Why were bibles chained to churches

But there was that pesky New Testament, a thoroughly Jewish document, as Anglican priest Bruce Chilton has noted : "It became clear to me that everything Jesus did was as a Jew, for Jews, and about Jews. The term "Christian" never appears in the Gospels at all, for the obvious reason that there was no Christianity during the life of Jesus -- only Judaism, in which he and his family, disciples and followers were immersed.

Readers of the Gospels might also have noted that when Jesus wasn't addressing the "multitudes" of Jews he was teaching in synagogues and was attending Jewish holy day celebrations. And his disciples called him rabbi. Since the Gospel writers couldn't keep Judaism out of Jesus' life story and ministry -- without the Judaism there would be no story -- they invoked the ban on the Bible while Christianizing Jesus with selective and edited stories that they conveyed to the public.

The Christianizing process, along with erasing Jesus' Jewish identity, continued throughout the Medieval and Renaissance periods. It is dramatically illustrated in classical artworks, in which Jesus and his family show no trace of a connection to Judaism. In this ethnic cleansing of Judaism they are pictured as fair-skinned Northern Europeans living in palatial Romanesque settings surrounded by later-day Christian saints and Christian artifacts and practices -- images completely alien to their actual Jewish lives in a rural village in Galilee.

But today, in a new era of reconciliation, Christians and Jews are recognizing the strong connection between the two religions. Some Christians are adopting Jewish practices like the Passover Seder and the Jewish marriage ceremony under the chuppah canopy , and couples are signing the ancient Jewish ketuba marriage contract.

Others are visiting synagogues to relive the experience of Jesus. Several years ago Jewish scholars and leaders from all four branches of Judaism issued a statement calling on Jews "to relinquish their fear and mistrust of Christianity and to acknowledge Church efforts in the decades since the Holocaust to amend Christian teaching about Judaism. I'm thinking of converting. Do you take Jewish girls?

His casual remark suggests that the celebration of common ground can trump doctrinal differences. Bernard Starr is a psychologist, college professor, and journalist. He is author of Jesus Uncensored: Restoring the Authentic Jew, which is available at Amazon grayscale and color edition , Barnes and Noble , and other major outlets.

Y ,psychologist, journalist. News U. Politics Joe Biden Congress Extremism. Special Projects Highline. It took nearly a year to copy a Bible manuscript. Bibles were not only copied but richly and beautifully illuminated with elaborate images. Bible illumination began in the fifth century with Irish monks who painstakingly prepared the skins of calves, sheep, or goats into vellum that was used for the manuscripts.

The famous Lindisfarne Gospels manuscript, copied and illuminated in the eighth century, was the work of one scribe who used calfskins and took five years to complete the work. The amount of labor that went into each copy of the Bible led to preventing their theft either by locking them in containers or chaining them to desks.

In other words, these were security measures, not efforts to keep Scripture from the faithful. Indeed, protecting an expensive Bible by securing it allowed greater, not lesser, access to it.

Moreover, the Bible was usually placed in a public area of a church so those who could read could peruse its pages. The first mention of this protective policy occurs in the mid eleventh century in the catalogue of St.

Moreover, the practice was not exclusive to the Catholic Church: Protestants also utilized the well-known security measure, as evidenced by the chaining of the Great Bible also known as the Chained Bible published by command of King Henry VIII of England in The Protestant principle of sola scriptura led to the myth that the Catholic Church kept the word of God from the faithful to maintain its authority; the chaining of bibles in medieval churches was seen as evidence of this.

It was the Church that, far from suppressing the Bible, determined the canon of its books and then preserved and authoritatively interpreted the written word of God throughout its history. Catholic monks painstakingly preserved the sacred writings and beautifully illustrated them throughout the medieval period.

These priceless manuscripts were chained or locked up in churches not to prevent their use but to protect against theft, thus allowing greater access to them, which was standard practice in both Catholic and Protestant churches until the printing press enabled mass production of bibles. Early in Tyndale became friends with Henry Phillips, a visiting Englishman. Phillips presented himself to Tyndale as sympathetic to the Lutheran cause, but plotted with the emperor's magistrates to arrest Tyndale.

In May, , Phillips invited Tyndale out to dinner and, upon leaving his residence, identified him to waiting guards who apprehended him. Although by this time, England had separated from the Catholic Church and Tyndale had some supporters in the government, the Church of England continued to fight against Lutheranism. Tyndale's friends appealed to the English government to intervene, but to no avail.

After a sixteen month imprisonment, an ecclesiastical panel convicted Tyndale of heresy in August, and turned him over to the secular authority. In October of the same year he was executed, being first strangled and then burned at the stake. Tyndale died not for the right to read the Bible, as many Protestants arrogantly claim. He was put to death by the civil judges of the father of the English Protestant Deformation , for doctrines subversive of law and order, which Dr.

James Gardiner, Protestant, said "was intended to produce an ecclesiastical and social revolution of a most dangerous character. It is love of the God-inspired books in the Bible that caused the Catholic Church to protect the people from counterfeit translations as ardently as the State endeavors to protect the people from counterfeit currency.

The "right to read the Bible," which is a moral right, does not include imbibing such a blasphemous and distorted translation as came from the contemptible ex-Catholic pen of Tyndale.

His translation was ordered to be destroyed, not because it appeared in the English language, as you assume, but because it was a faulty, corrupted translation, which was a deliberate profanation of the Sacred Text.

Does this action make the Church anti-Bible? First if the Church truly wanted to destroy the Bible, why did her monks work diligently through the centuries making copies of it? Before the printing press before , copies of the Bible were hand written with beauty and painstaking accuracy. One reason for Bibles being chained to the walls of churches is because each copy was precious both spiritually and materially.

It took a monk about a year to hand copy the entire Bible, so Bibles were scarce. Paper was not used during the Middle Ages, as the first paper mill was not built until the 15 th century in England. Every monastery had a scriptorium, a writing room, in those ages, where priests and monks diligently and lovingly transcribed Bibles.

In that way the texts we have today were preserved. It is calculated to have taken skins or parchments. Hence Bibles could not be distributed then as they are distributed today. Those chained Bibles were Open Bibles. Thus we see, that chained Bibles were Bibles used for educational purposes. The Church did not oppose faithful vernacular translations, Luther himself noted "it was an effect of God power, that the Papacy should have remained, in the first place, sacred baptism; secondly, the text of the Holy Gospels which it was custom to read from the pulpit in the vernacular tongue of every nation What the Church did oppose were heretical additions and distortions to the Bible.

The Church prohibited these corrupt Bibles in order to preserve the integrity of Holy Scripture. This action was necessary if the Church is to preserve the truth of Christ's Gospel. As St. Peter in his Epistle in the Bible warns us, the ignorant and unstable can distort the Scriptures to their own destruction [2 Peter ; see front panel]. The Catholic Church has always Protected the Bible against those who would destroy it. The great scholar G.