PERSECUTIONS AGAINST THE SPANISH BIBLE

PERSECUTIONS AGAINST THE SPANISH BIBLE

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December 30, 1999 (David W. Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, Michigan 48061, fbns@wayoflife.org) - The following article is from the book ROME AND THE BIBLE: TRACING THE HISTORY OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH AND ITS PERSECUTION OF THE BIBLE AND OF BIBLE BELIEVERS. To our knowledge, this is the first history ever published that details the relationship of the Roman Catholic Church to the Bible through the centuries. It covers the Roman Catholic Inquisition from the 11th to the 19th centuries, particularly the role played by the Inquisition to keep translations of the Bible out of the hands of the common people. It contains the history of ancient separated Christians, including the Waldensians and the Lollards. The book could also be titled "The Bible Through the Centuries." It gives the history of the English Bible from John Wycliffe to William Tyndale, and the history of the Spanish, German, French, and Italian Bibles. It contains amazing biographies of royal queens who loved the Bible. It gives the decade-by-decade details of papal condemnations of 19th-century Bible societies and of Roman Catholic persecution in the 19th century. It describes the 20th-century phenomenon of Rome changing tactics and joining hands with the Bible societies. It answers the question: Has the Roman Catholic Church changed? The book contains 74 illustrations, many of which are from rare out-of-print books. 200 pages, 8.5X11, perfect bound $19.95 + $4 S/H. Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, Michigan 48061, fbns@wayoflife.org (e-mail).

PERSECUTIONS AGAINST THE SPANISH BIBLE
By David W. Cloud
Copyright 1996, Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, Michigan 48061, fbns@wayoflife.org (e-mail)

The antichrist attitude of the Roman Catholic Church toward the Scriptures is evident in the history of the Spanish Bible. Rome controlled Spain for many centuries, even until modern times, but it did not produce an approved Spanish Bible until 1823-25, when the translation of Don Felix Torres Amat, bishop of Barcelona, was published. Even this was not a people’s Bible. The whole Bible was published in 19 volumes octavo, each of which was about 6 X 9 inches. The New Testament was issued in a cumbrous 2 volumes quarto, a book about 9.5 X 12 inches. Though 2,000 copies of the Latin-Spanish edition were printed, only 500 copies of the separate Spanish edition issued from the Catholic press.

The brave men who did give the Spanish a Bible in their own tongue were tormented by the ecclesiastical authorities and their translations were burned. In the fifteenth century, a Roman Catholic priest named Bonifacio Ferrer translated the whole Scriptures into the Valencian or Catalonian dialect of Spain. He died in 1417, and his translation was printed in Valencia in 1478. In spite of the fact that it was produced by a Catholic author and had been examined and corrected by the Catholic inquisitor, James Borrell, "it had scarcely made its appearance when it was suppressed by the Inquisition, who ordered the whole impression to be devoured by the flames. So strictly was this order carried into execution, that scarcely a single copy appears to have escaped" (M’Crie, History of the Reformation in Spain, pp. 191,92). In 1645, four leaves of this translation were discovered in a monastery.

We come now to the sixteenth century. For the following history of the Spanish Bible I am indebted particularly to the following resources: History of the Progress and Suppression of the Reformation in Spain in the Sixteenth Century by Thomas M’Crie (1829); Foxe’s unabridged Acts and Monuments of Martyrs; an unpublished manuscript by J. Hurtado, Jr., titled History of the Translation of the Reina-Valera Version of the Bible; and James Heron’s Evolution of Latin Christianity (1919).

