Some Protestant myths: medieval obscurantism. On the supposed “biblical ignorance” of medieval times.
The work Section I of New Testament Greek, which the Protestant entity s.e.u.t. (United Evangelical Seminary of Theology, linked to the Spanish Evangelical Church and to the Spanish Reformed Episcopal Church) provides in its biblical-language courses, does not focus on the Greek language, as one would expect, but ventures into the field of exegesis and history by setting out some of the “exegetical” principles of the Protestant pseudo-reformation, as well as by shamelessly teaching the myths of “Reformed” historiography. Let us see how this masterpiece of ideological manipulation lacks any scientific and biblical basis.
First myth
This is the supposed ignorance of the peoples of Europe in biblical matters before the Protestant pseudo-reformation, as stated in lesson 34 of Section I (p. 5.8), where it is said concerning the Middle Ages, the “Dark Ages”, that such ignorance was due to the Bible being written “only in ancient languages, such as Latin and Greek. The Bible was only available, mostly, in Latin, and the ordinary man of that time was no more versed in Latin than a worker in a Ford factory today”; and that “shortly before the Reformation, some began to translate the Bible into European languages (…) despite terrible opposition and persecution”.
It seems impossible to fit a greater number of falsehoods into so few lines.
Let us take it step by step:
1) The Middle Ages begin in the fifth century A.D., counting from the year of the fall of Rome. At that time the western half of the old Roman empire, dominated by the barbarians, spoke Latin and had an excellent version of the Bible: the Vulgate of Saint Jerome; the eastern half of the empire, which survived until the Turks conquered Constantinople in the fifteenth century, spoke Greek and could read in that language both the New Testament and the Old (the latter in several versions, such as that of the LXX); so that in the Middle Ages the people had a very broad knowledge of the Scriptures.
2) The Bible was translated into the vernacular languages many centuries before the pseudo-reformation of Luther, Calvin and company, for:
a) The Catholic saints Cyril and Methodius translated the Bible into Old Bulgarian in the ninth century, in the very middle of the Middle Ages, the “Dark Ages”! (cf. Lengua y Literatura Latinas I, various authors, UNED, Madrid, 1986, p. 32, and Iniciación a la fonética, fonología y morfología latinas, José Molina Yébenes, Publicacions Universitat de Barcelona: Barcelona 1993, p. 4); thus, the Bulgarians could read the Bible in their own language.
b) Bishop Ulfilas (an Arian, not a Catholic), evangelizer of the Goths of Dacia and Thrace, translated the Bible into Gothic a few years before Saint Jerome finished the Vulgate, so that when the medieval “darkness” arrived, the Goths could read the Bible in their mother tongue! (cf. José Molina Yévenes, op. cit., p. 5; Esteban Torre, Teoría de la traducción literaria, Ed. Síntesis, 1994, p. 24, and UNED, op. cit., p. 32).
c) The Catholic monk Bede the Venerable translated the Gospel of Saint John into Anglo-Saxon or Old English shortly before his death, which occurred in the year 735, that is: in the very middle of the Middle Ages, “the Dark Ages”! (cf. Esteban Torre, op. cit., p. 24).
d) The great historian Giuseppe Riciotti, author of very meritorious works such as Vida de Jesucristo (Ed. Luis Miracle, Barcelona 1978) and Historia de Israel (Ed. Luis Miracle, Barcelona 1949), informs us in his introduction to the Holy Bible that, in Italy, “the Bible in the vulgar tongue was extremely popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries”, and that “from the thirteenth century onward there are” Italian translations of the Bible, although “they are partial translations”, that is, translations of the most memorable and accessible sacred books, since no one, except a few scholars, was interested, for example, in the interminable and most tedious list of genealogies in the book of Numbers (taken from sì sì no no, no. 70, April 1998, p. 7).
e) The work Historia de la Literatura I (Antigua y Medieval) (various authors, UNED, Madrid, 1991, p. 103) informs us as follows concerning the Castilian versions of the Bible: “we find in the thirteenth century another group of works formed by the translations of the Bible that were made in this period. Already in the first half of the century we encounter the first preserved text included in this group: the Fazienda de Ultramar. Although some have wished to push its composition back to the middle of the twelfth century, it does not seem, judging from its language, to have been written at so early a date. It is not a simple version of the Bible. It contains, together with the translation itself (made, it seems, not directly from the Vulgate but from a twelfth-century Latin translation made from the Hebrew texts), another series of materials: geographical descriptions, accounts taken from classical antiquity… It seems intended to be a kind of guide for pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land. By means of these translations of the Bible, people who knew how to read in their own language were able to receive religious teachings more directly. The versions were also used for reading aloud in small groups. The Spanish Church of the time was not very favorable to Romance Bibles, and in fact at the Council of Tarragona in 1233 it went so far as to prohibit their reading. Despite this, the translation of the Scriptures was not abandoned; it developed widely throughout the thirteenth century, and the Romance Bibles were read even by the kings of the time”.
