His message of FAITH and GRACE in Jesus Christ alone..was replaced by the CHURCH handing out grace for faith in IT...and the church's ability to take it away by way of "excommunication"... if you didn't comply with them..and what they commanded to be "faithed"...!
Cites?
This vice like grip on salvation....wasn't broken till the inventing of the printing press came about..! When a man or woman could read the word printed in their OWN language.. (not Latin)...and they could then know what PAUL had taught..instead of what the "offical church" said he taught...!
Oh, yeah....the evil old Catholic Church
never produced any Bibles that weren't in Latin, just so they could keep people in the dark.
Right?
This, of course, completely ignores the fact that prior to the Reformation, there were Church-approved vernacular translations in Spanish, Italian, Danish, French, Norwegian, Polish, Bohemian, and Hungarian.
In English alone, we have the Anglo-Saxon translation of Caedmon of Whitby in the 600's AD, the Saxon versions of Bede of Jarrow, Eadhelm of Sherbourne, Guthlac of Peterborough, and one Egbert in the 700's AD; then the free translations of Alfred the Great and Aelfric of Canturbury, the Book of Durham, and the Rushworth Gloss, all from well before the Norman Conquest; the Orm Paraphrase of 1150 and the Salus Animae of 1250, and the Middle English translations of William Shoreham and Richard Rolle, both from the 1300's.
All of these, you will take note, existed centuries before John Wycliffe's flawed English translation of 1525, which was full of translational errors and was, in fact, so bad that Henry VIII ordered every copy of it within the kingdom to be located, seized, and burned.
The idea that the Church kept the Bible out of the language of the people in order to keep them in the dark is a load of baloney. Were there Bibles in Latin? Sure; it was the Church's litrugical language. Were Bibles chained to pulpits in churches? Sure they were. They were copied by hand and often decorated with precious stones and metals, and ergo represented both decades of work and extreme monetary value---they were chained up to keep thieves from stealing them---but anyone who could read was free to enter the church and read the village Bible at any time.
Which brings up the point of literacy; most common people during the Middle Ages couldn't read anyway, so it really didn't matter much if their Bible was in Latin, English, German, Hindustani, or Klingon, did it? If you can't read, you can't read.
You might want to pick up a copy of
Where we Got the Bible, by Henry G. Graham (TAN Books, Rockford IL 61105), which debunks loads of these Reformation fables concerning the Catholic Church and the Bible.