FRANCISCO DE ENZINAS

The story of the pure Spanish Bible from the period of the Reformation begins with Francisco de Enzinas [also known in Germany by the name of Dryander] (1520-1553). He and his brothers, Jayme and Juan, were sent abroad by their wealthy parents to be educated at Louvain University in Belgium, and there all three rejected Roman Catholicism for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Juan moved back to Paris in 1541 and was impressed with the cruelty of the persecutions there, which were even more barbarous than those in Spain. "There was something solemn, though appalling, in the composure with which a Spanish assembly witnessed the barbarous spectacle of an auto-de-fe; but the wanton ferocity with which a Parisian mob shouted, when the executioner, with his pincers, tore the tongue from the mouth of his victim, and struck him with it repeatedly in the face, before binding his body to the stake, was disgustingly horrible and fiendish" (M’Crie, History of the Reformation in Spain, pp. 178,79). Being required by his father to go to Rome, Juan reluctantly obeyed. After several years, when he was preparing to leave the country, he was betrayed to the Inquisition as a heretic. He died at the stake in Rome in 1546.

Jayme was fruitful in soul winning and Bible teaching and led a man to Christ named Juan Diaz. The latter became a master of the biblical languages and was diligently serving Christ in Germany and Bavaria. Diaz’s brother Alfonso, though, an official in the Roman curia, was a staunch Roman Catholic and was maddened by the news that his brother had "defected." In the spring of 1546 Alfonso journeyed from Rome to Neuburg, Bavaria, and attempted to talk his brother, Juan, into traveling with him to Italy. Failing in this, Alfonso feigned himself to depart that country, but he returned to the town stealthily and, with the help of his servant or assistant, murdered his own brother in a religious rage by burying a hatchet into his head (M’Crie, History of the Reformation in Spain, pp. 181-86). Alfonso was arrested, but the court was unable to convict him due to pressure from Catholic authorities. He was welcomed back to Rome as a hero and later appeared openly at the Council of Trent with his assistant.

Francisco’s parents apparently intended that he become a military man, but instead he became a soldier of the Cross. He mastered the Greek language, and in 1541 he moved to Wittenburg and became closely associated with Philip Melancthon, co-worker with Luther. It was natural for this Spanish-speaking Greek scholar, in that Reformation climate, to proceed with a Spanish translation from the Greek Received Text which Luther had used for German and which Tyndale had used for English. In 1543 in Antwerp the Enzinas New Testament was published with the title "The New Testament, that is, the New Covenant of our Only Redeemer and Saviour Jesus Christ, translated from the Greek to the Castillian [Spanish] language." Enzinas presented a copy of his New Testament to Charles V, Emperor of the Roman Empire (1519-1558), during the emperor’s visit to Brussels. Historian Thomas M’Crie gives the record of what happened then:

"Charles received it graciously, and promising his patronage if it were found to contain nothing contrary to the faith, gave it to his confessor Pedro de Soto to examine. After various delays, Enzinas, having waited on the confessor, was upbraided by him as an enemy to religion, who had tarnished the honor of his native country; and refusing to acknowledge a fault, was seized by the officers of justice and thrown into prison. Besides the crime of translating the scriptures, he was charged with having made a translation of a work of Luther, and visiting Melanchthon" (M’Crie, History of the Reformation in Spain, pp. 194-95).

Roman Catholic inquisitors discovered three alleged "heretical indications" in the Enzinas New Testament: First, the phrase "the New Covenant" was condemned as "Lutheranism"! Second, the phrase "Only Redeemer and Saviour" was condemned as a heresy because it left out the authority of the pope and the "Holy Church." Third, key passages in the Epistle of Romans concerning justification by grace were printed in bold capital letters.

Rome’s blasphemy is plain in this condemnation of a lovely and pure Spanish New Testament. Rome claims to be a mediator between Christ and men, thus it was offended at the phrase "Only Saviour"! It is opposed to justification by faith alone through grace alone, thus it was offended that Enzinas would draw his readers’ attention to the biblical doctrine of justification.

Francisco’s father and uncles visited him in prison and reproached him for dishonoring his family. After fifteen months’ confinement he miraculously escaped prison in Brussels and fled to Antwerp, then to Wittenburg, then on to England, where, in 1548, he was given the chair of Greek at Cambridge. He returned to the continent in 1550 and died of the plague at Strasbourg in 1553. "Most of his New Testaments were burned and all of his manuscripts were destroyed by the Inquisition."

