sadmanbarty
Well-known member
and so it came to...
I really like all the sentences beginning "And..."
repetition is central to the bibles rhetorical style. mantra like. rituals rely on repetition. dance music. it's very much evoking appealing to that cognitive space.
Well certainly in Europe for a long time it was illegal to translate the Bible from Latin, in other words it could only be read by the elite, the educated... priests basically. So in this respect access to the Bible and the word of God was totally about control, the populace could not argue back or really even debate the word of the lord that was handed down to them. Obviously this was later and the Bible wasn't created to allow the elite in Britain to subjugate the public but I can well believe that any complexity or cryptic elements certainly gave the priests a kind of hierophantic position right from the start... and thus status and power.If that's true then it means they wanted lots or as many people on board as possible, no? Why then make it so cryptic? Was this to weed out the dunces? Jesus loves you as long as you're not thick? Maybe. Or it could have been rewritten at some point to twist it more in the direction of a tool for control. Less likely but possible. Conspiracy aside It seems to me that most of this shit is fairly simple in the end, and has been made unnecessarily convoluted. But then I haven't read it so I guess that makes me one of the dunces *shrug*
Well certainly in Europe for a long time it was illegal to translate the Bible from Latin, in other words it could only be read by the elite, the educated... priests basically. So in this respect access to the Bible and the word of God was totally about control, the populace could not argue back or really even debate the word of the lord that was handed down to them. Obviously this was later and the Bible wasn't created to allow the elite in Britain to subjugate the public but I can well believe that any complexity or cryptic elements certainly gave the priests a kind of hierophantic position right from the start... and thus status and power.
I'm pretty sure it was banned to translate it in the UK and probably also other parts of Europe during the middle ages, maybe it had been translated before that but that doesn't mean its translation was sanctioned by the church at all times.I doubt this, the translations were not forbidden, there are early translations into other languages like Gothic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_Bible
Even the Latin translation itself was a bit controversial, since the original language of thw Old Testament was hebrew - and in the Septuagint Greek, the New Testament was Greek.
AndChurch attitudes toward written translations and the use of the vernacular in Mass varied by the translation, the date and location. For example, whereas the acts of Saint-Gall contain a reference to the use of a vernacular interpreter in Mass as early as the seventh century, and the 813 Council of Tours acknowledge the need for translation and encouraged such, in 1079, Duke Vratislaus II of Bohemia asked Pope Gregory VII for permission to use Old Church Slavonic translations of the liturgy, to which Gregory did not consent.
I think I'm correct in the gist of what I am saying; that there were times when there was resistance from the elites to the great unwashed having a bible in their language and this was to stop them interpreting it "incorrectly" ie in a way that might inconvenience said elites. Although obviously I accept that there were times and places when this was not the case.A well-known group of letters from Pope Innocent III to the diocese of Metz, where the Waldensians were active, is sometimes taken by post-reformation scholars as evidence that Bible translations were forbidden by the church, especially since Innocent's first letter was later incorporated into canon law.