Catholic Apologetics on Catholic Truth - The Bible
1. The Catholic Church destroyed the Bible before the Reformation.
This is a popular statement among anti-Catholics, but the truth is that the Bible was
always available to the people and was available in many editions before the Reformation.
The Catholic Church would have been very stupid to have copies of the Bible made by her monks and nuns only to destroy them. The Church did destroy the counterfeit Bibles of Coverdale, Tyndale, and Wycliffe. The Bible belongs to the Catholic Church (see number 8). If she cannot prevent those outside her jurisdiction from tampering with and misusing it then she will take care that her own children must avoid perusal of counterfeit Bibles. History has shown that the Catholic Church has been wise in prohibiting private persons from translating the Bible without ecclesiastical authority. The Church is very wise is prohibiting the faithful from reading Bibles that are not approved by her, for she desires that the pure, uncorrupted Gospel should be placed into the hands of the people.
2. Martin Luther was the first to translate the Bible into the language of the people.
This is not true. The Bible had been translated into French, Italian, Danish, Spanish, Polish, Norwegian, Bohemian, and Hungarian long before Martin Luther gave out his Lutheran Bible. There was an English translation seven hundred years before the birth of Luther. Luther's Bible came out in 1520, and before that there were 104 editions of the Bible in Latin, 9 editions in German before the birth of Luther, and 27 in German before Luther's Bible. Before the Protestant Bible appeared there were already 40 editions of the Bible in Italy, with 25 of these in Italian with the express permission of Rome. There were 18 editions in France before 1547. Spain began her editions in 1478. In all there were 626 editions of the Bible with 198 of these in the language of the laity before the first Protestant Bible appeared. The first book ever printed was the Bible, in 1445. That was 80 years before Protestantism.
3. Why, in 1713, did Pope Clement XI condemn the doctrine that the Bible is for all to read.
He didn't. What he did condemn was the theory that it is necessary to read the Bible in order to know what Christianity is. Christ established a teaching Church, and the necessity to be taught by that Church. Christ did not order His Apostles to sell Bibles. He did not say "Go and write," but "Go ye and teach all nations." If it were necessary to read Scripture in order to gain salvation Christ would have written a book instead of commissioning to His Apostles to teach, adding "He that heareth you, heareth me." Remember, Christ lived on earth before the discovery of the printing press. Could He make the growth of His religion dependent upon a device that would not be invented for 1400 years? How about the millions of people throughout history who could not read? Before the last book of the New Testament was written the Catholic Church had celebrated her Golden Jubilee and eleven of the Apostles had died. Christianity existed over 300 years without one single Bible Christian. Pope Clement XI wisely condemned the proposition that the reading of Scripture is necessary to
all.
4. The Catholic Church seems afraid that Catholics will be harmed by the reading of Scripture.
Thousands of people have been harmed by the reading of Scripture, thinking themselves capable of interpreting it corrrectly. The Pharisees read Scripture, yet managed to use, or misuse, quotations from the Old Testament as an argument against Christ Himself, the Author of Scripture, just as people today quote Scripture as an argument against the true Church of Christ, the Catholic Church. We must remember the words of Christ in Mark 9:42 "But anyone who is an obstacle to bring down one of these little ones who have faith, would be better thrown into the sea with a great millstone around his neck."
5. The Protestant Bible is the True Bible.
How can it be, when they cut out seven books from the Old Testament: Tobias, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus (Ecclesiastes), Baruch, and the two books of Machabees, as well as various sections of other Books. Luther removed these books because they did not suit his new doctrines. Luther is guilty of using the principle of private judgement - of picking and choosing religious doctrines. Whenever any book taught a doctrine that was contrary to his own, he threw that book out. He and others also mutilated some of the books that were left (see number 6). Many Protestant preachers and Bishops have written volumes pointing out the errors in the King James Version and the Revised Version. In a convention of ministers some years ago in St. Louis, MO., a Presbyterian minister urged the necessity of a new translation of the Protestant Bible because there were no less than 30,000 errors in it.
Now read what some other non-Catholics have said about Protestantism and the Bible:
Dr. Booth, addressing the "Bible League":
"If the assaults on the Scripture continue, the time will come when to those always faithful to God there will be but one refuge, and that will be the Roman Catholic Church."
In Hallam's "History of Literature":
"The translation of the Old and New Testament by [Martin] Luther is more renowned for the
purity of his German idiom than for its adherence to the original text. Simon has charged
him with ignorance of Hebrew and when we consider how late he came to a knowledge of that
or the Greek language, and the multiplicity of his employments, it may be believed that his knowledge of them was far from extensive."
In the September 1908 edition of "Appleton's Magazine" the Rev. Dr. Aked, a Baptist minister, said:
"In the pages of the Protestant Version of the Bible are to be found historical errors,
arithmetical mistakes, inconsistencies, and manifold contradictions, and, what is far worse, one finds that the most horrible crimes are committed by men who plea, 'God said,' in justification of their terrible misdeeds. Moreover, the English Bible is a version of a version which is a translation of a translation. It has come down through Hebrew, Greek, and Latin into English. In all its earlier stages it was copied by hand from one manuscript to another, by different writers, a process certain to result in many mistakes."
