In the 4th century, Jerome translated the Bible from Greek into Latin. It took until the 16th century for Luther to translate the Bible from Latin into German. So why did the Catholic Church decide to stop translating the Bible?

by JosephvonEichendorff

I'm aware that their were other vernacular translations in the meantime, such as those of Wycliffe and Hus, but these were explicitly forbidden by the Church. As far as I know, it wasn't until well into modern times that their were any vernacular Catholic Bibles produced at all. This is especially odd considering that Jerome's Latin translation is called the "Vulgate" as it was intended to be readable by the common people, yet over time it became readable only by the educated clergy as the Church refused to translate it again. What was the reason for this?

sunagainstgold

The only place where vernacular Bibles were explicitly banned is 15th century England; the only vernacular where we have no surviving Bibles until the early modern era is Spanish. By the fifteenth century, in fact, preachers were not just including Latin Bible passages in their sermons with vernacular explanations, but sometimes translating the passage into the vernacular for the audience first!

Where we see censorship laws outside the Oxford Constitutions, it's that new printed editions (yes, they're that late) have to get approval from censors at the university (in the case of a Cologne statute) or archepiscopal (in the Mainz archdiocese) before being printed. In point of fact, none of the new printed German editions after the 1481 decree from Mainz had any kind of censor approval.

The thing to keep in mind is that the medieval Church was, in general, not concerned with lay people reading the Bible for themselves. Rather, the thing that threatened Church authority was the proposition of non-clerics interpreting the Bible in different ways and teaching that publicly. Lay people owning a Psalter or a historiated Bible or a New Testament was not, on the surface, a problem.

So why don't we see more effort towards establishing standard vernacular translations like the Latin Vulgate? Literacy rates. Until the 15th century, really, literacy rates among lay Europeans were staggeringly low. Even by 1500--1500! after the printing press!--we're talking about at most 30-50% in cities, which would have been less than 15% of the population even in more urbanized areas. (Maybe with the Low Countries excepted). The people who could read in large numbers were professed religious or ordained priests...and most of them could read Latin. Even in women's houses, where we see vernacular literacy and vernacular literature from the 12th century, there is still a strong Latinate culture or mixed Latinate/vernacular religious culture at the time of the Reformation.

There just wasn't the need for massive amounts of vernacular Scripture. But what there was a demand for, in general, absolutely did exist. Including the persistent circulation of "Wycliffite" Bibles in England and non-censor-approved editions in the Holy Roman Empire.