It is clear: long before Calvin and Luther, the Castilian people read the Bible in their own language. The enormous extent of the Castilian translations shows that the prohibitive law of the Council of Tarragona was either not applied or soon fell into disuse. That conciliar decision had its explanation: before authorizing the reading of a version, it was necessary to check whether it was properly made, without falsifications of the sacred text. The poor literary quality of the versions, together with the addition of other materials, was not exactly suited to dispel every suspicion; but no one was persecuted for translating the Bible into Castilian, which is very significant.
f) “The Middle Ages witnessed the flourishing in France of a large number of translations of Sacred Scripture into all the languages and dialects of Oc and Oil [for all the old French versions we refer to: P. C. Chauvin, La Bible depuis ses origines jusqu’à nos jours]. Some are extant that go back to the twelfth century and even to the end of the eleventh. In the thirteenth century, the University of Paris presented a translation of both Testaments that held authority for a long time. Nevertheless, other French versions appeared, particularly in the fourteenth century. One of them, that of Guyart Desmoulins, from the end of the thirteenth century but updated in style, was printed from 1478 as regards the New Testament, and in its entirety in 1487” (Daniel Raffard de Brienne, Traductor, Traditor. Les nouvelles traductions de l’Écriture Sainte, in the journal Lecture et Tradition, July-August 1986).
Luther boasted of having been the first to translate the Bible into German, but the heresiarch Calvin already reminded him that such an honor did not belong to him; indeed, we know that the friar published the New Testament in 1522 and the remainder in 1532, and that “it has been said of this version, with a great lack of historical truth, that it was the first German version in the vernacular language, when by then in Germany alone there were fourteen versions in learned language and five in the common tongue. In addition there were many partial versions, such as of the New Testament, of the Psalms… (cf. Janssen: Geschichte des deutschen Volkes seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters, 8 vv., Freiburg, 1883-1893, volume I, p. 51)” (Francisco J. Montalbán, S.I., Los Orígenes de la Reforma Protestante, Razón y Fe, Madrid 1942, p. 129).
g) The great historian Ricardo García-Villoslada also informs us about the Germanic versions of the Bible before Luther: “Many think that Martin Luther’s chief work in his life was the translation of Sacred Scripture into the language of his people. There is no doubt that the vernacular version of the Bible and its dissemination, offering it as the sole norm of faith, played a very important role in the founding and establishment of the Lutheran Church. Exaggerating his merits, which on the other hand are undeniable, he used to repeat that in the Church, before him, no one knew or read the Bible (Tischr. 3795 III 690; ibid., 6044 V 457 and many other places). Today the reader laughs at such unjust assertions, dictated by passion. Recall what we said about the reading of the Bible when Fr. Martin was a novice in Erfurt. Francisco Falk has counted no fewer than 156 editions from the invention of printing until 1520 (F. Falk, Die Bibel am Ausgange des Mittelalters [Mainz 1905] 24). Sebastian Brant begins his well-known poem Ship of Fools (1494) with these verses: `All countries today are full of Sacred Scripture -and of everything pertaining to the salvation of souls-, of the Bible’, etc. German translations of the whole of Sacred Scripture existed in no small number before Luther, at least fourteen in High German and four in Low German, not counting partial versions, psalters, evangeliaries, etc. In the fourteenth century a complete translation was made in Bavaria, which the Alsatian printer Johann Mentelin had printed in Strasbourg in 1466, and which with some modifications was reprinted thirteen times before Luther’s appeared, becoming, according to Grisar, something like a German Vulgate. (One may consult the great edition of W. Kurrelmeyer, Die erste deutsche Bibel [Tübingen 1903-15], 10 volumes with the original text and the corrections of the 13 later editions. See also W. Kurrelmeyer, The Genealogy of the Prelutheran Bibles, in The Journal of Germanic Philology, 3,2 [1900] 238-47; W. Walter, Die Deutsche Bibel: übersetzung des Mittelalters, Braunschweig 1889-92)” (García-Villoslada, Martín Lutero, BAC, Madrid 1976, vol. II, p. 399).
h) One may also mention the translation of the Bible, in the Middle Ages, into other Indo-European languages, such as Armenian (cf. UNED, op. cit., p. 30 and Molina Yébenes, op. cit., p. 4), made in the fifth century, the century in which the “Dark Ages” begin!
