History of the Bible

The Jerusalem Bible was condemned several times by the Catholic Church because of some very serious errors in its translation. It was put together by a group of liberal French scholars in Jerusalem. I do not trust the American Bible because it has sacrificed the exact meanings of certain terms in favor of colloquial American expressions (can you imagine Jesus speaking like John Wayne?).

    The Challoner-Rheims version has a story to it. Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek were the original languages in which the Bible was written. Aramaic was the regional language of Jesus and the one that He himself spoke. Only one book of the Bible was written in that language (St. Matthew's), but was lost in history. I believe that only copies of it exist. Of course, no one will be able to read it, because no one really knows that language except scholars. The majority of the Old Testament books were written in Hebrew. The general population does not know Hebrew and can't read these texts. Only the priestly class could benefit from this rendering. Some of the Old Testament books and the whole New Testament was written in Greek. Greek was the  language of the upper classes and intellectual elite in the time of Jesus. The rest of the poor population spoke Latin. Even Jesus Himself did not know Greek, but needed the help of the rich apostle Phillip to translate for Him.
    The language barrier, therefore, did not permit people access to the scriptures.  For four hundred years, until the time of St. Jerome, no one really read the Bible because it was in Greek. In the 5th century, St. Jerome translated the Bible into Latin. This Latin translation from the Greek came to be known as the "Vulgate" (with some corrections made in the 17th century). Even though the Bible was now in the language of the populace, they still did not possess the means to read it. Before the 16th century, there were no printing presses to make copies of the Bible for everyone. To make matters worse, the majority of people did not know how to read or write. Schools for the general population were only a reality beginning in the 18th century (and this only in certain countries like France and England).

    Copies of Bibles could only be had from monks who had the time to slowly and patiently copy them by hand. Such work made the copies expensive to buy. Only kings and nobles could really afford them.

    The only way that people could have access to the Word of God was through the preaching of holy men who had studied it and would share it with them (that is exactly the motto of St. Dominic, who founded the Dominicans to meditate on the Word of God and preach to others the fruits of their contemplations). You had, therefore, in the middle ages, Franciscans, Dominicans, Trinitarians, Carmelites, Servites, etc. going from town to town preaching the word of God to crowds ignorant and deprived of this message. Some became very famous like St. Anthony, St. Bonaventure, St. Vincent  Ferrer, St. John of Capistrano, St, Bernardine of Siena, etc.

    In the 16th century, Gutenburg invented the printing press, and the one to take quick advantage of it was Martin Luther.  He himself translated the Bible into the German language and spread copies all over the country. This, in itself, explains the success he had in getting so many people to leave the Church and coming over to Protestantism. Since many people could not read nor write, the printing presses (that turned into book companies) decided to print books with pictures and images. Many books of these types showed the Pope with horns and called him the anti-Christ. This type of literature nurtured hate and violence between Catholics and Protestants of those times. The Jesuits, in the person of St. Peter Canisius, quickly reacted to the Protestant attack. They formed Catholic book companies and started to spread Catholic literature. This explains St. Peter Canisius' success in winning back to the Caholic Church southern Germany, Austria and parts of Switzerland. In those days, who controlled the press, controlled, at the same time, the religion of the people.

    It was the Anglican Church of England that prohibited the publication and reading of Catholic Bibles. This country had already translated the Bible into English under the reign of King James. We had, therefore, the Protestant English version of the Bible. The English Catholics did not have the right to publish their English vernacular version. A group, therefore left England and settled in the city of Rheims, in southern France. There, they had the peace and tranquillity to produce the English Catholic version of the Bible called the "Douai-Rheims" translation from St. Jerome's Latin translation. In truth, it was a translation of a translation. With so much confusion going on in society, the Church was careful as to who could possess copies of these Bibles and set guidelines.

    It is not, however, that the Church "discouraged, banned or restricted the use, distribution or possession of the Bible." On the contrary, with the Biblical movement that began in the world during the 1940's, the Church encouraged all its members to acquire a love and understanding of the Word of God. She even promoted new translations of scripture, citing the original sources directly to the vernacular language (and bypassing the Jerome translation). When Evangelicals accuse the Church of prohibiting others from reading the Bible, they do so outside of a historical context and also in a biased way, because they too prohibited people from the reading the Bible.

 Anthony Mellace