Did the Church ban bibles?

  • Thread starter Thread starter DictatorCzar
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
Hypothetical:

Somebody publishes a translation of the Bible in which the Gospel of John chapter 1 verse 1 goes as follows:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with the Gods, and the Word was one of the Gods.

Would you want that translation to be offered as a correct version of Scripture, approved by Mother Church?
If not then what ought the Church to do about it?

Historically there have been times when people published false versions of Scripture. It was the duty of Mother Church to oppose such falsehoods.
 
Last edited:
I’m just curious. I want to be 100% sure I’m right where I belong. It talked about council of Toulouse. The canons are actually real canons part of the council of Toulouse and possibly other councils and documents of popes.
 
You keep asking these questions. If you keep entertaining every single accusation ever thrown at the Catholic Church, you will have nothing but doubt.

Maybe your approach should be different. Instead of “I want to be 100% free from doubt,” you should say “I want the truth, I want to know Christ, who is truth itself, I want to know the faith for which the martyrs went to their deaths.”

-Fr ACEGC
 
DictatorCzar said:
I came across 2 websites. …I’m just curious. I want to be 100% sure I’m right where I belong. It talked about council of Toulouse. The canons are actually real canons part of the council of Toulouse and possibly other councils and documents of popes.
Click to expand...
The Council of Toulouse was a local counci brought together to combat the Albegensian heresy. Apparently, the Albigensians were using bibles to pass on their false teachings in notes which slipped into the Bibles to misinterpret the Word of God.

Banning the Bible in this local area helped the Bishop to ensure that his people were getting the true Gospel.
When i read it, it seems that it supports the Protestant argument. I haven’t really gone over this and I’m really confused.
Click to expand...
If there’s anything else bothering you, please ask a specific question. Those are long articles and there’s no way for us to know what is confusing you. But if you are having trouble with the entire website, then post your questions, one at a time. That will also make it easier for people who want to respond. And you’ll get more thorough responses. Remember, this website has a word liimit for each response.

I hope that helps
 
Zaccheus said:
Hypothetical:

Somebody publishes a translation of the Bible in which the Gospel of John chapter 1 verse 1 goes as follows:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with the Gods, and the Word was one of the Gods.
Click to expand...
This is a great critique, hypothetically, but is a strawman because it ignores history. I assume the author is referring specifically to the translations of the Bible into English where you actually did have people who were put to death for doing so. However, your critique ignores the fact that the translations which came out of the early reformation attempts were very faithful, and in many ways superior to what was then available to the public. The criticism of the Wycliffe translation is generally that he used a strict formal equivalence which made it a bit harder to read, but more faithful to the actual wording of the originals. The Tyndale translation used the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts available in its day as opposed to the Vulgate and offered a very good early English translation that was simultaneously fairly easy to read. The big criticisms was that it supposedly downplayed clericalism, but was actually in many cases more faithful to the original languages in its use of congregation or assembly, or its use of repent as opposed to penance, than the Vulgate. The Church’s criticism had less to do with the quality of the translations than with the theology of the translators. However, in doing so it ignored the fact that we can simultaneously agree with the translation and debate the theology of the translators.
 
Last edited:
You’ve been given the reasoning behind this Council. Now ask yourself, what was the geographic extent of the ban? How many years was the ban enforced? Did people still have access to scripture? How many of the affected people could read (Latin, in this case)? How many of the affected people could afford a hand-copied bible?

Do you see how few people in the entire history of Catholicism were actually affected?
 
Short answer: No. However, certain translations WERE banned, which is something else entirely. (They were bad translations).
 
Let’s not forget the obvious here. Protestants leave this part out a lot.
A Bible in full was not cheap back before the printing press. Sure churches chained them up, but this wasn’t to stop people from reading it, it was to keep it from being stolen. I read somewhere that just the Gospel of Matthew would cost some $2,000 in todays value. Every Bible had to be written by a scribe , do you know how long this took?
If anything Protestants should be thanking the Church for making the effort it did to preserve the word of God even when it was being abused by several heresies throughout the centuries.
Another thing, people were not literate like today. To assume people were kept from reading the Bible is ridiculous when the average townsfolk couldn’t even read their name.
 
Come on, walk into a secular bookstore and see if you can tell which of the 50 Bibles is a good translation. I would certainly hope the Catholic Church banned a few Bibles over the 2000 years. The Catholic Church chained them down too.
 
Oh man, what a blast from the past. That aloha site is a classic from Catholic Answers back in the day. I feel like that kind of nonsense gets a lot less play these days (likely with a lot of credit to CA itself). Even the old Jesus-is-Lord site seems to have dropped the geocities style gifs and pared itself down a lot. I never see that one anymore either.

This deserves an old school @church_militant gif!
(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
 
Some 80% of the worldwide followers of Jesus Christ are Catholic or Orthodox. Our differences with the two Orthodox Communions are largely to do with semantics and 6th & 11th century politics. Jesus promised that the Gates of Hell would not prevail against his Church. The ramblings of latter-day Calvinists suggest that the Gates of Hell have prevailed and they are calling Jesus a liar. In places their teaching amounts to blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. A very warm welcome awaits them in the next world.
 
That’s a really good point.

I listen to Dr. David Anders podcast quite a bit, and I love the way he handles stuff like this. He answers the question, but the very first thing he does is discuss the origin of the Bible, the precedence of Liturgy and Tradition to the Bible, and how you must have the Church’s authority to even have a Bible.

When you look at it that way, and look at the ancient Church and the Church fathers, alot of the arguments fall apart, in my opinion.

‘Did the Church Ban Bibles!’

It may have. But given that it also
A) Created the Bible
B) Spread the Bible around
and
C) has the authority to interpret the Bible

it makes it much more understandable that they may have had to use their authority to get rid of bad translations, or restrict the Bible to communities that are misinterpreting it to spread heresy.
 
I think the bigger issue here is not one of history, nor one of the Church’s allowing or not allowing of access to scripture to the laity.

The OP posts threads like this with some regularity. This is not a theological or apologetical issue. This is a personal and spiritual one. The OP needs to alter his approach to seeking the truth. Instead of moving the goal line yet again with each new doubt or anti-Catholic accusation that comes up, he ought to seek out why the faith is true, why the Church is what it claims to be. Continually entertaining doubts and anti-Catholic nonsense is never going to bring peace.

-Fr ACEGC
 
I am picking up from answers that you are in the habit of posing this kind of question. I do not know what others you have asked but I think this one could have been handled by you with only a little bit of thinking. Protestants have often claimed that the Catholic Church instigated a variety of methods to keep the majority of the people away from the Bible.

The Church would not have had to do this if they even had wanted the people not to know what was in the Bible. All the Church had to do was leave well alone. The vast majority of people were illiterate: they could neither read nor write. So, even if a Bible had been written in the local dialect of the part of the UK where I lived there would have been no need for the Church to ban it. The vast majority could not have read it! They were illiterate.

Even if the Church had wanted to do this, and I do not think she did, she had no need.
 
DictatorCzar said:
I came across 2 websites.

Bible possession once banned by the Catholic Church!

Roots of the Roman Catholic Church and roots of the Pope

When i read it, it seems that it supports the Protestant argument. I haven’t really gone over this and I’m really confused.
Click to expand...
Think about it. The writers of the NT were already in the Church they were building. The NT then was written in, by, for, the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church therefore, gave us the bible. Until the printing press was invented, all bibles were hand written. Not an easy job.

AND

To your question, Did the Church Ever Ban the Bible? | Catholic Answers
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top