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"This come from the Roman Catholic Church. Don't tell me they were interested in Bible distribution."

I'll start by proclaiming that I am a Protestant. "Bible distribution" was simply not possible. Books were extremely rare and expensive. Some might think that private ownership of a bible would be selfish. The books were chained so as to allow availability not to prevent availability. Because modern libraries have security measures to prevent theft does not mean that they want to restrict or prevent knowledge?

You can understand the concern of authorities that some uneducated people might misuse parts of the bible. Look at some of the stupid things that the puritans did -- smashed stained glass windows, destroyed artwork, ran through the streets naked, all justified by “their” reading of the bible. The uncontrolled interpretation of scripture by individuals has created a Protestant church that is fractured into a very large number of groups. The fracturing seems to continue daily. That hardly seems like success.

hiho hiho,

Thank you. Just as phone books used to be chained or cabled to the body of phone booths to *ensure* their availability for use, so were Bibles chained to pulpits or tables in Catholic Churches, especially before the invention of the printing press. Handwritten Bibles were expensive to produce and utterly incapable of mass production. it was impossible that "everyone" could have a personal copy. the chaining was meant to prevent theft, so that anyone who could read merely had to go to the church to utilize the Bible there.

After printing was invented, it still took some time to really get mass-production underway, for the Bible or any other work. Compared to modern printing, it was still a fairly slow process, though, of course, much faster that hand-printing.

Until this time, and, effectively, right into the 1600's, *anyone* who could read at all very likely could read Latin. Vernacular translations thus were not all that vitally needed in the time period, though, as vladimir pointed out, there were numerous examples throughout Catholic Europe, both before and after the printing press.

You can understand the concern of authorities that some uneducated people might misuse parts of the bible.

I have no doubt that Luther and others feared this may happen. Luther and others simply stood by the truth wherever that was bound to take him. I don’t think Luther was too concerned about this even though he must have realized it could happen.

Much of this was taking place during the Renaissances where there was great emphasis on knowledge and learning. I’m sorry the author doesn’t speak to this more. The Renaissance by this time had been going on for almost 300 years. It was a time when great emphasis was placed upon learning and knowledge. This, no doubt was probably also one of the reason Luther’s father scraped together what little he had and sent Luther off to school. While the rest of society was experiencing this, including the hierarchy of the Church, the masses in the Church were not.

The reactions of the Puritans (and other Protestants) most likely were an overreaction to the environment they found themselves free of. Regrettably, Protestant laws (e.g. burning heretics) were established somewhat like the Catholic Church since that was the only basis the early Protestant had to compare against. It became a tit-for-tat. This is not to condone Protestants action, simply to state some of them might have been somewhat like the Corinthians in taking their liberations too far.

BTW-I like your picture.