From John 21:17:

The third time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, “Do you love me?” He said, “Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Feed my sheep.

Could it be that the real reason the Reformation occured is that the church of Peter, with their Latin bible, failed to “feed my sheep”? Thank God for the printing press.

Interesting find Scott. I think some scholars believe he actually translated it from Latin rather than Hebrew. If I remember correctly he burned at the stake so he paid a high price for it to be sure.

Despite losses in translation, it is still good to be able to the Word in your local language.

In response to the question posed by “davel” regarding the Protestant Revolt, the answer clearly is no. Anyone familiar with the history of the Catholic Church, which for 2,000 years has been preserving and protecting the Word of God, recognizes how ludicrous this statement is. It was is only by the authority of the Catholic Church, which collected the various books of Scripture in the fourth century, that we have a Christian Bible at all. And it is only because of the Church that the Bible survived and was taught for the many centuries before the printing press made it widely available. All Christians everywhere owe it a great debt for that. For this excerpt and a fuller, more historical discussion on Tyndale, please see: http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/2002/0212fea3.asp

The Roman Catholic clergy and the civil authorities, controlled by the clergy, would not allow an unauthorized version of the Bible to be translated. Thomas More and church authorities objected to the accurate translation of four words which changed the meaning of church to congregation, priest to elder, “do penance” to repent and charity to love. Such a translation from earlier Greek text, rather than the later Latin, supports what Jesus shows our relationship to God should be, that is, direct and personal not filtered and institutionalized.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyndale_Bible#Reaction_of_the_Catholic_Church

It looks to me like the later Latin translations were there to support organized religion. Maybe to advance the translators career?

Longenecker pointedly summarizes some of the crazed and disparate notions during this supposed period of translation enlightenment against Holy Mother Church, to wit: “This was an age when making your own version of the Bible seemed to be all the rage. The Reformers cut out the Deuterocanonical Books, Luther wanted to get rid of the Epistle of James as well as Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation because they didn’t agree with his theory of justification. The Reformers themselves fought about which version of the Bible was best. Zwingli said of Luther’s German version of the Bible, ‘Thou corruptest the word of God, O Luther; thou art seen to be a manifest corrupter of the holy scripture; how much are we ashamed of thee…!’ To which Luther politely answered, ‘Zwinglians are fools, asses and deceivers.’ At the same time Molinaeus, the French Reformed theologian, complained that Calvin ‘uses violence to the letter of the gospel, and besides this, adds to the text.’”

One can imagine hearing each of them chanting the same refrain so often found in modernist circles…”we want direct and personal, not filtered and institutionalized.” As is so often the case, these adjectives are misapplied.

If this is going to devolve into a debate about the causes and affects of the Protestant reformation then we better hold onto our hats.

It is a fact that most of the major Reformation characters, including Luther and Calvin, wanted to correct some things they saw as errors of the Roman Church. They did not (emphatically in Luther’s case) want to split the Church.

There is also little doubt that the efforts by Tyndale, Luther, and others to translate the Bible into the vernacular was a major thorn in the side of Rome, and the invention of the printing press helped the process along. The more important point of the reformers is that they believed that it was wrong for the Church to maintain the scripture in the Vulgate Latin, when the vast majority of the population (and many Priests, in fact) didn’t have a clue as to what any of the language meant.

I’ve always felt that the Reformation was as much a political battle as it was a religious one. After all, one of the side effects of the Reformation was to pretty much bring an end to the Holy Roman Empire.

One wonders how different history would have been if Luther, having nailed his 95 theses to the door, would have been engaged and listened to instead of being convicted of heresy. In other words, what if the Roman Church leaders had actually been willing to reform and deal with their problems instead of pretending they didn’t have any?