Dr. Ingraham, at the time the Anglican Bishop of London:
"At the present moment, there is only one Church in England that officially accepts the
Scriptures as the infallible Word of God, and that Church is the Church of Rome."
The Rev. O. J. Nelson of Bellingham Washington:
"Strictly speaking, none but the Catholic has an infallible Bible, and none but the Catholic can rightly be called an orthodox Christian...There is only one Christian Church of real and consistent authority and that is the Catholic Church."
6. Catholics accuse Protestant translators of tampering with the text of Protestant Bibles.
That's because they did. In his "Introduction to Scriptures", Dixon says "That the early Protestant translations were full of gross errors no unprejudiced Protestant will now deny, and that these errors were willful, Ward, in his 'Errata,' satisfactorily proves." Blunt, in his "Key to the Knowledge and Use of the Bible" says "The characters of the translators were not such as to command the respect of men." Robert Gell wrote of Protestant translators "Truth was often outvoted. Dogmatic interests were in some cases allowed to bias the translation. The Calvinism of one party, the prelatic views of another, were both represented at the expense of accuracy." In his "Bible and the Reformation", Allnatt says "That all the early Protestant versions of the Bible literally swarmed with gross and flagrant corruptions - corruptions consisting in the willful and deliberate mistranslations of various passages of the sacred text, and all directly aimed against those doctrines and practices of the Catholic Church which the 'Reformers' were most anxious to uproot."
Martin Luther himself was the first to introduce intentional errors into his Bible. Not being satisfied with St. Paul's doctrine "we are justified by faith," Luther added the word "ALONE" to make the sentence read "we are justified by faith alone." He explains this insertion himself: "I know very well that the word 'alone' in not in the Latin and Greek texts; but Dr. Martin Luther will have it so, and I order it to be so, and my will is reason enough." St. Paul wrote under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, while Luther created his own Bible under his own audacity. Luther and his cohorts must have forgotten the words of Revelation 22:18-19: "This is my solemn warning to all who hear the prophecies in this book: if anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him every plaque mentioned in the book; if anyone cuts anything out of the prophecies in this book, God will cut off his share of the tree of life and of the Holy City, which are described in the book."
7. The Catholic version of the Our Father is different from the Protestant version.
That is because the Protestant Bible uses a conclusion that was not in the original Greek
copies of the New Testament. The words "For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever. Amen." in the King James Version were added by some copyist, who had in mind words borrowed from the Greek liturgy. These words were not spoken by Christ and that is why Catholic's do not use it. St. Jerome rejected these words as not authentic in the fourth century, and they were also rejected by the authors of the Revised Version of 1881. Even the King James Version omits these words in Luke 11:4. This is an excellent example of the explaination given in statement number 6. Pious Bible students may claim "There are no mistakes in the Bible. It is all inspired. It is God's own book." But God never guaranteed that every individual scribe who copied the New Testament would never copy anything wrong. The original Scripture is free from error because God in the author of the original.
8. The Catholic Church claims the Bible is her own.
That's because it is and no one can disprove that. The Books of the New Testament were scattered around the Mediterranean civilization for 300 years before the writings were gathered and compiled into one collection. It is a fact of history that the Council of Carthage, in 397 A.D., settled the Canon Table of Contents of the New Testament. This is over 1100 years before Luther created his Bible. This Carthage Table of Contents from 397 A.D. is the same Table of Contents that the Catholic Bible has today. The Catholic Church has preserved the Bible and she alone knows what it means. No other denomination has any right to it whatsoever, or any authority to declare what the texts mean. The work of translating, editing, and printing it belongs only to the Catholic Church. The Bible came from the Catholic Church. The Church did not come from the Bible.
9. The Bible alone is all anyone needs for salvation. (Sola Scriptura)
(see also Sola Scriptura
Which Bible? How do you know you have the right Bible? Are you sure your Bible contains only the true words that came down from the Apostles and Evangelists? Are you absolutely sure no words have been inserted or deleted deliberatey by man? Do you have an exact copy of the Holy Scriptures that are identical to the writings from Moses to St. John? If you don't then how can you talk about the Bible and the Bible alone theory? How do you know your Bible came from God? Do you prove it by the intrinsic merit of the writings? Or do you rely upon the religious quality of the Scriptures as sufficient evidence? The merit of the Bible and the inspiration it gives the reader is no guarantee that God is the writer, for we have other books, such as "The Following of Christ", which are much more inspiring than some parts of the Bible.
