I think you need to read over something.
In the original post there was this:
“2) The Church distributed the Bible in every country it was in and in the common language of the people from the 7th down to the 14th century and beyond.
You wrote:
“Not true. In England, for example, some translations were made, but they were for the elite, not the commoners.”
Whoa! Commoners are PEOPLE. Common language is what they speak. The opening post said “common language of the people” while you used a DIFFERENT WORD AND IDEA = “commoners”.
Some commoners could read. Some could not. But just about everyone in England after 1300 knew the common tongue. Before that that was not the case. The elite often spoke a different language (and it wasn’t Latin either although many of them knew that language). Wealthy, well educated people in late medieval England often knew several languages. They spoke either Old/Middle English or Norman French at home. In Church matters they spoke Latin. In common law courts they used a highly developed dialect of French particular to the courts. We get words some of our legal terms like voir dire from that Anglo-Norman dialect.
The Catholic Church, to put a good spin on it, didn’t want commoners reading scripture apart from ‘sacred tradition’. The problem wasn’t lack of desire from people, nor lack of ability, but fear of what scripture might do if read apart from the Catholic Church.”
The languages varied a bit more between common and high. In particular, what I’ve read of the German translations is that they were a courtly german, not shared by the common folks.
In England, the common tongue wasn’t all that common. Wycliffe and later Tyndale had to choose what version of words to use...and their works were so well distributed that, like Luther, they changed the language itself.
But I think my point, poorly expressed, is correct. The handful of copies made were not intended nor available to common people. When Wycliffe’s “Bible Men” traveled and read the portions of scripture they had, common folk listened and learned. To recite the Lord’s Prayer in common English was enough to prove heresy, since the only way a commoner could do it was thru Wycliffe.