What has been said so far is enough to demolish one of the myths of Protestant historiography: the tremendous ignorance regarding the Bible in which the wicked Catholic Church kept the medieval Christian peoples.
Second myth
In the Middle Ages “most people could not read or write. Thus they were `in the dark’ with respect to every kind of knowledge, since it could not be communicated” (Lesson 34 of Section I, p. 5.8).
This is brilliant! Where must the author have studied history? In a BBC television course?
Let us see what that science called History tells us about this matter: “In the Middle Ages, as in every age, the child goes to school. Generally, it is the school of his parish or of the nearest monastery. Indeed, all churches have a school: the Lateran Council of 1179 requires this, and in England, a country more conservative than ours, one can still see the church beside the school and the cemetery. Often it is seigneurial foundations that guarantee the instruction of children; Rosny, a small village on the banks of the Seine, had from the beginning of the eighteenth century a school that had been founded around the year 1200 by its lord Gui V Mauvoisin. At other times they are exclusively private schools; the inhabitants of a village join together to maintain a teacher who takes charge of the teaching of the children. (…) The cathedral chapters were also subject to the obligation to teach dictated by the Lateran Council (Note 1: In each diocese, says Luchaire, apart from the rural or parish schools that already existed… the chapters and the principal monasteries had their schools, their staff of teachers and pupils. La societé française au temps de Philippe Auguste, p. 68). The child entered them [the schools] at seven or eight years of age, and the teaching that prepared for university studies extended over a decade, just as today, according to the data provided by Abbot Gilles le Muisit. Boys and girls were separated; for girls there were particular establishments, perhaps fewer in number, but where studies sometimes reached very high levels. The abbey of Argenteuil, where Heloise was educated, provided instruction in Sacred Scripture, letters, medicine and even surgery, apart from the Greek and Hebrew that Abelard introduced. In general, schools gave their pupils notions of grammar, arithmetic, geometry, music and theology, which allowed them to gain access to the sciences studied at the University; some included technical instruction. The Histoire Littéraire mentions as an example the school of Vassor in the diocese of Metz, where at the same time as they learned Sacred Scripture and letters, the pupils worked gold, silver and copper (Note 2: L. VII, c. 29; recorded by J. Guiraud, Histoire partiale, histoire vraie, p. 348). (…) In this period children of the different social classes were educated together, as attested by the well-known anecdote that presents Charlemagne as angry with the sons of the barons, who were lazy, unlike the sons of serfs and the poor. The only distinction made was that of payment, since instruction was free for the poor and paid for by the rich. We shall see that this gratuity could be prolonged for as long as the studies lasted and also extended to access to the degree, since the aforementioned Lateran Council forbids the persons whose function was to direct and control the schools `to require from candidates for teaching a remuneration in order that the title be granted to them’. Moreover, in the Middle Ages there was little difference in the education received by children of different condition; the children of the humblest vassals were educated in the seigneurial mansion together with those of the lord, the children of rich burghers were subjected to the same apprenticeship as that of the humblest artisan if they wished in turn to attend to their father’s trade. This is undoubtedly the reason why there are so many great men of humble origin: Suger, who governed France during the crusade of Louis VII, was the son of serfs; Maurice de Sully, the bishop of Paris who had the church of Notre-Dame built, was born of a beggar; Saint Peter Damian was a swineherd in his childhood, and Gerbert d’Audrillac, one of the most dazzling lights of medieval science, was also a shepherd; Pope Urban VI was the son of a shoemaker from Troyes, and Gregory VII, the great Pope of the Middle Ages, of a poor goatherd. Conversely, many great lords are literate men whose education must not have differed greatly from that of the clerics:Robert the Pious composed Latin hymns and sequences; William IX, prince of Aquitaine, was the first of the troubadours; Richard the Lionheart left us poems, as did the lords of Ussel, of Baux and many others; not to mention more exceptional cases such as that of the king of Spain Alfonso X” (Régine Pernoud, A la luz de la Edad Media, Ed. Juan Granica, Barcelona 1988, pp. 115-118).
All the foregoing, pure history, presents us with a picture of the Middle Ages very different from the one drawn by Protestant mythology: instruction was extremely widespread, everyone had access to knowledge of the Scriptures, and culture was free for the poor (the opposite of what happens in our Protestantized world). Where, then, are the medieval “darknesses”? Only in the minds of Protestant mythographers.
Author: Luis Fernando Pérez
