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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (17665)	7/3/2001 12:01:14 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

I think licensing theologians is a somewhat bizarre concept on the face of it. Of course, theologians at variance with the official orthodoxy of the church hierarchy in Galileo's era had a somewhat harder time of it than Curran or Kung. On a somewhat related note, this book review from a few months ago: But there is deeper irony, of which we are reminded in the story that is so well retold in another pair of volumes, ''Wide as the Waters'' and ''In the Beginning,'' both of them fascinating, readable and scholarly books about English-Bible-making history. The irony is plain in the contrast between the perceived market for the first English Bibles and the market for their handsome successors. When letterpress was employed in the making of Bibles five centuries ago, it was specifically intended that the resulting books could and should be read not by an elite but by the most ordinary of men and women. The stated intent behind both translation and vernacular printing was that the word of God could after centuries be taken away from the monopoly of the clergy, swept from the clutches of the few and into the hands of many. Until, in the 14th century, John Wycliffe and his Lollard followers made their first halting translation of the Vulgate, St. Jerome's own Latin translation, the Bible was the preserve of the priestly classes: they read it, they preached from it, they interpreted it as they saw fit. Wycliffe tried to see that the word filtered down to more common folk; William Tyndale, a century later, did much the same -- and was strangled and his body burned at the stake for such heretical presumption. (Wycliffe's bones were dug up and burned, to drive the point home.) nytimes.com The broader political points in that review may be a little overstated, I don't know. Around the time I read that, there was something elsewhere about possessing the Bible in translation being a heretical offence, subject to the usual range of sanctions.