Bible Burners

[Denise]

By Dwight Longenecker, author and now Priest

Dwight Longenecker is the editor or author of five books, among them, The Path to Rome, a book of British conversion stories. He is co-author of Challenging Catholics: A Catholic-Evangelical Debate and the author of More Christianity.

Tales continue to circulate about how the Catholic Church opposed translating the Bible into the vernacular. But the Church has never opposed that. After all, the Vulgate was originally translated by St. Jerome to make the Bible available in the vernacular of the day, Latin, which continued to be the lingua franca of educated Europe up to the late 18th century and beyond. Nor were the Reformers the first to translate the Bible into more modern European languages. The Catholic Church approved of Gutenberg's German Bible in 1455. The first printed Flemish edition came out in 1477. Two Italian versions of the Bible were printed in 1471, and a Catalan version came out in 1478. A Polish Bible was translated in 1516, and the earliest English version was published in 1525. Most of these were editions of the entire Bible. Individual books had appeared in the vernacular centuries earlier. The first English-language Gospel of John, for example, was translated by the Venerable Bede into Anglo-Saxon in the year 735.

The Church didn't object to William Tyndale's translating the Bible into English. Rather, she objected to the Protestant notes and Protestant bias that accompanied the translation. Tyndale's translation came complete with prologue and footnotes condemning Church doctrines and teachings. Even King Henry VIII in 1531 condemned the Tyndale Bible as a corruption of Scripture. In the words of King Henry's advisors: "the translation of the Scripture corrupted by William Tyndale should be utterly expelled, rejected, and put away out of the hands of the people…."

Protestant Bishop Tunstall of London declared that there were upwards of 2,000 errors in Tyndale's Bible. Tyndale translated the term Baptism into "washing," Scripture into "writing," Holy Ghost into "Holy Wind," bishop into "overseer," priest into "elder," deacon into "minister," heresy into "choice," martyr into "witness," etc. In his footnotes, Tyndale referred to the occupant of the Chair of Peter as "that great idol, the whore of Babylon, the anti-Christ of Rome."

The Catholic response was not to burn the Bible, but to burn Tyndale's Bible. 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."

The Protestant Reformers may have been revolutionaries, but their revolution was extremist, not unlike that of the Taliban. This is exemplified by their zeal for destruction. Catholics burnt some Bibles, but the Protestants burned books on a scale that makes the Catholic fires look like the odd candle flame. In England, when the monasteries were suppressed, their libraries were most often destroyed as well. So the vast monastic libraries of religious texts encompassing many ancient, rare, and hand-copied Catholic Bibles were put to the flames. In 1544 in the Anglican controlled sections of Ireland, the Reformers put an immense number of ancient books, including Vulgate Bibles, onto the bonfires as they ransacked the monasteries and their libraries. In an effort to reduce the Catholic Irish to ignorance, King Henry VIII decreed that in Ireland the possession of a manuscript on any subject whatsoever (including sacred Scripture) should incur the death penalty.

King Henry VIII even burnt the Protestant Bibles of Tyndale, Coverdale, and Matthew, with the Catholic Latin Vulgate helping to feed the fires.

In 1582 The Rheims Catholic New Testament in English was issued. This Catholic version, with its accompanying notes, aroused the fiercest opposition in Protestant England. Queen Elizabeth ordered searches to seek out, confiscate, and destroy every copy. If a priest was found in possession of it, he was imprisoned. The Bible-burning wasn't limited to England. In 1522 Calvin had as many copies as could be found of the Servetus Bible burned, and later Calvin had Michael Servetus himself burned at the stake for being a Unitarian.

Sadly, the destruction was not limited to the burning of Bibles. Sixteenth-century England and Ireland witnessed the most monumental pillage of sacred property and destruction of Christian architecture, art, and craftwork the world has ever seen. In England between the winter of 1537 and spring 1540 over 318 monasteries and convents were destroyed. Parish churches were ransacked. Beautiful paintings and carvings were smashed. Sacred vestments and altar hangings with rich embroidery were confiscated and recycled into curtains and clothes. Vessels of the altar were stolen, melted down, and sold. The Protestants destroyed a religious heritage with the zeal and fury of terrorists, and what was left by the iconoclasts during the reign of Henry VIII was smashed further during the Puritan regime of Oliver Cromwell.

In France the Calvinists, in one year alone (1561), according to one of their own estimates, "murdered 4,000 priests, monks and nuns, expelled or maltreated 12,000 nuns, sacked 20,000 churches, and destroyed 2,000 monasteries" with their priceless libraries, Bibles, and works of art. The rare manuscript collection of the ancient monastery of Cluny was irreparably lost, along with many others.

Living in England, as I do, the legacy of this mindless destruction by anti-Catholic forces is present everywhere. A map of the countryside marks countless bare ruins of medieval monasteries, abbeys, and convents. Visit the medieval parish church in any village and you will notice the empty niches, the whitewashed walls, the side chapels turned into store-rooms, the stained-glass windows once riotous with pictures of the saints and stories from Scripture, now merely plain glass windows. The iconoclasm was followed by a campaign which, for three hundred years, continued to persecute Catholics relentlessly, while it concealed the destructive fury of the Protestant forces and continued to paint the Catholic Church as the incarnation of evil.

The final irony is that the very forces that pulled down and smashed the images of the saints in the medieval churches soon filled those same churches with carved memorial stones and statues of the rich and famous of their day. The figures of the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints and angels are now replaced by figures of English military heroes, prime ministers, and forgotten landed aristocrats. The church which exemplifies this most is Westminster Abbey. Any Catholic visitor to London will be amazed at how this once proud Benedictine Abbey has been turned into a museum of English civil heroes. At every turn one finds statues of statesmen, kings, and politicians, while the heroes of the Christian faith are relegated to the margins.

Time does not heal all wounds. Terrible and violent events cannot simply be forgotten. Telling ourselves that certain things never happened is a lie. Saying that they don't matter now after so many years is another form of the same lie. Terrible events need to be faced, acknowledged, repented of, and forgiven. The violent events and terrible persecution of both Catholics and Protestants can only be put right through repentance and mutual forgiveness.

Catholics must own up to their own faults and sins of the past. In the Jubilee Year, Pope John Paul II took an amazing step forward with his historic mea culpa for the sins of Catholics. On Ash Wednesday in the year 2000 he led the Catholic Church in a public act of repentance. However, this admission of guilt and act of repentance has been met here in England and throughout the Protestant world with stony silence. Not one Protestant leader has offered a similar corporate examination of the past. Isn't it time that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Queen of England took the lead as international Protestant leaders, and offered their own reassessment of the past? If they did so, maybe others would follow and the process of healing could begin.