Have you ever heard people say the Catholic Church burnt people at the stake for translating the Bible into English?

I have and in today's episode I'm going to discuss this myth and how the controversy over punishing

heretics and translating scripture is not a Protestant

slam dunk against Catholicism. First let's talk about the claim that the

Catholic Church prohibited vernacular Bible translations and even executed people simply for the crime of possessing one of these

translations.

Do that though, here's a quick history lesson.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Bible was translated into various languages such as

Wufelas Gothic Bible and the Syriac Pesita in the fourth century. Later into the

Middle Ages we would get the Bible translated into Old Church Slavonic, Coptic, Armenian, and other Eastern languages.

In the West, St Jerome's Latin translation became the standard Bible, and it was called the Vulgate

because it could be read by common people, the Vulgatio, from which we get the English word

vulgar. However, by the ninth century Latin was no longer a common language and it was being

replaced by newer romance languages like French.

However, these languages were still in their primitive forms and so they often lack the

vocabulary that was necessary to translate more abstract concepts from

scripture and it was expensive to copy the Bible in translate more abstract concepts from scripture.

And it was expensive to copy the Bible in general.

The archaeologist Rupert Bryce Milford said it would have taken the skin of nearly

1600 calves to produce the three Bibles requested by Calphrith, the teacher of the 8th century

author venerable bead. Coupled with the low rates of literacy in medieval Europe, Bible production

wasn't very feasible. But in some cases it was done, and as Franz von Lier notes in his

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