As part of my participation in Becoming Catholic, I’m hearing some interesting stories by former Protestants about the myths they were taught about the Catholic Church.
A recurring theme (and one common online), is that Catholics do not read the Bible, and in fact spent a great deal of effort to prevent the common people from reading it. The obvious implication was that the sinister Obscurantist Papists had distorted its teachings and any who dared question them were condemned to a horrible death.
It’s a cool story, but to anyone who has done even the most cursory research on the topic, it’s weapons-grade nonsense.
Let’s begin with the beginning. If one goes way back, the Old Testament was available in Greek and Hebrew. The latter was spectacularly obscure to the vast majority of potential converts. If the Catholic Church had wanted to keep the Bible under lock and key, no action needed to be taken. Just keep the sacred texts in Hebrew and Greek.
Yet for some strange reason, St. Jerome was tasked with translating the Bible into the Vulgate, a form of Latin that was the most accessible to the largest number of people. To put it another way, this is about as secretive as translating it into English for an American audience.
Now, as the Roman Empire collapsed and barbarian hordes wandered hither and yon, Latin faded as a daily language and Gothic, Frankish, and other foreign languages took its place. Yet Latin remained a language all literate people knew, and as the “barbarian” languages found a written form, sure enough, Bible verses were translated into it. After all, how else could one spread the Good News other than in the language of the common people?
Now it is true that Bibles were regarded as precious items, and placed under lock and key, but this was because the materials involved in their creation were literally priceless. Modern technology is now able to do detailed examinations of old documents and see how many times ancient parchment or vellum was overwritten. Writing materials were more precious than gold, because the old trade routes had collapsed.
Even the most cursory student of Ancient Antiquity knows how few copies of various histories survived. One of the in-jokes of Battle Officer Wolf is that the planet is “Vitellius XV-a”, which is the shelf-location of the only surviving manuscript we have today.
This is not unique. Many of our most significant sources for history rely on a single copy of an ancient text. The epic history of the Roman Empire by Titus “Livy” Livius is incomplete. If the Catholic Church wanted to have a stranglehold on history, it would not have produced so many copies of the Bible. It’s almost as though they want to make sacred scripture more accessible.
This accusation also begs the question, because 99 percent of the population was illiterate. One of the reasons that icons became so prominent was that it was the only way to communicate salvation history to an illiterate population. Far from being “idolatry,” painting pictures of salvation history in churches was the only way to help common people understand it.
Put simply, books were irrelevant to the vast majority of the population, and far from smothering intellectual inquiries, the Catholic Church created the concept of the university. It was the Protestants and their state churches who demanded obedience under pain of death.
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