Censorship of the Bible

Censorship of the Bible involves banning or restricting the possession, reading, or use of the Bible as a whole, or of specific editions or translations. People who have violated these bans have faced punishments like imprisonment, forced labor, exile, execution, or the burning and confiscation of their Bibles. Such censorship has been driven by explicit religious motives, as well as by concerns over public policy or state control, particularly in authoritarian regimes or after violent uprisings.

This kind of censorship has happened in the past and continues today. In the 20th century, Christians resisted the Soviet Union's official policy of state atheism by smuggling Bibles. In the People's Republic of China, which is also officially atheist, Bible burning has occurred as part of antireligious campaigns.

The history of Bible censorship in Western Europe is debated. Catholic writers have traditionally described bans on vernacular translations as temporary, cautious responses to local outbreaks of organized violence and heresy—more about policing than theology. Protestant writers have portrayed these bans as church authorities suppressing the truth to hold onto power.

In most cases, bans on pious laypeople owning or publicly reading certain Bibles targeted unauthorized vernacular editions that were not based on the Latin Vulgate, or orthodox translations that also contained heretical or confusing material. Clergy were never forbidden to own the Latin Vulgate. The Catholic Church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum included various Bible translations and editions.

Background

The Old Testament was mostly written in Hebrew and partly in Aramaic. The New Testament was written in Koine Greek. These books were translated into several other languages, including Latin and Gothic. Around AD 300, Latin began to become the language of worship in Western Christianity, helped by the fact that many European languages (the Romance languages) descend from Latin. In contrast, the earliest written Western Germanic languages date only from the 6th century. From AD 382 to 420, a new Latin translation, the Vulgate, was made. It became the dominant translation for Western Christianity between the 7th and 9th centuries, and from about the 9th century, it was considered the only valid Bible translation. In Eastern Christianity, Greek remained dominant.