The message of Protestantism was that men could find in Scripture the means to salvation, the keys to good and evil, the rules by which to live, and the standards against which to measure the conduct of prince and pastor.
By
Jim Ley
on March 19, 2007
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Discussion (7)
well... one message of protestantism.
Yes, but that's only part of it. A large part of the message of Protestantism was that the Latin translation of the Bible had truly problematic inaccuracies, and that the Bible should be retranslated straight from the source languages.
Rachel:
What were the source languages?
What were the truly problematic inaccuracies in the Latin translation?
The source languages, I believe, were mainly Greek and Hebrew, but also some Aramaic.
Why do you ask me this after I returned my book on the translation of the Bible...
from memory, which I hope is accurate, there were a few mistranslations, but a big one was that ... geez, I need details I don't have access to, but that the original form seemed to imply that salvation was a gift that couldn't be earned and didn't need to be bought. This meant that indulgences (buying of papers that the Church said got people through Purgatory faster) didn't make sense. You didn't need to buy salvation, merely accept it. But it was based on a difference in translation.
There were some others. You might wish to read the following book, which was more interesting than I expected: In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture by Alister Mcgrath
It doesn't really talk about religion itself, and I think it does a decent job of mostly being neutral about the contents of the Bible itself, while talking about the process of translating it, the political and religious issues, and the effects that such things have had on culture, language, religion, etc.
Unfortunately, my memory is not sufficient, nor am I a Biblical scholar. But Luther seemed to be saying not that the Catholics were wrongly interpreting the Latin Bible they were using nor that their actions were somehow inherently wrong regardless of religion, but that their interpretation of the Bible in the Latin had some errors, and that those errors had profound religious implications.
Rachel:
I want to say thank you for pointing me to that book.
I just returned from the library where I was able to read the first 77 pages. Pages 57-58 offered some examples of where Erasmus took exception with the Latin Vulgate translation compared with his understanding of the original Greek.
Oh wonderful, I'm glad you liked the pointer. :)
Alister Mcgrath,
the author of,
In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture also has a doctorate in molecular biophysics.
He has coauthored,
The Dawkins Delusion?: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine