[terycarl]

LOL The Catholic Church executed any who would try to read anything other then their perversion of scripture.

Nope, up until the time that perverted forms of the Bible began to appear, you could own all that you could find and all that you could afford.....and that was VERY FEW.

[MamaB]

Then why were people forbidden to have their own copies of the Bible and were burned at the stake if they had a copy? History is a favorite hobby of mine especially since genealogy is another interest. I was simply horrified when I read stories about what Catholics did to non Catholics. How could they do that? They were not Christians in any way. No wonder people got fed up with them and did not want anything else to do with them.

[Elsie]

Nope, up until the time that perverted forms of the Bible began to appear, you could own all that you could find and all that you could afford

Oh?

Show me the evidence.

[CynicalBear]

>>Nope, up until the time that perverted forms of the Bible began to appear, you could own all that you could find and all that you could afford.....and that was VERY FEW.<<

Do Catholics just say what they think fits at the time. From "no one could read" to "you could own all you could find" is a rather interesting switch. An honest study of history might do your credibility some good.

[2nd amendment mama]

Nope! You are totally incorrect! The Catholic church DID, in fact, ban laity from owning and reading the Bible. Instead of parroting what the priests have taught you, you should do your own research.

From VatiLeaks

Origin of ‘heresy’

When the basic New Testament canon started to develop towards the end of the Fourth Century (generally) the laity was strictly ‘forbidden to read the word of God, or to exercise their judgment in order to understand it’.³ Damasus recorded that ‘bad use of difficult passages by the simple and poor gives rise to hear-say’ and the general populace was denied access to the compilations. The word ‘hear-say’ developed into ‘heresy’ and people who opposed Church opinions were subsequently called ‘heretics’.⁴ It was with a resolution of that council that the ban was officially established but some members of the priesthood had trouble understanding the new terminology. The unreliability of their explanations of heretics and heresies is illustrated in the case of St. Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis (d. 403) who mistook the Pythagorean Sacred Tetrad (the number 4), for a heretic leader.

After he suppressed the Bible, Damasus created an array of formidable penances and additional anathemas ‘designed to keep the curious at bay’⁵, the chief tendency of the priesthood was to keep the Bible away from people and substitute Church authority as the rule of life and belief.

Owning a Bible was a criminal offence

In 860, Pope Nicholas I, sitting high on a throne built specially for the occasion in the town square, pronounced against all people who expressed interest in reading the Bible, and reaffirmed its banned public use (Papal Decree). In 1073, Pope Gregory supported and confirmed the ban, and in 1198, Pope Innocent III declared that anybody caught reading the Bible would be stoned to death by ‘soldiers of the Church military’ (Diderot’s Encyclopedia, 1759). In 1229, the Council of Toulouse, ‘to be spoken of with detestation’, passed another Decree ‘that strictly prohibits laics from having in their possession either the Old or New Testaments; or from translating them into the vulgar tongue’. By the 14th Century, possession of a Bible by the laity was a criminal offence and punishable by whipping, confiscation of real and personal property, and burning at the stake.

With the fabricated Christian texts safely hidden from public scrutiny by a series of Decrees, popes endorsed the public suppression of the Bible for twelve hundred and thirty years, right up until after the Reformation and the printing of the King James Bible in 1611.

Another link about the subject: Vatican Archives Reveal Bible Was Once Banned Book