Dr. John Bergsma

And it was very difficult to understand each other across even small borders.

So the only language in which there was a substantial body of literature to read was Latin.

If you learn to read your little dialect of German in the duchy where you're at, that's great, but there's hardly anything written in that.

So there was a limited use of,

four vernacular translations because the idea was, well, if you can read, you're going to learn Latin, and if you can read Latin, then you can just use the Vulgate.

So that was a feeling.

And if you wanted to communicate with the illiterate, then just have some educated person translate for them the Vulgate, because they're gonna hear it orally anyway.

But again, yeah, nobody was burned just for the act of translation.

And both before and after the Reformation,

vernacular or we might say common language translations of the Bible were made by the church.

And we should emphasize too that the reason why the Vulgate is called the Vulgate was that when St.

Jerome translated it at the end of the 300s and the beginning of the 400s, it was in the vulgar tongue of the people.

Vulgar then didn't mean profane like it does nowadays, but just common.

Like this was street Latin.

This was Latin as it was spoke on the street.

And Jerome did this as a popular translation of scripture so that the common people could read it in a language that they understood.

And most of the traditional translations actually started out that way.

The Septuagint as well, the ancient Greek translation started out as a translation in the language of the day and then centuries rolled by and it became kind of an antiquated form of Greek.

So that just shows that the church can and did try to make translations that folks understood.

Yeah, I get frustrated with that claim, Matt, because it doesn't respect all the things that are said in scripture.