Anti-Catholic Whoppers
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Some represent simple misunderstandings but some fallacies about the Catholic faith persist in forms so abhorrent to Catholic teaching--Jack Chick tracts come to mind--that even many Catholics would leave the Church if they were true! Here we seek to shine the light of God's truth and untangle those untruths.
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Fallacy: Catholics were once forbidden to read the Bible and in 1536 William Tyndall was burned at the stake for publishing a Bible in English
by Luke Haskell, Catholic Defenders (edited)The Catholic Church never stopped Catholics from reading scripture. They stopped Catholics from reading bad vernacular Protestant interpretations.The Catholic Church was reading and teaching scripture in the Holy Mass for 1400 years before Protestantism began and for over 300 years before they decided what would compose the New Testament in order to have a unified canon read at every Holy Mass around the world.
It was Catholics who formed the chapter and verse of scripture. It was Catholics who protected the Books through pagan book burnings. It was Catholic monks who set up scriptoriums and in a labor of love dedicated their lives to recopying the Bible over and over again through out every generation up until the printing press when the first Bible off of the press was a Catholic one.Thomas More said when a language waxed old the church always provided a Bible in the vernacular.
“After the invention of the printing press, prior to Luther's Bible being published in German, there had been over 20 versions of the whole Bible translated into the various German dialects (High and Low) by Catholics. Similarly, there were several vernacular versions of the Bible published in other languages both before and after the Reformation. The Church did condemn certain vernacular translations because of what it felt were bad translations and anti-Catholic notes (vernacular means native to a region or country). The Catholic Douay-Rheims version of the whole Bible in English was translated from the Latin Vulgate. It was completed in 1610, ONE YEAR BEFORE THE KING JAMES VERSION WAS PUBLISHED. The New Testament had been published in 1582 and was one of the sources used by the KJV translators. The Old Testament was completed in 1610. The Latin Vulgate was always available to anyone who wanted to read it without restriction. Some Evangelicals have said that it would only have been usable by people who read Latin. But in the 16th Century there were no public schools and literacy was not that common, especially among the peasants. Those people who could read had been well educated and could read Latin.
“ALLEGEDLY THE CATHOLIC CHURCH BURNED COPIES OF THE BIBLE AND THEY EVEN KILLED WILLIAM TYNDALE!
Protestants have speculations that copies of the Bible were chained to the walls of churches during the Middle Ages so that people could not take them home to read. And they also say that the Church is not in favor of translating the bible into different words so that it cannot be studied. And what's even funnier is that the Catholic Church is said to have found copies of the Bible and killed William Tyndale, with the plan of all the madness.
Let's clear up the coachman stories…First, it is correct that the bibles were chained in the Churches in order to secure them because was once expensive to make copies of the bible. [Ed. note: It has been estimated that a hand-written Bible cost in excess of $45,000 in todays dollars to hand scribe before Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1436.] But this does not mean that it was forbidden to read the bible; rather it is chained so that no one could steal it. It's as simple as this, in the telephone booth the phone is attached to the booth where you can't just take it. Does this mean you are not allowed to use the telephone, or the directory?
Second, we know that the original languages of the Bible are two: Hebrew in the Old Testament (with some Aramaic), and Greek in the New Testament. Since Latin is the world's first recorded global language, or lingua franca, St. Jerome translated the bible in Latin in 381 so that many could understand. Cardinal Allen guided scholars in the year 1594 to produce the English translation known as the Douay-Rheims. And in 1948, in the Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius XII entitled Divino Afflante Spiritu which aims to translate the bible into different vernacular languages.
Lastly, the Catholic Church did not kill William Tyndale. Who is he? Tyndale translated the bible into English with footnotes in which were attacks against the Catholic Church.
St. Thomas More searched for errors in Tyndale's version of the Bible and this is what he noticed: the term "baptism" turns 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,” "evangelist" into "bearer of good news," and etc. Many of his footnotes were vicious. For instance, Tyndale referred to the occupant of the Chair of Peter, as "that great idol, the whore of Babylon, the anti-Christ of Rome."
In fact, 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, and not be suffered to go abroad among his subjects." Protestant Bishop Tunstall of London declared that there were upwards of 2,000 errors in Tyndale's Bible. [Henry G. Graham, Where We Got The Bible (TAN Books, 1977) p. 99.] To stop the confusion brought by Tyndale, the Church burned copies of the Tyndale version of the Bible.
Tyndale died not for the right to read the Bible, as many Protestants claim. He was sentenced to death by the civil judges according to christianhistoryinstitute.org, not by the Catholic Church, for doctrines subversive of law and order, which Dr. James Gardiner, Protestant, said "was intended to produce an ecclesiastical and social revolution of a most dangerous character. . .” [what say you © 1955 p.62]
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Luke Haskell, Catholic Defenders (Facebook group), 10/31/23, https://www.facebook.com/groups/2239305266323417/
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Anti-Catholic Myths ( fun with Bob Jones of Bob Jones University)
We've heard these so many times before. The scarlet harlot of Rome is just warming up for Bob Jones. --Catholic Answers