![]() Take and read! Take and read!” It was the Bible he picked up to read and the saving words of Scripture transformed his life and brought him to a true and constant conversion. Augustine was converted when he heard children singing, “Tolle legge. In a few places, the authorities did burn some translations of the Bible which were deliberately faulty or which carried heretical notes, but this was an attempt to preserve the purity of the Scriptures, not to keep it from God’s people. Once the printing press was invented and literacy grew, more translations were made. However, before the invention of the printing press, widespread translation of the Bible was unnecessary because those who could read understood Latin. The earliest English version of the Bible for instance, is a paraphrase version of Genesis dating from the year 670. The Catholic Church encouraged translations into the vernacular from the beginning. The Bibles were chained for security reasons the way phone books used to be secured in a phone booths: not to restrict them, but to make them available to everyone.ĭid the Catholic Church forbid the Bible to be translated into the ordinary language of the people? No. Before the days of printing presses, books were precious items. It is true that Bibles were chained in churches, but they weren’t chained up to keep people from reading the Bible. Like most myths, the stories are both true and false. Some extreme Protestants like to say that the Catholic Church not only forbade people to read the Bible, but they deliberately kept the Bible in Latin, chained it up in churches, and even went so far as to burn popular translations of the Bible. Try reading any official Catholic teaching documents and you will find they are – and always have been – permeated and upheld with Scripture. That Catholic doctrine and moral teaching is biblically-based is easy to see. Therefore, it is the bishops - living, praying, and working in a direct line from the apostles – who use the Bible to determine Christian doctrine and moral principles. Paul’s clear instructions to Timothy, “the things you have heard me say … entrust to reliable men so that they may in turn teach others” ( 2 Timothy 2:1 – 2). As Paul gave Timothy the apostolic authority to “rightly divide the word of truth” ( 2 Timothy 2:15), so Catholics believe their bishops have inherited the authority of the apostles to teach doctrinal and moral truth faithfully. Like Evangelicals, Catholics also use the Scripture to determine doctrine and moral principles – it’s just that the Catholic lay person or pastor doesn’t do so on his own. In the early Church, they read the letters of the apostles, recited the psalms, and used portions of Scripture to praise and worship God just as Catholics do today. The Gospel grew out of the apostles’ preaching about Jesus. The New Testament is composed of apostolic letters of instruction read to the churches. The psalms were the hymn book of the Jews. The Jews recite the Old Testament law in their worship daily. The “prayer book” method is the way Scripture has been used for thousands of years. You can think of it this way: Evangelicals use the Bible as a rule book. So a church-going Catholic does know and use Scripture – its just that he uses it primarily for meditation and worship ( Psalms 119:48) – not primarily for personal information and instruction. Furthermore, the responses and the words of the Communion service are almost all from Scripture. The whole structure fits together so that the Mass is focused on Christ in the Gospels.Ĭatholics follow a three-year cycle of Scripture reading, so a Catholic who goes to church faithfully will – over those three years – hear almost all of the Bible read. When Catholics go to Mass, they hear a reading from the Old Testament, they say or sing one of the Psalms, then they listen to a reading from the Epistles, then a Gospel reading. When my friend checked the content of his local Bible-based Evangelical church, he was surprised to discover that the total amount of Scripture read took just 3 percent of the service. The Catholic Mass was almost 30 percent Scripture. ![]() Some time ago, a friend of mine compared the amount of the Scripture used at Mass to that used in an Evangelical Protestant service.
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