Catholicism and Ancient Literacy

By Kerry Duke

April 14, 2005

The Catholic church does its best to denigrate the role of the Bible.  Their ploy is to destroy faith in the Bible as the final authority so that men will be driven to Rome for direction.  One of their old claims is that people in the early centuries of the church did not have Bibles like we do today and even if they did have them they couldn’t read them.  One Catholic fellow even wrote and said 98% of people in that period couldn’t read or write! If people back then were so illiterate, then why did Pilate waste his time writing on Jesus’ cross, “This is the king of the Jews” in Greek, Latin, and Aramaic (Luke 23:38)?  How could the people at Berea search the Scriptures every day (Acts 17:11)? Why would Paul have told the Ephesians, “When ye read, ye may understand” (Eph. 3:4) if most of them couldn’t read?

One Catholic writer said that “unnumbered millions” before the year 1500 “had no Bibles, or were too poor to buy one, or could not read it even though they bought one, or could not understand it even if they could read it.”¹ He goes on to say, “Rome claims that the Bible is her book; that she has preserved it and perpetuated it, and that she alone knows what it means; that nobody else has any right to it whatsoever, or any authority to declare what the true meaning is.”² This is the Catholic position on the Bible, stated in unmasked arrogance almost 100 years ago before the days of political correctness.

Exaggerations about rates of illiteracy and lack of access to Bible books in the first three centuries are typical in Catholic teaching. But this is wishful thinking on their part.  Catholicism thrives in a climate of biblical ignorance, and what better argument can Catholics make against sola scriptura than to assert that most people in the ancient world could not read?  How can the Catholic church create more doubt about the reliability of the New Testament than to claim that most people didn’t even know what books belonged to it, much less have copies of them, in the first three centuries?

Strangely enough, one of the early fountainheads of Catholicism admits that copies of the Scriptures were possessed and translated by numerous people outside the approval of the Catholic clergy.  Augustine didn’t like the fact that so many “lay Christians” were attempting this, complaining in 397 about:

. . .diversities among translators.  For the translations of the Scriptures from Hebrew into Greek can be counted, but the Latin translators are out of all number.  For in the early days of the faith every man who happened to get his hands upon a Greek manuscript, and who thought he had any knowledge, were it ever so little of the two languages, ventured upon the work of translating.³

If the populace of the early Christian world was largely illiterate and cut off from accessing Bible manuscripts, then why does Augustine speak of so many getting their hands on them and translating them “in the early days of the faith”?  This ancient Catholic authority, serving as a hostile witness, betrays modern Catholic misrepresentations of the ancient world.

The same picture is painted of common people in Medieval and Reformation times.  Average men and women are depicted as too uneducated to read and understand the Bible.  But Catholics cannot deny that through the efforts of John Wycliffe (1320-1384), the Bible was given to the common man in English.  To show their hatred for his work, Catholic authorities thirty-one years after his death ordered his bones removed from their tomb and burned.  Still, Graham ridicules the belief that common folks during the early days of the Reformation had an ability and interest to read the Bible.  He mocks the idea “that ploughmen and shepherds in the country read the New Testament in English by stealth, or that smiths and carpenters in towns pored over its pages in the corner of their master’s workshops.”⁴

Catholics claim that most people before the invention of the printing press either learned Christianity orally from the Catholic Church or they didn’t, and couldn’t, learn it at all.  This is just another Catholic argument that is designed to frighten people into becoming Catholics.  For if most people in ancient times were illiterate and shut off from reading the Bible for themselves, and the Bible is our guide to heaven, then this means that most of those people were lost because of circumstances beyond their control.  Catholics want us to accept this depiction so we will be lured into the belief that the Catholic Church was the only hope for those poor souls, and remains the only means of salvation for us today.  The argument rests upon the false and remarkably arrogant premise that the Catholic magisterium, not the Bible, is the highest source of religious authority on earth!

Church history abounds with evidence that refutes the Catholic claim of widespread illiteracy and extreme scarcity of Bibles prior to the Reformation.  Verduin writes of certain “heretics” apprehended in Trier in the thirteenth century who were described by authorities at the time as being “well-versed in scripture, which they possess in Teutonic translation.”⁵ These dissenters certainly weren’t Catholics, yet they had copies of the Bible in Teutonic, an older Germanic language, and they knew the Bible well!  Further evidence that copies of the Bible existed outside the scope of Catholic approval is a decree from the bishop of Liege in 1203 that “all books containing the Scriptures in Roman or Teutonic tongue are to be delivered into the hands of the bishop, who will then return those which in his judgment should be given back.”⁶ This measure is quite remarkable if the common people neither had Bibles of their own nor could read them!  Verdiun continues, “Hand-copied exemplars of the Scriptures in the vernacular continued to be made and used.”⁷ The people who dared to own and circulate these copies of the Bible risked their lives.  Many of them were executed by Catholic authorities.  But if, as present Catholics claim, most common folk  couldn’t get a copy of the Bible and read it for themselves, then why did the Catholic Church execute these people?  As with so many other Catholic arguments, this one has been weighed in the balances and found wanting.
 

Footnotes:
¹  Henry G. Graham, Where We Got the Bible: Our Debt to the Catholic Church, p. 11.
²  Ibid., p. 111.
³  Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book II, 11.16.
⁴  Graham, Where We Got the Bible, p. 125.
⁵  Leonard Verduin, The Reformers and Their Stepchildren, p. 147.
⁶  Ibid, p. 151.
⁷  Ibid., p. 152.