Did the Catholic Church refuse to make a vernacular Bible available in England?

[Stylteralmaldo]

Tyndale's Heresy:

It is a fact usually ignored by Protestant historians that many English versions of the Scriptures existed before Wycliff, and these were authorized and perfectly legal (see Where We Got the Bible by Henry Graham, chapter 11, “Vernacular Scriptures Before Wycliff”). Also legal would be any future authorized translations. And certainly reading these translations was not only legal but also encouraged. All this law did was to prevent any private individual from publishing his own translation of Scripture without the approval of the Church.

Source:
catholic.com/thisrock/2002/0212fea3.asp

Stylteralmaldo:

Perhaps the bigger issue is whether or not Luther was qualified to render his own translation of the Bible in the first place.

Contarini:

Tyndale’s situation was different, since the Catholic Church in England refused to make a vernacular translation available.

Source:
forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?p=2553554#post2553554

So did the Catholic Church refuse to make a vernacular translation available?

 

[Contarini]

Source:
catholic.com/thisrock/2002/0212fea3.asp

Source:
forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?p=2553554#post2553554

So did the Catholic Church refuse to make a vernacular translation available?

Actually the CA tract tacitly admits this, saying that the Church saw no need for a “new” translation. I am not sure what they are talking about in terms of print Bibles already available. They don’t say what language these Bibles were in, or give any details (were they whole Bibles, paraphrases, what?) or any documentation. So there’s really no way to respond to such a vague and unsubstantiated claim.

I do not have Graham’s book in front of me, but I do not think that there was any translation of the entire Bible before Wycliffe. There were translations of parts of Scripture, and there were paraphrases of large sections of Scripture–the Church was very zealous in making such paraphrases and explanations available in the 13th and 14th centuries. However, this would be irrelevant anyway unless these versions were available and were linguistically intelligible (for instance, large parts of the Bible were indeed translated into Old English in the Anglo-Saxon period, especially under King Alfred I believe, but of course those texts would no longer be intelligible and in fact lay mouldering in libraries until the modern era). The tract is, unfortunately, resorting to rather vague and shifty language in order to defend the indefensible.

The fact remains that there was no widely available, intelligible translation of the Bible into English in the time of Tyndale, and that the Church did not choose to authorize such a translation. I am happy to retract this claim when evidence to the contrary is provided. (One Orthodox person I know from other boards told me that his study Bible claims that there was a vernacular Bible available for the use of Carthusian nuns in the early 16th century, or something like that–but I’ve never seen documentation of this.)

Of course, the further question is whether it’s a good thing for the Church hierarchy to have a monopoly of translation. Generally, I think Protestants are needed to keep Catholics honest, just as (alas) secularists are needed to keep Christians in general honest.

Edwin

 

[patrick457]

Nope; it only forbade unauthorized translations of the Bible. Even after Wycliff had died, his translation minus the heretical prologue was still used by some of the nobility and religious houses.

St. Thomas More once said about this:

‘It neither forbiddeth the translations to be read that were already well done of old before Wycliffe’s days, nor damneth his because it was new but because it was naught; nor prohibiteth new to be made but provideth that they shall not be read if they be made amiss till they be by good examination amended.’

-Thomas More, A Dialogue against Heresies