OK i got an email from one of my fundementalist friends with a link to an anti catholic article asserting that the catholic church purposly kept the bible out of people’s hands by refusing to translate it into the vernacular.
That’s actually quite funny. Protestants always have a really hard time understanding that things were different than they are now hundreds of years ago. They insist on judging history by today’s standards.
First, consider that Jerome’s famous Latin Bible is called the Vulgate because it was a translation from the Greek into the vernacular language of the time. Back then there were two common languages. In the East there was Greek (fortunately for them the Bible was written in it) and in the West there was Latin. Therefore, when the Bible was translated into Latin, the Church actually enabled more people to read it.
Second, consider the fact that for many centuries not many people could read anyway. Most common people couldn’t. Those who were educated enough to read, read Latin. It remained the language of the educated and the literate for a very long time.
Third, consider that until the 1500’s there was no printing press. The Church wasn’t keeping the Bible out of people’s hands, most people couldn’t afford them to begin with. Until the printing press was invented books of any kind were extremely rare and extremely expensive.
Finally, historian Hilarie Belloc says in his book The Great Heresies, that until around the 1400s local vernacular languages weren’t very prolific. They didn’t come into much use until the rise of local patriotism around that time. People expected things to be in Latin because they were part of Christendom.
