The Heresy of Full Scriptural Access

When Jerome translated the Bible into Latin from Greek, it was so that the citizens of the western half of the Roman Empire could read the Holy Scripture in their native language. His translation was called the Vulgate, literally, "that written in the common tongue". In the course of the Early Middle Ages, there were sporadic attempts by those few scholars with the ability and time to translate various parts of the Bible into the languages of formerly pagan peoples, who had not been members of the Roman Empire, when it had still existed and therefore not acquired Latin as an everyday language. Thus for example, we have Jordanes' translation of the Bible into the East Germanic tongue of Gothic. Then we have certain anonymous Anglo-Saxon monks translating parts of the Bible into Germanic-style poetry. But by the eleventh century, CE, the Church had a change of heart about making Holy Scripture accessible in the languages of the various cultural flocks across Christendom. By this point in time, Latin had become a "dead language", meaning it was actually only written, read and spoken (and sung) for scholarly and liturgical purposes. With the Gregorian Reforms that put the clergy and laity in opposition to each other under Canon Law, it was decided that no further efforts should be made to render Biblical texts into any form of vernacular. This was obviously a measure to ensure control over the laity and strengthen the indispensability of a mediating priesthood. And so what regular Medieval people were left to understand about the stories and wisdom passages of the Bible was whatever Ecclesiastical authority permitted them to know. Under such circumstances, it might be easy to conjecture even without consulting the extant homiletic manuals just what slices of the Bible an authoritarian clergy wanted the laity to know about. And then, just over a hundred years after the so-called Reforms of Gregory VII, we have evidence in quite a dramatic way of what the clergy had been leaving out of the Christian experience of the New Testament in particular. In a village in Northern France in the late twelfth century, CE, a parish priest took it into his head to translate and then read the Gospels in the native French dialect of the region, the Langue d'oil. The initial reaction to these readings was one of awe. The congregation remarked openly that here was a Jesus they had never know about -- indeed, a kind, compassionate Jesus who healed people from mental illness, social alienation and physical disease. And then a secondary reaction set in: how dare the Church keep them from knowing all these generations of this good and loving Jesus?! All they had ever been told was that God was most angry at them, of all humanity, and the poor were among the most sinful in God's eyes . The moral indignation that felt flared up into rioting, especially when the ecclesiastical authorities showed no sign of apology for their omissions of Biblical teaching, and otherwise declared that the priest had transgressed in reading to them "what they were too ignorant to properly understand". The riots turned into a full-blown revolt, as peasants and other common folk, such as the artisans of the towns, began to share the message of the "fully revealed Gospels", and the Church's conspiracy to keep the Jesus of caritas hidden from them. Unfortunately, the revolt turned quite violent. Generations of oppression by the nobility and wealthy town fathers (not to mention the social repression wrought by a largely arrogant and contemptuous clergy) erupted into a mountain of scores to settle. Castles and palaces were burned. Pillaged goods and monies were redistributed among the poor, and the leaders of the rebellion announced they were going to bring about the equal society Christ had intended for humankind. Of course, eventually the Chivalry of Northern France pulled itself together after the initial shock of this wildfire peasant uprising, and crushed the religious revolutionaries soundly. A similarly religiously-motivated uprising was to occur two centuries later in Southeastern England, the Peasant Revolt of 1381, again , fueled in part ideologically by the Lollard translations of portions of the new Testament into the native English tongue. Making the Bible accessible to people in their own everyday languages would later become a key component of the Protestant movements that arose in the sixteenth century, CE. giving literacy an added boost by providing a religious mandate for it among the laity (not to mention the purely practical incentives as the world trade grew in the Early Modern Period, causing an educated middle class to grow along with the more intense and sophisticated business opportunities that liberated them from the Medieval class system). Unfortunately today, we find ourselves falling back into the same barrier of access to the fullness of Holy Scripture, even though now every Christian (Catholic of Protestant) is supposedly freely reading the Bible. The similarity with an unhappy past of lack of access to the Bible lies in the way people are now being taught to read the Bible, especially by fundamentalist religious sects. Preachers are telling their congregation very selectively what to pay attention to in Holy Scripture, and also exactly how to interpret those select passages. They are divorcing these readings from their complete context and shutting out the inherent richness of all Biblical writing, which actually communicates meaning on multiple levels. But what fundamentalist preachers are doing now is nothing new. They are creating a barrier that induces only a semi-literate understanding of Holy Scripture and twists meaning to serve socially repressive, spiritually-handicapping purposes, which promote clerical control over the laity. A Greek Orthodox theologian and presbyter, Origen Adamantius, who taught at Alexandria's School of Catechism was a victim of such agendas early on in the annals of the Authoritarian Church. Origen, was a great scholar and teacher, promoted in his lifetime a less literalistic interpretation and a more spiritually metaphorical understanding of Holy Scripture, through exegetical techniques of analysis. He was well loved by his students, but he was expelled by the Patriarch of Alexandria for his teachings. He found exile and started a school of his own in Palestine, but the authoritarian Eastern Orthodox Church eventually found sufficient "justification" to arraign him before a local ecclesiastical court and sentence him to torture until repentant or dead. Origen chose death. The spiritually liberating implications of his teachings in terms of restoring a stronger sense of intellectual independence among individual Christians was declared heretical by the Church. Origen's many treatises were burned, and his school was dissolved. Today, all that we know of Origen, who by rights should have been acclaimed as one of the Doctors of the Church, is a description of him in Eusebius' History of the Church, and a fragmentary and corrupt translation from Italy of one of his works into Latin by a monkish student of his teachings. Literacy is thus not merely the mechanical ability to read, especially in terms of sacred religious texts. Religious literacy is the ability to understand in accordance with one' own inner light, with clergy acting only in a responsibly guiding role that does not partake of any agenda to ensure political power over their sacredly entrusted flock. Amen.