Need to Know
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Never let the truth get in the way of a narrative.
Having been born and raised in the Assemblies of God, I was taught all manner of lies in that denomination. It was actually a relief to learn the Truth: the Church preceded the Bible, and is the foundation of Truth, NOT Scripture. She determined under guidance of the Holy Spirit what Books would be considered Canonical and what would not be in the late 4th century AD. Those Books included the Deuterocanonicals that Protestants rejected on their own authority. And all this nonsense about Renaissance Protestant translations into English –> those translations were deliberately done incorrectly to serve heretical Protestant theology. I could go on and on and on. Indeed it is ever annoying to hear Protestants say the Bible is our foundation without realizing that that contradicts 1st Timothy 3:15, and that before the printing press, hardly anyone in the public had any access to the written Scriptures, and that Jesus founded a Church, not a Bible. You can explain this to Evangelicals and Fundamentalists till you’re blue in the face. They would rather deny history than admit that they believe in a heresy, and it’s not a monolithic heresy. It’s all different: Reformed and Calvinist, Arminian and Pentecostal, etc. ad nauseam. The only thing that unites them is their hatred of all things Catholic. They can’t agree on pedo-baptism vs believer’s baptism, Cessationism vs Pentecostalism, Complimentarianism vs Egalitarianism, Predestination vs Free Will, etc. etc. etc. But they all claim to be Sola Scriptura! Go fathom that!
The amusing thing about this argument is how anachronistic it ends up being, reading back quasi-universal *literacy* (such as it is…) onto the past.
If one was able to read in the West, one would be mostly reading in Latin (and some Greek), because that is what almost all of the books that were available were written in. Books were stupidly expensive and laborious to make, incentivizing them being copied and written in a language that could be widely read. A “large” library at certain times and in certain places could be about 15 books or so.
Vernacular translations were generally not (prior to the printing press) for the principle purpose of getting the Bible as a written work into the hands of “the people,” who generally wouldn’t have been able to read their own language (some of which didn’t have stable written forms for some time) any more than Latin. If they could read, they would be more likely to be able to read Latin than their own vernacular.
It’s really only after the printing press made books more affordable that vernacular translations probably became more practical among the laity, as the wider availability of cheaper writings created more incentive to make vernacular works more widespread. There had definitely been many made prior to this (I think there were 17 German translations of some form before Luther ever set pen to paper for his), but nothing like the explosion that occurred after.
I think one could argue whether this has been, on the whole, a net plus.
I remember the online apologetics wars of the aughts, back when the Internet was still the Wild West, and one of the most fascinating aspects was how frequent that “universal literacy” (as Jason put it) was assumed on the part of those who were arguing with me, and that included my fundamentalist relatives.
As if the Bereans of Acts 17 were sitting around a table with their highlighted copies of the Old Testament and conversing about it every night before coming back to St. Paul!
The whole point of the vernacular translations (even after the printing press) was for people to *hear* the scriptures in their native tongues. *Reading* them as such ended up being a happy bonus…eventually.
I have to admit, as a convert, I was ABSOLUTELY SHOCKED when I opened my first Catholic Bible and discovered that the words of Jesus were not in red!!!!! I said: “Is this even a bible!” Ah, the first days of being a convert.
Outstanding observation, LCQ.
“… pedo-baptism vs believer’s baptism, Cessationism vs Pentecostalism, Complimentarianism vs Egalitarianism, Predestination vs Free Will, etc.”
Some say “”[Eastern] Orthodoxy will drive you mad with their arguments and dissensions;”.
But they don’t have anything on the Protestant scriptural literalists.
Infused knowledge through the Holy Spirit. Jesus said to test everything.