10-22-2003, 11:31 PM
Brother Todd, the King James Version of the Bible is not the translation used by the Catholic Church. It is missing 7 books and is full of errors. We use translations like the New American Bible, Revised Standard Version, and the Douay-Rheims and the Latin Vulgate. The King James Version was put out in 1611 in response to the Protestant Reformation that was revolting against the Catholic Church.
King James was not the one that was responsible for translating the Bible from Latin into English. He came at the end of a long list of people that had been translating the Bible (or sections of the Bible) into the ever-evolving "English" language.
Caedmon, who was a monk of Whitby, paraphrased most of the Bible into the common language.
St. Bede the Venerable also translated parts of the Bible into the language of the common British people in the 8th century. In 735 he translated the Gospel of St. John before he died.
Bishop Eadhelm, Guthlac and Bishop Egbert worked on Saxon Bibles around this same time frame.
During the 9th and 10th centuries, King Alfred the Great and Archbishop Aelfric worked on Anglo-Saxon (Old English) translations.
After the Norman conquest of 1066 the Catholic Church produced several translations (e.g. Salus Animae) into Anglo-Norman in 1250.
In 1582 the famous Douay-Rheims New Testament translation was completed, while the Old Testament was finished in 1609.
The Douay-Rheims New Testament influenced the King James version of the Bible. King James did not translate his version "from scratch" as many believe.
The invention of the Printing Press, by a Catholic named Johannes Gutenberg, in 1450 enabled the Bible to finally be available to the general public. The first book that Johannes printed was the Catholic Bible, complete with the books that are missing from the Protestant bible.
Many Protestant Christians claim that the Catholic Church kept the Bible "hidden from the public" by keeping it "locked up" in Latin. But remember, anyone that could read their own language could also read Latin back then. Martin Luther was not the first person to translate the Bible into the vernacular. Many German editions already existed. The King James Version, a Protestant Bible, came at the tail end of an already dynamic effort to translate the Bible into the many tongues of the World.
I myself would warn Muslims against using Bibles that are missing books and have errors in them - like the KJV. They are deffinately corrupted by human hands.
"Latin Vulgate" = St. Jerome translated the Bible Latin back when Latin was the language of the people. This Bible is the "Latin Vulgate". Even after a thousand years, Latin still remained the universal language in Europe so nothing was being hidden from anyone.