Replies

If not for the Catholic Church assembling and maintaining the integrity of the Bible through the centuries, you would have no Bible to read.

The very opposite is true. The Catholic Church did everything possible to keep the Bible in the common language out of the hands of the laity.

In the clearest language, Wyclif charged the priestly authorities of his time with withholding the Word of God from the laity, and denying it to them in the language the people could understand. And the fact remains that, from his day until the reign of Elizabeth, Catholic England did not produce any translations of the Bible, and the English Reformers were of the opinion that the Catholic hierarchy was irrevocably set against English versions.

William Tyndale had to flee from England to translate his New Testament. In 1526, Tyndale’s English New Testament began trickling into England. The Scriptures, now referred to as the "pirate edition," were printed smaller than conventional books. This made them easier to smuggle in bales of cotton and containers to England. As the "quiet" distribution of Tyndale’s New Testaments continued, it was inevitable that some would fall into the hands of the "enemy." Upon discovery of Tyndale’s work, officials began buying up as many of the English New Testaments as possible. William Tyndale was publicly denounced by the Catholic church. The confiscated Scriptures were then thrown into the fire. Within a decade, Tyndale’s New Testament was widely distributed throughout England. Although the translator’s vision of the ploughboy’s Bible had come to pass, persecution of those caught with this "illegal" book was severe. The prisons were overflowing, hundreds of New Testaments were burned, and believers were even publicly burned at the stake with Tyndale’s New Testament fastened around their necks. His translation of the Old Testament is believed to have been completed during his 18 months in prison. His final words, as he was to be burned at the stake, reveal the heart of God’s martyr, refusing to conform to man’s laws above God: "Lord, open the King of England’s eyes."

The German Bible of Luther was saluted with the greatest enthusiasm, and became the most powerful help to the Reformation. Duke George of Saxony, Duke William of Bavaria, and Archduke Ferdinand of Austria strictly prohibited the sale in their dominions, but could not stay the current. Hans Lufft at Wittenberg printed and sold in forty years (between 1534 and 1574) about a hundred thousand copies,—an enormous number for that age,—and these were read by millions. The number of copies from reprints is beyond estimate. Cochlaeus, the champion of Romanism, paid the translation the greatest compliment when he complained that "Luther’s New Testament was so much multiplied and spread by printers that even tailors and shoemakers, yea, even women and ignorant persons who had accepted this new Lutheran gospel, and could read a little German, studied it with the greatest avidity as the fountain of all truth. Some committed it to memory, and carried it about in their bosom. In a few months such people deemed themselves so learned that they were not ashamed to dispute about faith and the gospel not only with Catholic laymen, but even with priests and monks and doctors of divinity."

One group of Christians was martyred in the year 1519, in Coventry, England, in an area called Little Park. The law they had broken was teaching their children the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments in the English language. Only the Latin Scriptures were considered "holy." The Bible in any other language, including English, was believed "vulgar" and its use labeled heresy.

Papal rage at the Protestant Bible societies of the 19th century, who were translating, printing and distributing millions of Bibles all over the world in the local vernacular language, was voiced by Pope Pius VII in 1816, who declared them "fiendish institutions for the undermining of the foundation of religion." [Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge]

Only after the proliferation of Protestant translations into such common languages as English and German for their respective people, did the Roman Catholic Church finally decide to publish their own vernacular translations. But the Catholic versions had to have the offical doctrines of the RCC included as notes, and of course included the books of the Apocrypha.

If I have the time and the desire, I'll deal with some of the rest of your post later. Or maybe some other poster would like to jump in with a Protestant response.