I certainly understand the confusion about the use of Bible in the venacular, especially when one wishes to discard the historical context surrounding such. For instance, the first attempts to translate Scripture into Old English occurred by the Venerable Bede in last part of the 7th and early part of the 8th Century, during the Middle Ages. This is only a couple of centuries from the end of the Western Roman Empire, which had standardized the language of the Church to Latin. At that time, Latin was the venacular language. Therefore, it made sense that Scriptures, all 72 books, were translated from the original languages (Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic) into the venacular. That the first English translations were from the Latin is quite understandable as the venacular in what would become England, before Anglo-Saxon (Old English) was Latin. Besides, the Catholic Church had declared that the venacular translation known as the Vulgate was the official “vulgar” translation from the original languages.

One other thing to note is that at that time (7th-8th Century), most people were much more interested in survival than in learning to read and write. Remember that, until Gutenberg had created the printing press in the middle of the 15th century, Bibles written in any language were supremely expensive. It took a monk a full year or more in a scriptorium to copy the library of books that is the Bible. Even so, Gutenberg’s Bible sold for approximately 3 years wages of an average clerk. Written material of any sort was extremely expensive. There was no real reason for anyone outside of royality and the clergy to be literate. Literacy rates ran in the single digits or, at most, in the low teens. Most congregants in churchs (there were few pews) did not read well enough to have been helped by a venacular copy of Scripture.

I have heard so many chastise the Medieval Church for keeping the Scriptures only in the hands of the clergy. When the historical context is examined, there were a great deal of practical and unavoidable reasons for that practice. Training someone to read was time consuming and extremely expensive. To survive, the common man could not afford that kind of liesure activity. Besides, when a Bible could cost as much as 3 or more years of wages, it would be too expensive for the vast majority in an economy that was more less based on coinage with little or no credit. To understand, one must be able to use pre-15th Century thinking to understand why things were done as they were in that society.

elorden, you make some valid points. However, the Reformers were interested in the Bible in the common speech so that it could be READ to the congregation in language that they could understand. In other words, the common speech of Germany at the time of Luther was not Latin, it was the precursor to German. Yes, official documents and official business was carried out in Latin at the Imperial level…much as English is used world wide today.

The other push of the Reformers, Calvin in particular, was for a truly educated clergy. Calvin insisted that clergy had to be able to perform exegesis of the scripture, which included requiring a working knowledge of Hebrew and Greek. It’s a known historical fact that when Tyndale started traveling around England and preaching from his translated Testament that Priests hung around in the backs of the crowds so that they could hear and understand the text that they had been teaching in Latin without understanding.

Education is truly a dangerous thing, is it not?

hs — I guess you could say that. Yet, while I agree that there is an aspect of power preservation in the actions of the Church at that time, could there not have been an element of intellectual inertia as well? After all, “We’ve never done it that way before” are still seven of the most deadly words in the English language for the church, both on a local level and universally as the Body of the Christ. Education was a luxury at that time, not a right as it is seen today. I still see only post-15th century thinking in the comments that have been made. There is little attempt to try to understand the historical facts in its own context.

elorden, Sorry, I can’t think like a 16th century thinker. However, I would suggest that looking at the events of the Reformation as part of an historical upheaval that more or less began with Columbus’s voyage to the New World in 1492 and ended with the Mayflower Compact in 1620.

During this period of 125 years, the Holy Roman Empire started it’s collapse, Luther nailed his 95 theses on the Cathedral door in Wittenberg, Henry VIII broke with the Church, Calvin wrote his Institutes, the Puritans briefly ran England under Cromwell, Tyndale translated his Bible, Peter the Great threw Russia into the modern age, Sir Francis Drake sank the Spanish Armada, Frederick the Great created modern Germany, and I could go on.

Seen from that perspective, the Reformation was as much political as it was spiritual. And, I would suggest, you can’t understand it without the political aspects. It’s also valuable to note that the Lutheran Church and the Anglican Church kept many aspects of Roman worship and practice alive, while the Puritans broke much more strongly. I would argue that the religious basis was quite simple. Several priests and monks started studying the scripture, and found significant problems with the actual practices of the Roman church, and dared to say so.