If people were able to read the Bible in their own tongue, the church's income and power would crumble. They could not possibly continue to get away with selling indulgences the forgiveness of sins or selling the release of loved ones from a church-manufactured "Purgatory".
People would begin to challenge the church's authority if the church were exposed as frauds and thieves. The contradictions between what God's Word said, and what the priests taught, would open the public's eyes and the truth would set them free from the grip of fear that the institutional church held.
Salvation through faith, not works or donations, would be understood. The need for priests would vanish through the priesthood of all believers. The veneration of church-canonized Saints and Mary would be called into question. The availability of the scriptures in English was the biggest threat imaginable to the wicked church. Neither side would give up without a fight. Any copies printed prior to are extremely valuable. Tyndale's flight was an inspiration to freedom-loving Englishmen who drew courage from the 11 years that he was hunted.
Books and Bibles flowed into England in bales of cotton and sacks of flour. In the end, Tyndale was caught: betrayed by an Englishman that he had befriended.
Tyndale was incarcerated for days before he was strangled and burned at the stake in But before that could happen…. Coverdale finished translating the Old Testament, and in he printed the first complete Bible in the English language , making use of Luther's German text and the Latin as sources. Thus, the first complete English Bible was printed on October 4, , and is known as the Coverdale Bible.
John Rogers went on to print the second complete English Bible in He printed it under the pseudonym "Thomas Matthew" , an assumed name that had actually been used by Tyndale at one time as a considerable part of this Bible was the translation of Tyndale, whose writings had been condemned by the English authorities. It is a composite made up of Tyndale's Pentateuch and New Testament edition and Coverdale's Bible and some of Roger's own translation of the text.
It remains known most commonly as the Matthew-Tyndale Bible. It went through a nearly identical second-edition printing in It became the first English Bible authorized for public use, as it was distributed to every church, chained to the pulpit, and a reader was even provided so that the illiterate could hear the Word of God in plain English.
It would seem that William Tyndale's last wish had been granted Cranmer's Bible, published by Coverdale, was known as the Great Bible due to its great size: a large pulpit folio measuring over 14 inches tall. Seven editions of this version were printed between April of and December of His motives were more sinister… but the Lord sometimes uses the evil intentions of men to bring about His glory.
The Pope refused. His first act was to further defy the wishes of Rome by funding the printing of the scriptures in English… the first legal English Bible… just for spite. The ebb and flow of freedom continued through the 's She was possessed in her quest to return England to the Roman Church. Mary went on to burn reformers at the stake by the hundreds for the "crime" of being a Protestant. This era was known as the Marian Exile, and the refugees fled from England with little hope of ever seeing their home or friends again.
In the 's, the Church at Geneva, Switzerland, was very sympathetic to the reformer refugees and was one of only a few safe havens for a desperate people. Many of them met in Geneva, led by Myles Coverdale and John Foxe publisher of the famous Foxe's Book of Martyrs , which is to this day the only exhaustive reference work on the persecution and martyrdom of Early Christians and Protestants from the first century up to the midth century , as well as Thomas Sampson and William Whittingham.
The New Testament was completed in , and the complete Bible was first published in It became known as the Geneva Bible. Due to a passage in Genesis describing the clothing that God fashioned for Adam and Eve upon expulsion from the Garden of Eden as "Breeches" an antiquated form of "Britches" , some people referred to the Geneva Bible as the Breeches Bible.
The Geneva Bible was the first Bible to add numbered verses to the chapters, so that referencing specific passages would be easier. Every chapter was also accompanied by extensive marginal notes and references so thorough and complete that the Geneva Bible is also considered the first English "Study Bible". William Shakespeare quotes hundreds of times in his plays from the Geneva translation of the Bible.
Between and at least editions of this Bible were published. Examination of the King James Bible shows clearly that its translators were influenced much more by the Geneva Bible, than by any other source. The Geneva in fact, remained more popular than the King James Version until decades after its original release in !
With the end of Queen Mary's bloody reign, the reformers could safely return to England. The marginal notes, which were vehemently against the institutional Church of the day, did not rest well with the rulers of the day. Another version, one with a less inflammatory tone was desired, and the copies of the Great Bible were getting to be decades old.
