You bet they did!
The real question is why did they do it?
Many anti-Catholics these days try and skew this chaining of the Bible as a dig against the Church. They use it to promote the revisionist idea that the Catholic Church didn’t want lay persons exposed to the “real teachings” of the Bible – which, of course, is just more bunk.
[Granted, the Church was being totally unreasonable at the time...something about not wanting a bunch of uneducated people misinterpreting scripture out of the context of the entire Deposit of Faith leading to horrible division (read denominationalism) and destroying unity within the Church. I mean, obviously the Church had no idea what it was talking about. Right. But I digress.]
Yes, the Church chained up Bibles, but they did not do it to keep people from reading them. Ironically, it was the exact opposite.
These Bibles were chained up in public, often out in front of the Church. It would be a pretty silly thing to chain up a bible and leave it out in front of the Church if they didn’t want anyone to read it. Wouldn’t you think? It seems that locking it away somewhere in a room or a box would work much better.
When we go to the grocery store checkout stand and pay for our groceries, there is usually a little pen there for everyone to use to write with. Often times this pen is chained to the checkout stand.
Is that because they don’t want anyone to use it? Or is that because they want to make it available for everyone to use?
It was precisely because they wanted everyone to have access to the Bible that they left it out where everyone could read it! But precisely because they wanted it to still be around for everyone to read, they had to chain it to something to keep it from walking off.
Keep in mind, this is back before the printing press. Books, particularly the Bible, were very expensive because they were all hand copied. They could cost thousands to tens of thousands of dollars in today’s currency.
Nobody in their right mind would leave something that expensive just sitting around for anyone to take. So the Church did what it could to make it available – and keep it available.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Thank you for this. I didn’t know and now I do ! Plus, I can tell anyone who comes up with the tired thing about Catholics keeping Bibles away from people
However those who want to believe what they have always believed, aren’t going to let something fact or reason stand in their way. Human nature.
As a convert, this is one of the many fallacies I had to wade thru on my road to Rome. Great Post!
Very interesting piece of history, Matt.
Thanks for clarifying. Yes, I have heard more than a few practices by the early church characterized in a way to make them sound crazy by today’s way of thinking. A shame that often the context and reasoning are sometimes purposely left out, particularly by other Christian fundamentalist groups who want to portray Catholics as some kind of weird cult. I am a minority Catholic in the south who has experienced this many times in a group of otherwise great Christian people who seem more than energetic about sharing some of these “strange Catholic behaviors” that they probably heard about in their church. It happens all the time.
Thx for the post, Matthew. And, to add to that, something that I read — the Catholic Church did in fact confiscate people’s bibles & burned them; but that was becos there were so many different translations that were defective & inaccurate (eg. the Tyndale or Wycliffe bibles) and those were the ones that were opposed by the Church.
What also should be mentioned is the sheer expense of producing a Bible before printing. (Even after the invention of the printing press, compared to now, a printed version would be expensive.)
A great comparison is the Saint John’s Bible (http://www.saintjohnsbible.org/) that was produced recently, by hand. The Heritage Edition (http://www.heritageedition.com/about.htm), a photographic reproduction of the hand-calligraphed Bible, costs $145,000 each. (Of course, the printing doesn’t cost that much, but the proceeds go to a foundation for the preservation of Christian manuscripts.)