**I would like to explain some things to everyone so we may eliminate the confusion.In order to understand properly the work of the RCC in creating, defending and perpetuating the Holy Scriptures, I feel I must explain the human means used in their production, and as to the collecting of the books of the Bible as we have it at present. There are some common erroneous ideas which we have to clear away from our minds at the very outset.
To begin with, the Bible did not drop down from Heaven ready-made, as some seem to imagine; it did not suddenly appear upon the earth, carried down from Almighty God by the hand of an angel or seraph; but it was written by men like ourselves, who held in their hand pen (or reed) and ink and parchment, and laboriously traced every letter in the original languages of the East.
In the second place you would do well to remember that the Bible was not written all at once, or by one man, like most other books with which we are acquainted. It took 1,500 years to be written… If you must, put 1,500 penney down to understand this enormous number. Yes, 1,500 years elapsed between the writing of Genesis (the first Book of the Old Testament) and the Apocalypse or Revelation of St. John (the last Book of the New).(Even more if you count the 400 years some protestants claim God was silent)
It is made up of a collection of different books by different authors, of different education and understand. These books formed, in short, a library instead of a single work, and hence were called ‘Biblia’ in Greek, or the books. :tsktsk:
If you had lived in the days immediately succeeding the death of Moses, all you would have had given to you would have been the first five books of the Old Testament, said to have written by that patriarch himself; that was the bible in embryo, so to speak – the little seed that was to grow subsequently into a great tree. From this we can see that the preacher extolling the bible as the only comfort and guide of faithful souls was slightly out of his reckoning when he used these words: ‘Ah, my brethren! What was it that comforted and strengthened Joseph in his dark prison in Egypt? What was it that formed his daily support and meditation? What but that blessed book, the Bible!’ Well my friends, Joseph existed before a line of the Old Testament was penned, and about 1800 years before the first of the New Testament books saw the light, the worthy evangelist was guilty of what we call a slight anachronism
Some folks ac as if they believed that the sacred books were first composed, and the incomparable Psalms of David set forth, in the sweet English tongue, and that they were afterwards rendered into barbarous language such as Latin or Greek or Hebrew, for the sake of inquisitive scholars and critics. This of course is not correct; the original language, broadly speaking, of the Old Testament was Hebrew; that of the New Testament was Greek. Thus our Bibles as we have them today for reading are ‘translations’ – that is, are a rendering or equivalent in English of the original Hebrew and Greek as it came from the pen of prophet and apostle and evangelist
A last point must always be kept clearly in mind, for it concerns one of the greatest delusions entertained by many Protestants and makes the fierce attacks on the RCC appear so silly and irrational – the point, namely that the bible, as we have it now, was not printed in any language at all till about 1500 years after the birth of Christ, for the simple reason that there was no such thing as printing known before that date.
We would have had to read our Testaments and our Gospels from the manuscripts of monk or friar, from the pages of parchment or vellum or paper covered with the handwriting, sometimes very beautiful and ornamental, of the scribe that had undertaken the slow and laborious task of copying the Sacred Word.
Protestants in these days send shiploads of printed Bibles abroad, and scatter thousands of Testaments hither and thither in every direction for the purpose of evangelizing the heathen and converting sinners, and declare that the Bible, and the Bible only, can save men’s souls. :whacky:
Our Divine Lord, I suppose, wished that the unnumbered millions of human creatures born before the year 1500 should believe what He had taught and save their souls and go to Heaven, at least as much as those of the sixteenth and twentieth centuries; but how could they do this when they had no bibles, or were too poor to buy one, or could not read it even though they bought it, or could not understand it even if they could read it?
Catholics believe souls may be saved and people become saints, and know and do all that Jesus Christ meant them to believe and do without the bible.
The Protestant theory, which bases a man’s salvation on the possession of the Bible, leads to the most flagrant absurdities, imputes to Almighty God.It ends logically in the blasphemous conclusion that our Jesus failed to provide an adequate means of conveying to men in every age the knowledge of His truth.
It would be impossibe for Christianity to benefit or even survive on the principle of ‘the Bible and the Bible only’ mentality.It would have ended before even being printed.
Really, I can not understand that otherwise intelligent non-Catholics have not awakened to that hollowness and absurdity. I can only suppose that they do not sufficiently realize, ‘read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest’ (as the English Prayer-Book says) this single item of history – the Bible was not printed till at least 1400 years after ChristSo it can’t bet the final authority. We contend that, the RCC is and must remain the spearhead to salvation.
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you might be on to something! 
& decided to do some research into the faith. What if found blew me away…