in the year 313. Twelve years later, the first Ecumenical Council (a council where the bishops of the world are gathered together) was held in Nicaea. This Council made several beliefs of the Church into dogmas. Dogmas are beliefs which members of the Catholic Church must believe without reservation if they are to remain members of the Church. Several of these dogmas included the Divinity of Christ and the Godhood of the Holy Trinity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: three Persons, one God. Did Constantine corrupt the Church? Well, he was at the Council of Nicaea, but only to give support and to announce his decision to make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. At the same time, he outlawed the cult of the Emperor and the old Roman religion (Jupiter, Venus, Mars, etc.).

the Catholic Church is called catholic (and not Lutheran, Calvinist, Baptist, etc.). The word catholic comes from the Greek word kaqolikoV (katholikos), which means "universal." To say that the Church is catholic means that it does (or should) exist in all times and places, throughout the world. For this reason, the Catholic Church is not a denomination: denomination means "of a name" (i.e., the Lutherans are of Luther, the Calvinists are of Calvin, etc.). The Catholic Church is also not a sect: sects are divisions within a religion not necessarily named after their founders, and Catholicism is the epitome of unity, not division; that is to say, Catholicism is the original Christianity! All forms of non-Catholic Christian groups are sects, and some are denominations. Even those who call themselves "non-denominational" are in reality a small sect. Thusly, the reason that I interchange "Catholic" and "Christian" when writing of these early times, is that at this time ALL Christians were Catholic! With the exception of a few heretical sects such as the Gnostics, no group used the name Christian except those in the Catholic Church.

In the early years of Christianity, the word "Scripture" referred only to what we call the Old Testament. The Old Testament was origianlly written in Hebrew and Aramaic, but was translated into Greek before the time of Christ. The books that were written after the resurrection of Christ (which we came to call the New Testament) were not considered Scripture as soon as they were written. The Bible as we know it, Old Testament and New, first took shape in the fourth century. St. Jerome, a multilingual scholar, translated the Bible (which he called Divina Bibliotheca, or Divine Library) into Latin. This Latin translation, known as the Vulgate, is considered by many scholars (even modern ones) as being the most accurate translation of the Bible ever made. St. Jerome knew at least four languages fluently: Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. This fact made him the perfect choice for translation of the Bible into Latin, since it was written in the other three languages. As a side note, many Protestants believe that the Catholic Church would not let the Bible be translated into the vernacular languages, but Latin WAS a vernacular language throughout Europe until around A.D. 1000, and remained so in Italy until the fifteenth century when Dante's The Divine Comedy became popular. St. Jerome spoke and wrote those four languages fluently, NEAR IN TIME TO WHEN THE NEW TESTAMENT WAS WRITTEN! This is important, because words in living languages can change meaning over periods of time. Consider how much English has changed over the last two hundred years! When scholars today translate Greek and Hebrew from two thousand or more years ago, the meaning can be approximated, but not exactly known.

Latin is, for all practical purposes, a dead language, and has been so for almost a thousand years. While many people still read Latin (and a few speak and write it), only literally a couple of words are added to Latin every year, and the existing words do not change meaning. Understand this: the Catholic Church determined the Canon of the Bible! There have been two "versions" (for lack of a better word) of the Old Testament, throughout history: the Alexandrian Canon, used by Greek-speaking Jews, and the Palestinian Canon, used by Hebrew-speaking Jews. The Alexandrian Canon was completed by either 70 or 72 Greek scholars between 250 and 125 B.C. This canon was also known as the Septuagint, which comes from the Greek word for seventy (the number of translators). At this time, Hebrew was a dying language, and most Jews in Palestine spoke Aramaic and Greek. Since Greek was the primary language of the entire Mediterranean region at the time of Christ, the Jews of that era (including the authors of the New Testament and Christ Himself) used the Alexandrian Canon of the Old Testament.