"And yet people hand copied Bibles until. . . well, today. People in the last few centuries did it whe they had little money or as an act of devotion. The Brethren - a modern day cult - copies NTs by hand, for instance.
The contention was that Bibles were not available to be read by folks, because of their rarety caused by the limitations imposed by being a large handwritten article.
**large handwritten article.**
Would not that have been a large handwritten scroll in the beginning?
http://www.ideafinder.com/features/everwonder/won-printbook.htm
The first mass produced printed book was the Bible, a version based on the Latin edition from about 380 AD.. The Bible was printed at Mainz, Germany by Johannes Gutenberg from 1452 -1455.. Although German bibliographers claim that it was may also have been finished and perfected by Johann Fust, a wealthy financier who gained Gutenberg’s share of the business in a lawsuit; and Peter Schöffer, Gutenberg’s assistant.
The oldest surviving Bible printed with movable type is often called the Gutenberg Bible (named after its printer Johannes Gutenberg), or the 42-line Bible (so called because with few exceptions, each page has 42 lines of print), or the Mazarin Bible (because the first copy to recapture attention in 1760 was found in the library of Cardinal Jules Mazarin, in Paris).
You wrote:
“The contention was that Bibles were not available to be read by folks, because of their rarety caused by the limitations imposed by being a large handwritten article.”
And yet the evidence shows that contention to be silly at best. Yes, there were fewer books and they were very expensive because the materials used and time they took to make. Yet, by the late Middle Ages, books were being produced in huge quantities - even by hand.
Ever hear of Uwe Neddermeyer’s Von der Handschrift zum gedruckten Buch, Schriftlichkeit und Leseinteresse im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit,
Quantitative und qualitative Aspekte (Buchwissenschaftliche Beiträge aus dem deutschen Bucharchiv München 61, Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 1998)? Ever? No, probably not. I bet no Protestant here ever has. He demonstrates that there were many more mss. Bibles than we realize today.
Ever hear of Andrew Gow’s articles “Challenging the Protestant Paradigm. Bible Reading in Lay and Urban Contexts of the Later Middle Ages.” in: Thomas Heffernan, ed., Scripture and Pluralism. The Study of the Bible in the Religiously Plural Worlds of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Leiden: Brill, 2005, 161-191 ? or
“The Contested History of a Book: The German Bible of the Later Middle Ages and Reformation in Legend, Ideology, and Scholarship,” in: The Journal of Hebrew Scripture 9,13 (2009), 1-37?
Ever? I bet not.
Maybe those works are too new for you. How about Erich Zimmermann’s 1938 monograph which showed clerical, noble and commoner ownership of Bibles and books of the Bible in the fifteenth century. He shows, for instance, that the scribal workshop of Diebold Lauber in Hagenau, active 1427–1467, produced a large number of Bible manuscripts. Many of the clients were city merchants and artists. The book was called Die deutsche Bibel im religiösen Leben des Spätmittelalters (Potsdam, 1938).
Ever hear of it? Ever? Even once?
The simple fact is I know what I am talking about while the Protestants here seem to never have read even one single serious, reputable work on the subject. Not one.