Luther and other reformers translated the word of God into the vernacular and promoted its reading - over the opposition of the Catholic Church. Care to explain why putting the word of God into the hands of commoners is evil?
The evil of Luther was his insistence that every Mom, Mick, or Mary could decide for their own selves what the Bible meant and, thus, a new sect arises daily
That’s not the problem...its the now infinite number of interpretations that arise that has served to fracture the Christian community. Luther himself decried his own solo scriptura principle taking offense at milkmaids even interpreting the scriptures to their own liking...
There is this really cool invention called the internet that allows you to actually do research before psoting errors such as the above.
Luthers was not the first, nor the second, what is was was one of the worst.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Bible+before+Martin+Luther.-a0277600839
By digging into history, these grandiloquent "experts" would be surprised to learn that the first printed Bible was produced by Johann Gutenberg, a Catholic,--with Church approval--in 1455. Luther was born in 1483! To go further on the number of printings, there were 18 German editions of the Bible before Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517.
For a full view of translation history it is important to acknowledge that no books of the Bible were originally written in Latin. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew with some parts in Aramaic. The New Testament was written in Greek. The Septuagint is a Jewish translation of the Old Testament into Greek for the Jews in Alexandria who spoke mainly Greek at that time. This made it possible for the whole Bible to be available in Greek by about 100 A.D.
Other early translations of the Bibles appeared in the Syriac dialect of Aramaic, in the Ge'ez language in Ethiopia and in Latin in Western Europe.
The earliest Latin translations were used as the Vetus Latina until the 5th century. St. Jerome re-translated the Hebrew and Greek texts into the vernacular, the Latin of his day, known as the Vulgate (Biblia vulgata), meaning "common version" or "popular version." So by the end of late antiquity, the Bible was available in all major written languages then spoken by Christians.
In the early medieval period anyone who could read at all could most likely read Latin, even in (Anglo-Saxon) England, where writing in the vernacular (Old English) was most common. After the Greek and Latin translations, the Bible or some passages thereof were translated into vernacular European languages. The Gothic Bible was translated from Greek by Ulfilas, an Arian. The Gospel of John was translated into Old English by Saint Bede the Venerable before his death in 735. The Gospel of Matthew was translated into Old High German in 748. Alfred the Great circulated a number of passages of the Bible in the vernacular around the turn of 900. The four Gospels were translated into Old English in the West Saxon dialect (the Wessex Gospels) in 990. There was a Gospel translation into the Old Slavonic language in the late 9th century by Saints Cyril and Methodius.
After the 8th century German translation of the Bible into the language of the common people, other European nations followed suit; these were France and Hungary in the 12th century and Italy, Spain, Holland, Poland and Bohemia in the 13th century. The Spanish Inquisition gave full approval to publish the Bible translation in 1478. The first printed Flemish translation came out in 1477. Two Italian versions were printed in 1516, a year before Luther posted his Theses. The earliest English edition was printed in 1525.
It is worth noticing that there were 198 editions of the Bible in the vernacular, the language of the laity; 626 editions altogether, all before the Protestant version, with the full approval of the Catholic Church.