Did the Catholic Church Burn and Chain Bibles Or Forbid Bible Reading?
1. Have you ever heard that the Catholic Church banned, burned or chained bibles to keep people from reading it? Nothing could be further from the truth
The standard objection goes something like this: the Reformation was necessary because the Catholic Church had all sorts of unbiblical doctrines; and it took years for people to know this, because the Church prohibited people from reading the Bible to find out what it really said. To keep people from comparing Church teachings to the Bible, the Church required all Bibles to be in Latin.
It wasn’t until Luther that the Bible was translated into the common language. Even after this, those who tried to get Bibles into the hands of ordinary people (or in ordinary language) were burnt at the stake. Until these brave Protestants thwarted the Catholic conspiracy against the Bible, the pre-Reformation Catholic was a superstitious peasant with little knowledge of Scripture. Did the Catholic Church Try to Suppress the Bible?
The truth is that bibles that had corrupted by man-made changes in them like “Jesus wasn’t crucified” or “God’s blessing was on Ishmael, not Isaac”were destroyed so the incorrect bibles wouldn’t be circulated. The Church was protecting Sacred Scripture to ensure that it contained only the inspired words of God and not man made ideas. And Protestants did the same thing…
2. Both the Catholic Church and Protestants destroyed inaccurate versions of bibles.
Does this action make the Church anti-bible? No. If it did, then the Protestants of this period were also anti-bible. John Calvin had as many copies as could be found of the Servetus Bible burned. -Bible Burning and Other Allegations, Catholic News Agency
“The classic Protestant suspicion is that Catholics fear the Bible; that the Church forbade the laity to read it for centuries because if that had been allowed, people would have seen how unscriptural Catholic doctrines were. This is simply untrue, of course, but is still widely believed among Protestants”
3.The Catholic view of the bible is that Scripture is but one book and that book is Christ. Does that sound like a bible hating church?
Scripture is read in every mass in the Liturgy of the Word. Catholics hear more scripture read in every mass than most Protestant churches. Does that sound like a church that wants to keep Sacred Scripture from the people?
In Who says Catholics don’t hear the bible at mass?, Mark Has explains:
Perhaps you have heard the common criticism that “Catholics never read Scripture"? The natural “go-to” response from Catholics to the above criticism is a explain that the Mass typically includes a reading from:
1. the Old Testament
2. the Book of Psalms (sung)
3. New Testament (the Epistles),
4 the Gospels.
So far, we count four Scripture readings total. Who says Catholics don't hear the bible at mass?
And this is just the tip of the iceberg! Almost everything the priest, deacon, or member of the assembly says within the liturgy is based in Scripture. -Mark Haas "Who says Catholics don’t hear the Bible at Mass?" Aletia
Does this sound like a church that doesn’t think Scripture is important?
When the gospel is read, the congregation stands in honor of Christ because it is his teaching. The congregations crosses their forehead, mouth and heart to make a visible sign that they want the gospel reading, Jesus words, to fill their their minds, the words of their mouths and their hearts. Does that sound like a church that has a low view of Scripture?
4. The norm in scripture is to read Scripture aloud to the congregation
Joe Heschmeyer explains:
Revelation 1:3 says, “Blessed is he who reads aloud the words of the prophesy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written therein; for the time is near.” One person getting up and reading Scripture within the hearing of the gathered believers, adding an explanation needed to make sure the people understand it: that’s the Scriptural norm.
It’s what Moses does in Exodus 24:7, it’s what he instructs the Levites (the Old Testament priests) to do in Deuteronomy 31:9-11, it’s what Joshua does in Joshua 8:34-35, it’s what we the Levites do in Nehemiah 8:7-8 (the Levites “helped the people understand the law, while the people remained in their places,” by reading “from the book, from the law of God, clearly; and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.”), and it’s what Jesus does in Luke 4:15-22 when He goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath to publicly read and interpret Isaiah.
It’s why St. James says that “from early generations Moses has had in every city those who preach him, for he is read every sabbath in the synagogues” in Acts 15:21. It’s why St. Paul says to the Colossians, “when this letter has been read among you, have it read also in the church of the Laodiceans; and see that you read also the letter from Laodicea” (Col. 4:16). And to the Thessalonians: “I adjure you by the Lord that this letter be read to all the brethren” (1 Thes. 5:27). And it’s why he instructs Timothy to “attend to the public reading of Scripture” (1 Tim. 4:13). This notion that Scripture is meant to be read and interpreted privately is both ahistorical and unscriptural.
