the priests declared the study of Greek to be that of the devil, persecuting all who promoted it.1 For the most part, the West became exclusively Latin,2 estranged from the East. It was this persistent opposition to the achievements of the past that contributed immensely in causing a veil to fall over the West, plunging it into the Dark Ages (A.D. 476-1453). The spurious books of the Latin Vulgate opened the door for the mysterious and for the dark doctrines which had confused the thinking of the ancients.3 The corrupt readings of the authentic text decreased the confidence of the people in inspiration and increased the power of the priests. This darkness prevailed until the half century preceding 1453 A.D. when refugees fleeing the Greek world from the flood of the Turkish invaders came west bringing with them their language, literature, and culture.4

During this period of separation, division and isolation, the "Bible" was interpreted, copied and distributed as the unique possession of the Church by churchmen (monks, priests, bishops) within each of the two communities – with the firm resolve that each was working with sacred text. Although this continued into the 18th century until the time when the Enlightenment ripped ("liberated" from their perspective) the Biblical texts from the domain of the Church, it was in the 16th century that the Christian humanist, Desiderius Erasmus – himself a disaffected priest, decisively disrupted the canon and text of the Western Church.5 Erasmus replaced it with the Greek N.T. canon and text of the Eastern Church, thus setting in motion a process that by the nineteenth century culminated in the loss of the Bible as a sacred text in the Roman-Latin West. The end result was that the Bible came to be viewed merely as a "religious" book.

By "religious book" we mean a book which still retains a "traditional specialness", but it has lost its status as sacred. The reason this has happened is that the text has been removed from the ecclesiastical matrix. Its interpretations and dimensions (the canon) are no longer determined exclusively by churchmen and theologians. Having been removed from its natural home and haven within the confines of the Church, its interpretation now becomes subject to the critics/University rather than the Church. In this new matrix, the Bible text is seen as merely that of a piece of world literature – nothing more. Here, it is no longer viewed by its reader as decisively authoritative and sacred text. In capsule, this is the entire problem before the Church.

This tension, between the Bible as ecclesiastical text and as the text of the University, cries out back to the words of Tertullian (160-230 A.D.), "What indeed hath Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?" Tertullian would surely dismay to learn that since the nineteenth century the Academy has completely prevailed over the Church with regard to the Biblical text. The result has been an eclipse of Biblical narrative and the arrival of a strange bizarre silence of the Bible in the Church.6

Biblical scholars working in concert with publishing companies, neither of which answer to any ecclesiastical authority within the Church, have taken the Bible away from the people. Through their endless writings and promotions, they have convinced many in the community of believers, pastors included, that only they can truly appreciate and understand the Bible. They infer that they are the only ones who can determine what it means. Does not this arrogance resemble a giant leap back to the Catholic position from whence the Reformation sprang? Did the dauntless Reformers work, endure persecution and die in vain?

1 Froude, Life and Letters of Erasmus, op. cit., pp. 74, 187, 294, & 256.

2 Westcott and Hort, Introduction, op. cit., p. 142. Albeit as the Empire broke up into modern kingdoms, the pure Latin broke up into the Spanish Latin, French Latin, African Latin and other dialects.

3 Wilkinson, Our Authorized Bible Vindicated, op. cit., p. 50.

4 Ibid., p. 44.

5 Letis, "Brevard Childs and the Protestant Dogmaticians", op. cit., p. 4.

6 Ibid., p. 5. The reader is reminded that Dr. Letis is the source for the material under this current heading.

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