The Reformation

Issues: Bible Study

The Bible that the Catholic Church was defending was itself a translation. In the fifth century, St. Jerome had translated the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament into Latin. This version is known as the Vulgate Bible and is the version that was used throughout the Middle Ages.

For many centuries, the only people who were literate were the monks and the priests. A pious laymen might have certain books read to him—the Gospels, for example, or Psalms—but rarely was the layman able to read the Latin for himself. The most common exposure was when priests read out passages in Church, though this was always in Latin and so was merely nonsense to the congregation. The closest laymen got to scripture was when the priest would explain and expound upon some Bible passage.

Still, the translation itself was held to have been divinely guided, and so further translations were not to be trusted. The clergy felt strongly that Jerome's Bible was the one true Bible and any further translation must necessarily incur error to some degree.

By the twelfth century, though, there were increasing numbers of laymen who were literate—not in Latin, but in their own native tongues. We hear of a translation of the Bible into French in this century, a translation done by the Cathars, a group in southern France who were condemned as heretics and largely destroyed in the thirteenth century.

Other translations cropped up in later centuries, but they were always associated with heretics (Wycliffe in England, Hus in Bohemia). Translating the Bible was not in itself heretical, but it was not difficult for Church authorities to make a connection. Reading the Bible was tricky and dangerous, and the example of the heretics seemed to confirm this opinion.

Not only were more commoners literate in the vernacular than in Latin, but French and German and English were not as rich as Latin; they lacked precision and depth, so that any translation into these tongues must necessarily be inferior. And, finally, the Vulgate was the product of a saint, one of the Church Fathers. His work was divinely inspired. Could a modern (medieval) translator dare to place himself on the same level as Jerome?

The example of the Cathars, the Lollards and the Hussites were the practical proof. The Bible ought not be placed into the hands of the common believers, lest they be led astray and lose their souls.