5. Did the Catholic Church forbid reading the bible?
No. Ideas like that come from Protestant sources that distort the truth. For example, in book entitled, “Roman Catholicism” claims:
Bible forbidden to laymen, placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Council of Valencia . . . [A.D.] 1229.”—Lorraine Boettener in his book, “Roman Catholicism”
There’s not truth to that claim: The Index of Forbidden Books didn’t exist until 300 years later and there has never been a “Council of Valencia”.
Maybe Boettner was confused with a Council held in 1229 in Toulouse, France? That council does get cited by anti-Catholics as supposed “evidence” that the Church banned the bible and its the year he claims. However, the Council of Toulouse doesn’t prove what he claims.
The Council in Toulouse wasn’t an ecumenical council. It was called to deal with a local problem, the Albigensian heresy. The Albigensians were using corrupt vernacular versions of the Bible to support their heresies. It was inaccurate versions that were banned to help put the heresy to rest.
6. Why did the Catholic Church Chain bibles? I heard they did it to keep the laity from reading the bible for themselves?
The same reason Protestants chained them. Because bibles were extremely valuable and susceptible to theft-not to keep them from the laity!
Bibles were rare and valuable. By today’s standards each one would be worth $100,000. That’s why they were chained by both Protestants and the Catholic Church.
Before the printing press, bibles were copied by hand and each one took thousands of hours to make so they were scarce. The Church wanted to keep them secure.
7. Didn’t the Catholic Church oppose translating the bible into the vernacular so they could control the people?
This is another false accusation. The Catholic Church translated the bible into multiple dialects long before the invention of the printing press. It is a fact usually ignored by Protestant historians that many English versions of the Scriptures existed before Wycliff. -Matthew A.C. Newsome
The Catholic Church didn’t try to stop the bible from being translated into the vernacular so that laymen couldn’t read the bible. They were keeping versions that were tainted with falsehoods from being passed off as the bible. As already mentioned, the Church was translating the bible into the vernacular even before the King James Version of the bible. They also invented an alphabet just to share the bible with unreached people.
8. Why Was the Bible in Latin?
Joe Heschmeyer points out that the Bible was in Latin for the sake of the people not to keep it from the people:
In the ancient world, it wasn’t unusual to speak one language, and write in another. For Protestants to criticize this is to betray a lack of historical understanding, and to attack the Evangelists. Remember that at the time of Christ, there were a wide variety of spoken languages throughout the Roman Empire, as Acts 2:5-8 makes clear. Yet the New Testament was written in Greek, not each local vernacular. Why? Because Greek was the standard written language. If you were literate, there was a good chance that, regardless of what you spoke, you read Greek.
By the fourth century, the standard written language in the West was Latin. This was also the language that most Westerners spoke. To respond to this shift, Pope Damasus ordered the Bible to be translated from the now-inaccessible Greek into more accessible Latin. As a result, this Bible became known as the Vulgate, because it was designed to reach the “vulgar” (common) people.
In other words, the Bible wasn’t in Latin to be inaccessible, but so that any literate Western European could read it. Even as Latin gradually devolved into French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, Latin remained the standard language for writing. That the Bible was in Latin rather than the local dialects is no more surprising than that modern Protestants prefer the King James Bible over a Bible written in, say, a southern dialect or Ebonics or Australian.
Latin also ensured that you could reach people who didn’t speak your local dialect. Having Latin as the standard language meant, for example, that St. Thomas Aquinas (an Italian) could learn under St. Albert the Great (a German) at the University of Paris, in France. The universality of Latin is also why many of the most famous writings of the Reformers, like John Calvin’s Institutes of Christian Religion, were written in Latin.
Myths like these have kept Christians divided. Don’t fall for them. Don’t participate in spreading the lies and rumors. Go straight to the source. This is what the Catholic church teaches about scripture:
Through all the words of Sacred Scripture, God speaks only one single Word, his one Utterance in whom he expresses himself completely:
You recall that one and the same Word of God extends throughout Scripture, that it is one and the same Utterance that resounds in the mouths of all the sacred writers, since he who was in the beginning God with God has no need of separate syllables; for he is not subject to time.
For this reason, the Church has always venerated the Scriptures as she venerates the Lord's Body. She never ceases to present to the faithful the bread of life, taken from the one table of God's Word and Christ's Body.66In Sacred Scripture, the Church constantly finds her nourishment and her strength, for she welcomes it not as a human word, "but as what it really is, the word of God".67 "In the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet his children, and talks with them."68
-Catechism of the Catholic Church: Christ, The Unique Word of Sacred Scripture.
-That is the honor the Catholic Church gives to scripture-equating it to what it really is-the Word of God, Christ himself.
II. INSPIRATION AND TRUTH OF SACRED SCRIPTURE
Where can I read more about this topic?
Did The Catholic Church Try to Suppress the Bible?
Did the Catholic Church Forbid Bible Reading?