Actually, the split in the Reformation did not start with Scripture alone.
The earliest instances were based on something very different.
Martin Luther did not (at first) have any problems with Scripture. (In fact to his dying day he maintained the Perpetual Virginity and the Sinlessness of Mary–neither of which is ‘Scripturally’ explicit but are implicit in Scripture and affirmed by Sacred Tradition–which Martin Luther upheld even then.)
Henry VIII had no problem with Scripture either. He had a problem, as did Luther, with papal authority. He also benefitted enormously when he sacked the monasteries and gave their lands to his noblemen, who ipso facto then embraced the ‘new religion’ which had given them temporal wealth.
Henry not only kept the Scripture (and the books) of the Catholic bible, he kept all the ‘popish’ practices as well, all the beautiful traditions, the incense, etc. etc.
It was the second wave of reformers who (seeing that many people were still Catholic in faith) tried to turn protestantism into being ‘about freedom to read Scripture’ (something which was a non issue but sounded ‘noble’. Catholics have always read (and heard) Scripture, even when most of them were illiterate.
People who scream, KJV bible brought the Word to the world are unaware that the Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible was actually brought out a couple of years BEFORE the KJV. Why, I wonder, if the Catholics were not ‘reading the Bible’ as much as the Protestants supposedly were?
No, the reformation was not about ‘Scripture’. It was about pride, wealth, power, and greed. All those led to a need for ‘justification’ and so the false charges implicit in claiming that Protestants were all about ‘bringing Scripture to the world’ became the byword. And since even in the U.S. (which is heavily Protestant) the majority of the history texts and books etc. are written from the Protestant point of view, this absurd and disingenuous ‘history’ is still given as truth. . .which it emphatically is NOT.
