Slide 2:
Well you could tell him he’s wrong but that would hurt his feelings.
One of my theology professors at Loyola in LA was a Methodist Minister who said he really enjoyed teaching at a Catholic University because he didn’t have to ignore 700 years of church history.
So let’s help your friend understand that the church never has attempted to keep the WHOLE bible from the people in the pews. The Hebrew Bible was translated into the more widely accepted Greek language between the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C.
Since Greek was the common language of traders in the Mediterranean area the Bible became more available to those few people who could read.
Moving ahead to New Testament times we observe that some of the writings of the time were in Aramaic as well as Greek.
Slide 3:
Jesus the Messiah spoke in the Galilean dialect of the Ancient Aramaic language.
This is the language in which the disciples and the apostles preached the Gospel and the scribes recorded the Scriptures.
The Ancient Aramaic Scriptures were translated into Greek by the Greek converts during the Apostolic Age.
In the fifth century AD, St. Jerome translated the Bible into Latin, which was the vernacular (common language) of his day.
Jerome’s translation is in fact known as the Vulgate, which means “common version.”
Still, in the period known as “late antiquity” (roughly, the third to the eighth centuries after Christ) there appeared many vernacular translations of the Bible.
The four Gospels were translated into Old English around 1000. In 1294, there appeared a complete translation of the Bible into French.
Slide 4:
Gutenberg’s printing press came into use in 1440 and then the Bible was mass produced in various languages forty-three years prior to the birth of Martin Luther.
Church authorities did oppose or condemn certain vernacular translations, but only because the translations were done by heretics and contained heretical opinions in their commentaries. The “saved by faith alone” concept grew out of such a mistranslation by Martin
Luther who inserted the “alone” in order to support his theological views.
Protestant Bibles have subsequently remove his insertion and many now include the portions previously removed during the Protestant Reformation, this section is called the Apocrypha.
Slide 5:
As you can see throughout the ages the Bible has been translated into the various languages of the people so that everyone can read and study it.
It is important to remember that the Bible of the first century is a Catholic Christian Book which has been translated throughout the centuries in an effort to help people recognize God’s work in our lives.
There has never been an attempt by any Christian religion to suppress the use of the Bible, on the contrary every effort has been made to make the Bible available to the largest group possible.