Did Catholics start printing their bibles in English after the Protestants did?
For over 1,000 years the Roman Catholic church kept the Bible in Latin only. They used their Latin Vulgate translation (made from the Hebrew and Greek languages that the Scriptures were first written in.) Very few people could read Latin by the 1500s. It was known by theologians, of course. But with the advent of Gutenberg’s moveable metal type printing press, a great leap forward was taken in getting the Bible into the hands of ordinary people. His first job was the Bible, in 1453, in which year Byzantium fell to the Ottomans. Displaced Christian scholars fled to Italy. This paved the way for the original language manuscripts to be used in translations, for that is where they were kept. English scholar John Colet (1467-1519) studied in Italy to help produce the first printed Greek grammar in England. He read the Greek New Testament with his students at Oxford, a momentous lecture series on Romans which “swept away centuries of turgid and often fantastic pedantry” by expounding the tex