In , a revision of the Great Bible known as the Bishop's Bible was introduced. The Geneva may have simply been too much to compete with. By the 's , the Roman Catholic Church saw that it had lost the battle to suppress the will of God: that His Holy Word be available in the English language.
In , the Church of Rome surrendered their fight for "Latin only" and decided that if the Bible was to be available in English, they would at least have an official Roman Catholic English translation. And so, using the corrupt and inaccurate Latin Vulgate as the only source text, they went on to publish an English Bible with all the distortions and corruptions that Erasmus had revealed and warned of 75 years earlier.
In the ancient Near East , at the time when the biblical books were written and copied, scribes did the work of composing and preserving important documents. Scribes were special because they could read and write; literacy was not widespread. Scribes were also editors. A scribe might take several different scrolls with something in common and compile a single book out of them, or scribes living in different times and places might edit similar scrolls together in different ways.
Say, for example, that a Jewish scribe living in Egypt possessed a number of scrolls and other written and oral traditions associated with the prophet Jeremiah. That scribe edited these texts and traditions together into a unified scroll, now called the scroll of Jeremiah.
In this way, different communities would have distinct versions of the scroll of Jeremiah, and both these versions would circulate. We know that something like this process actually occurred, since different versions of the book of Jeremiah—and other biblical texts, too—existed side by side in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in other ancient versions and translations the Masoretic and Septuagint texts of Jeremiah, for instance, also differ.
The biblical books had to be copied over again and again so that they could be preserved for other people to read them. The process of rewriting the books of the Bible was not always perfect—sometimes mistakes were introduced or words were added or dropped. We call this whole process, including the accurate copies and the mistakes, the transmission of the text. That is, the text is transmitted and sometimes changed by scribes who copied the ancient scrolls over and over again. In time, editions of these books were collected and religious communities gradually narrowed down the list of books they deemed authoritative.
However, different communities used different criteria. This process of including certain books as Scripture and rejecting others is called canonization. Of course, the books of the Torah the first five books of the Hebrew Bible were seen as especially holy from at least the second century B. But even in the first century C.
A list of books that are considered Scripture for any particular group of people is called a canon. Jewish and Christian communities have different canons because Christians include the books of the New Testament in their Scripture.
Within Christian tradition, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox , and Protestant communities have slightly different canons. Even among Eastern Christian traditions, there are very different canons, too. Much of his research focuses on the reception history of the Bible, which studies the ways in which biblical texts function in diverse contexts in liturgy, theology, visual art, literature, and politics.
Despite questions about its authorship and date, 2 Peter is an important witness to concepts of apostolic authority and tradition in the early Christian church. The Bible did not just appear in its entirety. It was written, edited, and collected by people over the centuries.
These Bible pedlars were not like foreign missionaries ; they were of the same nationality as the people they talked to, they knew them well and shared the same language. They travelled tirelessly through town and country, sometimes to the remotest of places, going from house to house to distribute their Bibles.
The Bible is at the centre of Protestantism. This underpinned the aim of the Bible Societies : to make the Bible accessible to people in their own language and at an affordable price. Importance was given to the Protestant principle of individual Bible reading and this became possible for more and more people. The pedlars distributed the Bible and encouraged people to read it — this led to a strengthening of the Protestant religion at the expense of Catholicism, throughout the 19th century.
The Deuterocanonical books were books in the Old Testament written in Greek and do not form part of the Jewish canon. They can be found in the Greek version of the Old Testament, the Septuagint. The Reformers considered the Apocrypha to be of interest, but not necessarily the Word of God. Cost was one reason why the British Bible Society eventually omitted the Apocrypha from their Bibles in As this Society distributed the most Bibles at the time, in spite of opposition from the Paris Bible Society, the Apocrypha came to be omitted more and more from Protestant Bibles during the course of the 19th century.
At first the Roman Catholic Church welcomed this new enthusiasm for distributing Bibles. However, Rome soon began to criticise the movement. A joint document, with translation guidelines, was issued by the Roman Catholic Church and the Universal Bible Societies. In , after a period of 15 years spent working together, the TOB, an ecumenical translation of the Bible into French, was produced worldwide for the first time.
Protestants and Catholics had, for the first time, both edited The Biblical text, notes and commentary. In the 6 books of the Apocrypha, which had been used by the Orthodox Church for centuries, were included in the third revision of this translation. They update these exhibitions regularly and follow the latest trends in museography.
0コメント