Protestant sects claim to be founded on the Bible, and the Bible alone, so why are there so many of them? It is because there are so many different interpretations as to what the Bible means. How can they all be right? They can't all be right if they all differ in doctrine and government. If they do not differ then why are they separated? Protestantism says "Let everyone read the Bible for himself and the Holy Ghost will guide him to the truth." If that is true then we must blame the Holy Ghost for the Babylon of religions that surround us, guiding one person to be a Baptist, another to be a Methodist, and so on until people give up religion entirely. The Holy Ghost does not inspire someone using their own private interpretation. If the Holy Ghost were guiding every individual that read the Scriptures sincerely then those individuals would all reach the same conclusions, and it is obvious by all the different Protestant sects that they do not. Anyone who believes that Scripture is their only guide ends by believing in their own mistaken interpretations of the Bible, and that means they end by believing in themselves. The Holy Ghost was guaranteed to the Catholic Church and not to individuals in the teaching of truth.
Suppose the Constitution of the United States could be termed our Bible of Democracy. What do you suppose would happen if everyone used the right of private judgement to interpret the laws of our nation as they felt inspired by the Holy Ghost? What do you suppose would happen if we didn't have the Supreme Court to tell us what the Constitution is saying? Our nation would come to an end as a democracy if we tolerated in government the absurd principle of private judgement. Is it not also rational that we have a Supreme Authority to interpret the Bible? The Catholic Church, which gave the Bible to the world, alone has the authority to interpret the Bible.
We know the Catholic Bible is the Word of God because the Catholic Church that gave the Bible to the world says so. To believe in the Bible you must have some third party to come between you and God. Catholics have the Catholic Church as that third party to come between them and God to tell them whats what about the Bible. The following is taken from "Where is that in the Bible" by Patrick Madrid:
Let's say someone wrote these words 100 years ago:
I never said you stole money.
Anyone you asked would say they understood the meaning of that short, six word sentence. But do they? Do they really understand what meaning the writer intended 100 years ago?
The writer of that sentence might have meant "I never said you stole money", implying someone else said it.
Or perhaps he meant "I never said you stole money." He thought it, he suspected it, but he never said it.
Or maybe "I never said you stole money." He said your neighbor stole it.
Or, "I never said you stole money." He means that you lost it, or squandered it, or did something else with it that he didn't approve of, but you didn't steal it.
Or, "I never said you stole money." Maybe you stole his horse, or shoes, not his money.
This shows how easy it is to derive several legitimate but very different meanings from this short, six word sentence. Think how easily the Bible can be misinterpreted. We can't just assume we have the correct understanding of Scripture. We need an authority to guide us, and the only true authority on the Bible is the Catholic Church.
10. Christ chose poor fishermen for His Apostles, not learned men. We can understand the
Scriptures as well as they did.
Christ trained His Apostles personally, and infused into their minds an exact knowledge of His doctrine. Luke 24:45 says "He then opened their minds to understand the Scriptures," We cannot claim to have received a similiar revelation. We cannot rank ourselves with them.
11. You keep saying only the Catholic Church has the authority to interpert the Scriptures. Prove it. What special qualifications does the Catholic Church have to do this?
1. The New Testament was written by members of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church existed before even a line of the New Testament was written, Protestantism started many centuries later. The Gospels are really the "family papers" of the Catholic Church, and she alone, possessing the family traditions, can interpret what those family papers really mean (see also question number 9).
2. The Catholic Church carefully and jealously preserved the Bible through the ages, so the Protestants would have no Gospel were it not for the Catholic Church.
3. The Catholic Church has been much more faithful to Scripture than any Protestant Church. while many Protestant leaders are prepared to sacrifice the Bible in order to appear more scientific and "politically correct", the Catholic Church consistently demands that every letter of God's Word must be accepted in the original sense intended by God.
4. The Protestant Churches owe their separate existences to the fact that each denies that the others really know what Scripture means, thus disproving the theory of Sola Scriptura.
5. The Catholic Church was established by Christ as the rule of faith, and He declared that a man is to be regarded as a heathen if he will not hear the Church, therefore, the Catholic Church is the only qualified interpreter of Scripture.
12. The Catholic Church is the enemy of the Bible.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary (see numbers 1 through 11) this is still
believed by many Protestants. Many years ago Professor G.H. Betts of the Northwestern
University sent out a list of 56 questions on religion and theology to 1,309 Protestant
ministers then in active service, and to five Protestant theological seminaries. Between
700 and 800 ministers, and a large number of students in the five seminaries, replied. The
results of the section of Prof. Betts' survey concerning the Bible are as follows (it should be noted that Prof. Betts was himself a Protestant):
2% of Lutheran ministers, 38% of Baptist ministers, 56% of Presbyterian ministers, 60% of
Episcopalian ministers, 65% of Methodist ministers, 83% of Congregational ministers, and
92% of the students denied or doubted the divine inspiration of the Bible.
This clearly shows who is the real enemy of the Bible.
SOURCES
Jerusalem Bible
Catholic Dictionary
"Bible Quizzes to a Street Preacher", by TAN Books and Publishing, Inc.
The Holy Bible as translated from the
Latin Vulgate
"Where is that in the Bible?", by Patrick Madrid
"Which Came First, the Bible or the Church?", by Matthew Arnold (distributed on CD by Lighthouse Catholic Media)