Moments in Church History 2-28

1759	Pope Clement XIII granted permission for the Bible to be translated into the languages of the Roman Catholic states.
1784	English churchman John Wesley, 80, formally chartered the movement within Anglicanism which afterward came to be known as Wesleyan Methodism.
1947	U.S. Senate Chaplain Peter Marshall prayed: ‘Let not the past ever be so dear to us as to set a limit to the future. Give us the courage to change our minds when that is needed.’
870	The Fourth Constantinople Council closed, under Pope Adrian II in the West and Emperor Basil I in the East. The council had condemned iconoclasm, and became the last ecumenical council held in the Eastern Mediterranean area.

I find the event of 1759 to be the most interesting event on the list for a number of reasons. Jesus spoke Aramaic which was translated into Greek the common second language of that area of the Mediterranean World. The Orthodox Church had translated the Bible into national languages long before the Catholic Church. There certainly was historical precedent for Bible translation. One of the most significant roles of the Reformers was to get the Bible written into the common language of the people – most notably Wycliffe and Luther. Yet the Catholic Church remained firm in its hold of the language of its Bible; a language which while important for reading, hadn’t been spoken or used by the common people for many hundreds of years.

Yet for all of its strangeness, there is a certain respect that must be granted in that the Bible remained in one language across the known lands for every Catholic.. Granted, it established an elite leveling of a nation’s population between those who could read Latin and those who couldn’t, but it did preserve the text from further corruption. If you have ever been in a service where the pastor comments “Now the NIV, KJV or … translates it like this, the original Greek carries more of a meaning of …..” you know what I am talking about.

As Reformed people we appreciate the Bible in the hands of every believer in their own language, don’t we have in our hearts to return to or cling to Greek as the final deciding anchor. I am not saying that these are the same thing, but it is interesting to note that we aren’t all that different except for the language we hold as the basis.

Some questions come to mind, while the Catholic Church has been open to translations for 250 there are still Protestants who swear only by the 1611 KJV. Is the Catholic Church more open to the needs of the people than the KJV only crowd? What made Latin so special to begin with and what finally led to the change in 1759? Why do ATM machines in the Vatican still have Latin as a language option? So many questions, so little time.