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With many non-Catholic Christians in ecumenical dialog is profound and respectful. Unfortunately, there are others that this is not the case, and not only among the sects. In their attack on the Church to attract followers, they don’t care about spreading lies and slander. Among them, that the Church was contrary to the Bible and that he did not want the people to have access to it. This is a myth that deserves an instructive answer. |
| The work Section 1 of the Greek New Testament, which facilitates courses in biblical languages, the S.E.U.T. protestant entity (Evangelical Seminary of Theology, linked to the Spanish Evangelical Church and the Spanish Reformed Episcopal Church), does not focus on the Greek language, as one would expect, but ventures into the field of exegesis and history by exposing some of the exegetical “principles” of the pseudo-protestant reformation, as well as to teach without flushing the myths of the “reformed” historiography. Let’s see how this masterpiece of ideological manipulation lacks scientific and Biblical basis.
This is about the alleged ignorance of the peoples of Europe in Biblical material before the pseudo-protestant reformation, as stated in Lesson 34 of Section 1 (page 5.8), where it is said on the subject of the Middle Ages, the “Dark Age”, that such ignorance was due to be written the Bible “only in ancient languages such as Latin and Greek. The Bible was available only in Latin, and the ordinary man then was not more versed in Latin than the operator of a Ford factory at present”; and “a little before the reform, some began to translate the Bible into European languages (…) despite the terrible opposition and persecution”. It seems impossible such a great number of untruths in so few lines. 1) The Middle Age begins in the 5th century d.C., from the year of the fall of Rome. At that time, the western half of the Roman empire, dominated by the barbarians, spoke Latin and had an excellent version of the Bible, the Vulgate of St. Jerome; the eastern half of the empire, which survived until the Turks conquered Constantinople in the 15th century, spoke Greek and could read in that language both the New Testament as well as the old (the latter in several versions, such as the LXX); so that in the Middle Ages the common people had a broad knowledge of the Scriptures. 2) The Bible was translated into the vernacular languages many centuries before the pseudo-reform of Luther, Calvin, and company, because: a) The Catholic Saints Cyril and Methodius translated the Bible into the old Bulgarian in the 9th century, in the height of the Middle Age, the “Dark Age”! (Cf. 1 Language and Latin Literature, various authors, on to the Latin Phonetics, phonology and morphology , Jose Molina Madrid, Publications University de Barcelona: Barcelona 1993, p. 4); thus, the Bulgarians could read the Bible in their own language. (b) The Bishop Ulfilas (Arian, non-Catholic), the evangelizer of the Goths of Dacia and Thrace, translated the Bible into the Gothic Quarter a few years before St. Jerome’s Vulgate, so that when they reached the medieval “darkness,” the Goths could read the Bible in their mother tongue! (Cf. Jose Molina Yevenes, op. cit., p. 5; Esteban Tower, Theory of literary translation, Ed. Synthesis, 1994, p. 24, and UNED, op. cit., p. 32). c) The Catholic monk, Bede, the Venerable translated into Anglo-saxon or Old English The Gospel of St. John shortly before his death, which occurred in the year 735, or: in the Middle Ages, “The Age of darkness”! (Cf. Stephen’s Tower, op. cit., p. 24) d) The great historian Giuseppe Riciotti, informs us in his introduction to the Holy Bible that, in Italy, “The Bible in the vernacular was very popular in the 15th and 16th centuries”, and that “since the 13th century they had Italian translations” of the Bible, although “it is a partial translation”, that is to say, although it is of translations of the most memorable sacred books and accessible to anyone, with the exception of a few scholars, no one was interested in it; e.g., the endless and boring cast of the genealogies of the Book of Numbers. e) The work – History of Literature 1 (Ancient and Medieval) (various authors, UNED, Madrid, 1991, p.103) informs us of the following with regard to the Castilian versions of the Bible: “we found in the 13th century another group works formed of translations of the Bible that were carried out in this period. Already in the first half of the century we find the first text preserved that is included in this group: The Fazienda Overseas. Despite the fact that some had wanted to delay the editing until the middle of the 12th century, it doesn’t seem that, by its language, it was written at such an early date. It is not a simple version of the Bible. It contains, along with the translation itself (made, apparently, not directly from the Vulgate but of a Latin translation of the 12th century, carried out from the Hebrew texts), another series of materials: geographic descriptions, stories taken from classical antiquity… It seems that it intended to be a guide for pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land. Through these translations of the Bible it is evident that people who knew how to read in their own language could more directly receive religious teachings. The versions were also used for reading aloud in small groups. The Spanish Church of the time was not very much in favor of the Bibles romances, and indeed in the Council of Tarragona in 1233 they prohibited their reading. Despite this, the translation of these Scriptures was not abandoned, it was widely disseminated throughout the 13th century and romance Bibles were read even by the kings of that era”. It is clear: long before Calvin and Luther, the Castilian people read the Bible in their own language. The enormous extension of Castilian translations shows that the prohibitive right of the Council of Tarragona either didn’t apply or soon fell into disuse. The decision to reconcile had its explanation: before authorizing the reading of a version one had to look to see if it was well done, without distortion of the sacred text. The poor literary quality of the versions, together with the addition of other materials, was not helpful in warding off any suspicion; but no one was pursued for translating the Bible into Spanish, which is very significant. (f) “The Middle Age witnessed the blossoming in France of a large number of translations of the Holy Scripture in all the languages and dialects of Oc and Oil [for all the old French versions we refer to: P. C. Chauvin, The Bible depuis ses origins jusqu’a nos jours]. They have some that date back to the 12th century and even to the end of the XI. In the 13th century, the University of Paris presented a translation of both testaments that made law for a long time. All in all, there were other French versions, particularly in the 14th century. One of them, the Guyart Desmoulins, the end of the 13th century but up-to-date with regard to the style, was printed from 1478 in regard to the New Testament, and in its entirety in 1487” (Daniel Raffard of Brienne, Translator, Editor. The New Translations of 1’Écriture Sainte, in the Lecture et Tradition, July-August 1986). |
