From "Answers To Your Bible Version Questions" ©2001 David W. Daniels. Reproduced by permission

Question: I read with great interest that the Catholic Church supposedly 'hid' the bible from its members so that they would not know its contents and therefore not know that they have been lied to.

Could you please reconcile this with the fact that the first printed bible for general public use was printed and distributed by the Catholic Church long before Martin Luther 'protested' (about 60 years before).

From what I get before the invention of the printing press (By Gutenberg - a Catholic), to have a bible would have meant that someone had to have hand-written it on expensive paper. (The fact is paper was not as cheap as it is now). From an expert's estimate, the cost of a bible would have been today’s equivalent of US$8,000.00 and this would have put the price of the bible out of reach of the vast majority of the people. I actually doubt that many in this day would have been keen to spend that much money on a bible that might not last as long. Besides they would not have been able to produce that many bibles anyway. Also, the Catholic bible is the best selling bible, actually book, of all time.

Could you please disprove the above by giving me quotes and references that support your tract (The Death Cookie) in the above subject.

I am trying to work out my salvation in fear and trembling and I need the truth.

Answer: The Roman Catholic Church did hide the Bible from the common people. There were two ways in which this happened.

First, the Roman Catholic leaders by the Middle Ages usually did not know the Bible. Many people bought their position as priests. Many did not have a Bible at all; but more importantly, many local priests did not even know how to read.

Second, the Roman Catholic religion did not even use a genuine Bible. Their book was from the polluted Alexandrian stream. The real Bible was kept by many people the Roman Catholics persecuted and murdered.

Since the Roman Catholic religion did not want the true Bible in the hands of the people, they 1) used a false Bible, 2) persecuted people who did have a true Bible, and 3) did not let even the perverted Bible be published widely in the language of the people.

The Gutenberg Bible you refer to was a Roman Catholic Vulgate, not a preserved Bible. Although the movable-type printing press was invented by him, he did not do mass copies of even the perverted Bible. That did not occur until a couple of events happened.

First, the city in which Gutenberg worked was invaded in 1462, spreading the printing press invention to Rome, Paris, Krakow (Poland) and Westminster (England). Second, the Reformers got hold of preserved Bibles and used these presses to print thousands of Bibles and Christian literature for the people.

You are right that Bibles before this had to be copied by hand. But the incredible historical fact is this: That is exactly what those who had the preserved Bibles did. It was these many, handwritten copies of God’s preserved words that so blessed, informed and converted the earliest Protestants of the Reformation. Just like you can find it in the King James Bible today.