Dr. John Bergsma

There were some individuals who were executed for heresy.

And some of those individuals did make or promote Bible translations.

And typically the translations that they produced were strategically twisted to conflict with Catholic teaching or traditional Christian teaching.

And so they had heretical translations of scripture, but it was never the act of translation that was the issue.

It was the other things that they were caught up in.

Rejecting the authority of the Pope, rejecting traditional Christian teaching,

other forms of heresy, it wasn't the act of translation because there were translations in the vernacular that had been made and that were circulating before the Reformation.

Luther was not the first one to translate the Bible into German, for example.

One was made, I think it was in 1466,

I wanna say a Catholic German translation was made by a figure whose name starts with M, Medellin, or something like this.

I'm slaughtering it, I'm sure.

But folks can quickly find that out.

There were Italian translations made prior to the Reformation.

There were partial English translations.

But you gotta remember too, Matt, and all of us need to remember, the printing press was new.

And prior to Gutenberg and the printing press,

everything had to be copied out by hand.

And most people were illiterate.

You didn't have universal education.

So anybody who went into some kind of profession and needed to learn to read would learn to read Latin because every little principality or duchy all over Europe had their own dialect.