When the eyewitnesses to Christ’s life and death died out, the Church started setting down and canonizing a new set of scriptures so that the miracles and mystery would not be lost from generation to generation.
In those early days, scriptures were freely translated into Syriac, Aramaic, and Latin. In the Catholic church, the Latin translation dominated for so many years that it came to be the standard – the only translation studied and proclaimed. But in the 400s, there was a boom of Christianity spreading to people who not only didn’t speak Latin, they didn’t have a written language whatsoever. Some translations were made, but by and large, reading the Bible got harder for the average Christian. Sure, those that could read could read Latin. But how many people was that really – maybe 5%, 10% of the population? More and more, the Bible was opened to the priests and monks, the wealthy landowners – and less to everyone else.1 This is not to say that the Catholic church had some kind of vendetta against people reading for themselves. Translation was long, complicated, and expensive work. On top of that, the resources needed to make a Bible were immense. For example, one Bible copied out in the 7th century in Northumbria required the skins of approximately 1,600 calves. 1,600!2
Sometimes the Catholic church did tacitly approve of translation efforts on a small scale. But, in the 12th and 13th centuries, groups like the Waldensians arose: Christians who wanted a Bible they could understand, but also challenged Catholic teachings. They didn’t believe relics had value or that holy water was different from regular water or that they should be required to fast on certain days.3 Literacy was on the rise and these groups were gaining some power locally. And so they were called heretics, excommunicated, and persecuted nearly to extinction. They were burned to death and even had a crusade organized against them in 1487.4
While there was no official ban on making a translation, well, you did so at your own peril. In the 16th century, Martin Luther was a priest, monk, and professor. He had the privilege of reading the Bible for himself and he had a crisis of conscience. At first, he was looking to reform the Catholic church from within: surely anyone could see that selling indulgences like they were then was a corrupt practice and that priests with barely any education who were openly sinning was a bad thing. But as he read and studied, he came to see that he was having a distinct revelation from God: we are saved through faith alone by grace alone in Christ alone and that we live for God’s glory alone. On top of that, he held firm to the idea of scripture alone5 – we don’t submit to both the traditions of the Church as well as what we find in the Bible. People err, in the past and now, so we need to listen for the Spirit speaking in and through the Bible. And, if the scripture is this important, this central to our faith, then it needs to belong to everyone.
So in the early 1520s, Luther went back to the original languages, the Hebrew and Greek, and he made a translation for everyone. He was so concerned with creating a translation that anyone could relate to, that he would regularly go out into towns and marketplaces so he could listen to how regular people spoke. He wouldn’t let the Bible he worked on be just an ivory tower exercise. With the help of other translators, the full Bible was published in 1534, but Luther kept refining and fine tuning this Bible translation until he died in 1546.6
Luther once said, “a simple layman armed with scripture is greater than the mightiest pope without it.”7 And the people wanted this Bible. With the help of Gutenberg’s printing press, one Bible printer made over 100,000 copies of Luther’s Bible translation between 1534 and 1574. This meant that almost every Protestant had a Bible at home – that they could read any time they wanted!8
One Johann Cochlaeus complained at the time:
“Luther’s New Testament was so much multiplied and spread by printers that even tailors and shoemakers, yea, even women and ignorant persons who had accepted this new Lutheran gospel, and could read a little German, studied it with the greatest avidity as the fountain of all truth. Some committed it to memory, and carried it about in their bosom. In a few months such people deemed themselves so learned that they were not ashamed to dispute about faith and the gospel not only with Catholic laymen, but even with priests and monks and doctors of divinity.”9
People read and learned to read because they had the Bible. Protestant reformers set up schools and lifted up public education in the hope that an educated public could grow in character and faith and move forward together in holy purposes. There wasn’t any kind of formal ban on other translations in the Catholic church until after Luther’s Bible spread had lit a fire in so many. After the Council of Trent from 1545-1563, the Catholics formally denounced many Protestant teachings and affirmed their Latin translation of the Bible to be the authoritative text of the Bible.10 Each side had drawn a line in the sand and there followed years of bloodshed and chaos. All for the right to speak from the Bible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_translations_in_the_Middle_Ages
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_translations_in_the_Middle_Ages
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldensians
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldensians#Catholic_response
[5] https://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/the-five-solas-of-the-protestant-reformation.html
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Bible
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sola_scriptura
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Bible
[9] Ibid.
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Trent