xingu wrote:If a group of bishops, as in this case, make a statement about the Bible they are speaking for the church. They are not allowed to make independent statements that are contrary to the teachings of the church. If this issue was in conflict with the teachings of Rome the Pope would have come out and stated such.
I am unaware of any statements coming from Rome that are in conflict with what these bishops said about the Bible.
Quite. No central teaching of the Catholic Church, that being any teaching relating to morals and matters of faith, has changed since the 4th Century, when Constantine, together with his select Churchly fellows, legitimized and institutionalized his and their vision of the Pauline tradition of Christianity. The notion this position statement represents any "New Teaching" on the part of the Roman Catholic Church is an absurdity founded in ignorance and forwarded in prejudice.
To begin with, what we know as The Bible originated with what we know today as The Roman Catholic Church, as did what we know today as Christianity itself, the 30,000+ permutations of what today is termed Protestantism having emerged and evolved over roughly the past 500 years.
The first, or "semifinal", Jewish codification of a Bible canon was completed around the 2nd Century BCE, the result of rabbinic translation of extant scriptures written in assorted languages (primarily Hebrew, but including others such as Aramaic, Syriac, and Chaldaic) into a unified Greek translation known as The Septuagint, containing 46 books. The final Jewish canon of the Old Testament was codified by the Jewish Council of Javneh, held in 90 CE. After centuries of dispute and controversy, the Jewish scholars and rabbis fixed their canon on what are known as the Masoritic Texts, those written in Hebrew, excluding from their officially sanctioned final canon what are known as the Deuterocanonical Works (the books of Tobit (or Tobias), Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, and I and II Macabees, along with a few passages from the books of Daniel and Esther), works written originally in Greek or other languages, or at that time existing only in in Greek translation, rather than in Hebrew. Early Christian tradition, however, made no such exclusion, endorsing the Septuagint, which included Javnehn canon and the Deutorocanonical Works excluded by the final Jewish canon. Effectively, Javneh marks the division between Jewish scripture and Christian scripture.
The first version of what today is known as the "New Testament" was written, or at the very least dictated by, an early Christian of decidedly anti-Jewish persuasion, an individual named Marcion, somewhere around the end of the first half of the 2nd Century. Notable in Marcion's version is the absence of any reference to the putative Jesus' Judaic faith and practice. Different, frequently glaringly conflicting, interpolations appeared and proliferated over the next couple centuries or so, occasining considerable dissent and friction in the nascent Christian Church. Not until the Festal Epistle of Athanasius, early in the latter half of the of the 4th Century, did there appear an essential equivalent to the contemporary New Testament. Athanasius' compelation was officially pronounced by the Council of Rome under the authority of Pope Damascus I as authoritatively the accepted canon - in 382, if I recall correctly - giving us the books today accepted as canon. About a decade later, the Synod of Hippo stated the same canon, and pronounced it adopted by and for the whole of The Church.
That notwithstanding, dissention and dispute persisted, pertaining to particulars of both Old and New Testaments, continuing well beyond the 1st Council of Nicea, which though focused on that issue, among others, failed to fully resolve the matter in the minds of many early adherents to Christianity. Not untill the 2nd Nicean council, late in the 8th Century, was the entire Christian Bible canon concretely and finally established. But we get ahead of ourself a bit. It was in the 4th Century that Greek as a common language began to decline in Western Europe, and it was deemed fit to cause to come about a Latin translation of the Christian canon. The task fell to a scholar monk named Jerome, who, using Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Syriac, Chaldaic and Hebrew texts, produced the version known as the Latin Vulgate (meaning more or less "Standard" or "Common" Latin version), completed early in the 5th Century. For nearly a thousand years, Jerome's was
THE Christian Bible; there was no other. Not until the Reformation, and largely due to the efforts, unconnected with one another, of Martin Luther and England's King Henry VIII, was there any alternate version.
