- My answer:
1)
- It is completely right to say that there were both Catholic and protestant martyrs regarding the transmission of Bible in languages people could understand!
- But it became a threat to the authority of the Church which did its best to prevent it!
- I underlined some parts of this text!
http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2413-94672015000200010
Increasingly, the key to what the book really means was sought in the so-called
regula fidei, the rule of what the church believes, confesses and teaches, in the form of doctrine, the
regula veritatis or rule of truth, and whenever conflicts of interpretation arose believers looked to structures of authoritative teaching in the church to solve these conflicts by official interpretation and teaching, often leading to the official rejection of what was seen as false teaching and false teachers. The Bible became increasingly used as source for the official church to prove its authoritative doctrines and teaching.
The Middle Ages
During the Middle Ages, in the Latin-speaking western Empire, developments took place in three different social locations, namely the monasteries, the cathedral schools and the medieval universities.
From the sixth into the twelfth centuries, it was in the
monasteries where "the torch of learning was kept alight" because Biblical learning and reading was kept alive, while education and scholarship suffered neglect and even destruction, together with towns, libraries, books and culture. The monastic tradition of spiritual reading for the edification of the soul through contemplation and discipleship called
lectio divina or
sacra pagina developed, involving the rhythm of threefold spiritual practices of reading, contemplation and prayer. During these practices the notion of the four senses of Scripture came to full employ - offering literal (historical and literary), allegorical (doctrinal), moral (exemplary) and anagogical (salvific) meanings. The works of celebrated preachers and commentators (like Gregory the Great and the Venerable Bede) were collected to form an accumulative and authoritative tradition of exposition, informing these practices of spiritual reading. The love of learning and the desire for God became closely inter-related - and for those who could not read there was the teaching through liturgy and art, deeply shaping and nourishing the popular imagination.
Since the ninth century, however, education was also becoming more public, books were copied (with the help of a new form of handwriting) and became increasingly available, new copies of classical and pagan texts were commented upon and gradually the
cathedrals in the larger towns and cities were challenged to open
schools for the education of the clergy, to serve the growing public demand for reading and knowledge. Here a scholastic way of reading the Bible developed, different in purpose and method from the monasteries, so that by the twelfth century two kinds of schools co-existed in different social locations, each with its own traditions of reading and interpretation - monasteries for monks and cathedral schools for clerics. In the schools several material processes were at work that would fundamentally influence and in many ways change practices of interpretation - glosses in the margins of the manuscripts increasingly developed into commentaries and finally into a whole corpus of official comments and opinions from authoritative authors; a method of question and answer, called
disputatio, developed as way of instruction and learning in the schools, making possible the dialectical methodology employed by teachers like Peter Abelard and Peter Lombard, so that the three moments of the
lectio divina were in these locations replaced by three different moments, namely the grammar, logic and rhetoric of the so-called
sacra doctrina. The Vulgate (or Latin text of the Bible) was provided with numbered chapter divisions after which numbered verses also followed, making concordances and similar reference works possible, all serving more systematic study of the Bible.
Still, yet another social location was developing where centres of learning, founded by citizens of more independent cities, were established that would later become known as the first medieval
universities, and again the Bible would be read and studies with different purposes in mind and therefore according to different ways of interpretation. By the end of the twelfth century it was possible for students to begin with a general study in the liberal arts, a
studium generale, preparing them for theological studies, afterwards. Since the scholastic training was not producing the kind of skills regarded by some in the church as necessary for the work of the church, both the Dominican and Franciscan Orders were founded early in the thirteenth century, both concerned with preaching. Francis' resistance against many of the scholastic ideals and practices led to a situation where most popular preaching, often based on very literal understandings of especially the Gospels, was done by self-appointed and untrained preachers. The Dominican Order of Preachers was therefore set up to combat what they regarded as an uncontrolled spread of heresies. The different orders set up their own centres of training or houses of study in the vicinity of and sometimes even as part of the schools and the universities, a practice that would become increasingly popular after the Reformation. By that time Protestant denominations founded their own seminaries, either separate from or collaborating with, universities, but always with a double-vision understanding of doing theology - for the church but in the academy. This included study of the Bible according to changing scholarly climates, approaches and methodologies, but simultaneously intended to be in the service of the church and its ministry and life. With the focus now on preaching, a new genre of gloss also developed, namely comments and later commentaries for preachers, called
postilla (or additions), providing material useful for preachers as sources of interpretation of the Bible.
At the same time, the Dominicans refused the translation of the Bible in the vernacular, thereby attempting to keep the Bible out of the hands of the common people, in order to prevent heresy, in the form of interpretation not officially approved by the church.
Renaissance and Reformation
The Reformation may be described as a next crucial period in the story of reading and interpreting the Bible, although it should be kept in mind that the Reformation itself was only, albeit an integral, part of a much larger cultural and historical process taking place. Already the Renaissance breathed the spirit of
ad fontes, back to the sources, which involved a renewed interest in the original Biblical documents, as well as philological work, translations from the original languages, translations into the vernacular, and wider access to these documents for a broader public. Popular movements grew in which the Biblical documents were read, in spite of official prohibition, spiritually, meditatively, literally, psychologically and morally - for example the reform movement called the
devotia moderna which produced Thomas a Kempis'
Imitation of Christ. Almost inevitably, these widespread encounters with the original documents led to an increasing conflict between these popular readings searching for literal meaning on the one hand and the official readings of the church according to the authoritative and doctrinal rule of faith on the other. A conflict between Bible and Church was developing - with many incidents and episodes contributing to this growing tension, for example the fate of William of Ockham, John Huss and John Wycliffe. For obvious reasons, the invention of printing was a major game-changer. The Reformation was unthinkable without printing. As a result of the technology of printing and the industry of paper-production the world was changed. Printing conquered Europe and later the whole world, is the way Henri-Jean Martin in
The History and Power of Writing describes this process, and in their own hands, in their vernacular, the Bible captured the imagination of many, it became the language they spoke, the lenses through which they saw the world, the strange new linguistic and imaginative world in which they lived. For the first time in history it really became meaningful to speak about "the Bible" in the singular, referring to one book in one physical format.
It became possible to imagine a book with a single message, thrust or purpose, to claim sola Scriptura over against the external authority of the church's teaching office and tradition.
Again, this would have major implications for the social locations where "the Bible" became read and interpreted. The major location was obviously the pulpits of local Protestant congregations. That is where the message was "preached and heard." In official theological studies and training, study of the Bible would also occupy pride of place, in universities, but also in the curricula and classes of the typically Protestant seminaries that would later become so widespread and popular. At the same time, however, the Bible was also from now on increasingly read "in and for the public sphere," so that princes, rulers, cities, regions, even countries could also hear - and hopefully obey - the "Word of God." Visionary interpretations, prophetic interpretations, covenantal interpretations all became popular as attempts to show how public life could also be transformed in obedience to the authoritative message of God's Word, according to the self-understanding of the Reformation.