With the Reformation, and the printing press, came increasing impetus to translate The Bible into various living languages. Contrary to popular myth, The Church was not institutionally opposed to translation of the Bible from Latin into vernaculars, so long as the translations were as consistent with Jerome's Latin Vulgate as would be practicable given the vernacular into which Jerome was translated; in English alone there exist more than a dozen Church-sanctioned, "Authorized", pre-era-of-printing translations, spanning a period from the 7th Century (St. Caedmon's translation) through the 14th Century (translations by Wyecliffe, Shoreham, and others); in Italian, something like 3 or 4 dozen pre-Reformation translations are known, there are numerous assorted pre-Reformation translations into French, Dutch, and both High and Low German as well, among other vernaculars. The Bible printed by Gutenberg was a German version of a Swiss translation known as the "Geneva Bible" - which Geneva Bible, incidentally, in English, was the Bible brought in 1620 by the Puritans to America, but while interesting, thats a whole other story. Anyhow, an upshot of the Reformation-era eagerness to translate the Bible from Latin into assorted vernaculars and disseminate to the masses via the wonderful new technology of printing (and the sudden abundance of cheap paper - but that too is another story) was the discovery that Jerome's version, as codified by The Church, presented some conflict with available earlier Hebraic, Greek, Syriac, Latin, and Aramaic texts; particularly troubling was that many other-than-Jerome texts agreed with one another almost word-for-word, but were different in some one or another (almost without exception minor) particular from that transcribed by Jerome.
Martin Luther undertook to translate Jerome into High German. While based entirely on Jerome's version, essentially book-for-book, line-for-line, but with certain alterations to better, in Luther's view, conform the text to older, more closely original texts, and in not a few cases to reflect his own opinions and interpretations, Luther's first translation of the Bible into German was Jerome as Luther preferred Jerome to be understood. Subsequent revisions by Luther himself and by later Protestant scholars/clerics, shifted some books around, and excluded others (essentially, the Deuterocanonicals, the books today known as the Apocrypha) found in Jerome. Luther, and those following in his footsteps, founded their rejection of the excluded Deuterocanonical works on the basis of their having been excluded from the Jewish Javnehn canon, and for their teachings, thought by the early formers of Protestantism to be too "Catholic" to comport with emerging Protestant doctrine. Thus began the evolution of the Protestant Bible as distinct from the Catholic Bible, the Protestant version containing fewer books, in slightly different order, and shorter versions of some shared books, than for over a millenium prior had
ALL previous Bibles.
In the late 16th Century, the Douay-Rheims Catholic Bible was produced, essentially a word-for-word (albeit with minor textual corrections and copiously laden with
VERY "Catholic" marginal notations and commentary separate from the main text) English translation of Jerome's Latin Vulgate. Several decades later, in the early 17th Century, the single most influential Protestant Bible, that known as the King James Version, was produced in England, at the behest of James the First (formerly James VI of Scotland), then Monarch, successor to Henry VIII's daughters, and particularly dedicated to the notion of solidifying the Stuart claim to the English throne and its attendent primacy over the Church of England, which institution had been established by Henry VIII. Taking more than 7 years of effort by churchmen, scholars, and politicians (frequently all represented in a given individal), the King James version saw its first semi-public release - it was distributed first to churches only - in 1609. While drawing heavilly on the Douay-Rheims version, the commission established by James I to produce "His" official Bible studiously and scrupulously eliminated the Douay-Rheims' commentary and notations, and somewhat but not entirely in the fashion of Luther ascribed lesser importance to the Deuterocanonical Works and the Apocrypha. Later, more widely disseminated revisions of the King James Version went further afield from the text of the "Catholic" Bible, but the original King James Bible was essentially, by way of its primary source, the Douay-Rheims version, a strict and literal translation, apart from the minor textual corrections introduced by Douay-Rheims, of the canon represented by Jerome's Latin Vulgate.
Now, from the earliest of the Fathers and Doctors of The Church, the official stance always has been that some of the Bible, in its accepted canon, was allegorical, not to be taken literally but rather to be understood as illustrative of, explanatory of, God's Revealed Truth. The writings of Eusebius, Augustine, and Aquinas, signal among those of others, make this point clearly and unambiguously. At the same time, it is simply historically accurate to understand the King James Bible not as the "best" or "most accurate" bible, but rather as the Bible as interpreted by those who's primary interests were to legitimize a dissention-beset monarch's claim to a throne and to solidify that monarch's claim to independent-of-Rome primacy over the Protestant church established by a predecessor of his.
Context often
IS everything.