JUAN PEREZ DE PINEDA

Another man who was raised up by God to provide the Spanish world with a vernacular Bible was Juan Perez de Pineda (c1490-1567). In Seville, Spain, Perez received the doctor of divinity and was the head of the College of Doctrine. In Seville "he contracted an intimacy with Egidius [Juan Gil] and other favourers of the reformed opinions" (M’Crie, History of the Reformation in Spain, p. 199). He associated himself with a small Protestant congregation pastored by Christobal Losada. That entire region had been affected with Protestant and Bible-believing thought, and a great many of the priests and nuns and nobility were at least interested in the "new" doctrines. Juan Perez, Cassiodoro de Reina, and Cypriano de Valera, all of whom later became translators of the Spanish Bible, were three of the many men who were influential in the spiritual revival which was progressing in the Seville area. The Protestant doctrines had permeated the monastery of San Isidro del Campo. "Nothing remained of the old system but the monastic garb … by their conversation, and by the circulation of books, these zealous monks diffused the knowledge of the truth through the adjacent country" (M’Crie, p. 223). The Spanish New Testament which had been produced by Enzinas in 1543 was being smuggled into the area. In 1557 "an ample supply of copies of the scriptures and protestant books, in the Spanish language, having been received, they were read with avidity by the monks" (M’Crie, p. 222).

Such things could not escape the attention of the inquisition. Juan Gil, in spite of his esteemed reputation, had been charged with heresy and imprisoned some years earlier in 1550. "The charges against him related to the doctrine of justification, assurance of salvation, human merits, plurality of mediators, purgatory, auricular confession, and the worshipping of images" (M’Crie, p. 157). Gil was imprisoned until 1555 and died the following year. His enemies tried to pursue him even beyond the grave. His bones were dug up and committed to the flames and his property was confiscated by the Inquisition.

When Gil was arrested, Perez and some of his friends found an opportunity to flee Spain. Perez settled in Geneva and was the first to form a Spanish church in that city (M’Crie, p. 363). Afterwards he moved to France. His translation of the New Testament into Spanish, relying heavily on the Enzinas version, was published in 1556 in Geneva.

JULIAN HERNANDEZ

The Scriptures and other books which were published by the Spanish Protestants in Geneva remained locked up for some time for lack of someone willing to smuggle them into Spain. "But at last a humble individual had the courage to undertake, and the address to execute the task. This was Julian Hernandez, a native of Villaverda in the district of Campos, who on account of his small stature was commonly called Julian the Little. Having imbibed the reformed doctrine in Germany, he had come to Geneva and entered into the service of Juan Perez as amanuensis and corrector of the press. Two large casks, filled with translations of the scriptures and other protestant books in Spanish, were in 1557 committed to his trust, which he undertook to convey by land; and having eluded the vigilant eyes of the inquisitorial familiars, he lodged his precious charge safely in the house of one of the chief protestants of Seville, by whom the contents were quickly dispersed among his friends in different parts of the country" (M’Crie, History of the Reformation in Spain, pp. 204,205).

Hernandez had been smuggling the Enzinas New Testament into Spain for several months when he was betrayed by a "friend" who was spying for the Roman authorities. He had shown the man a copy of the New Testament in an attempt to bestow upon him eternal blessings through Jesus Christ, and his payment for this kind deed was betrayal into the hands of the inquisitors. "Julian the Little" proved himself to be Julian the Giant of the faith by his bold testimony before his persecutors. "He did not seek to conceal his sentiments, and gloried in the fact that he had contributed to the illumination of his countrymen by furnishing them with the scriptures in their native tongue. … Hernandez displayed a firmness and heroism altogether above his physical strength and his station in life. During the three years complete that he was kept in prison, he was frequently put to the torture, in every form and with all the aggravations of cruelty which his persecutors, incensed at his obstinacy, could inflict or devise; but, on every fresh occasion, he appeared before them with unsubdued fortitude" (M’Crie, pp. 240-242). After three years of unspeakable torment, this brave friend of the Truth was burned at the stake.

Most of the New Testaments of Perez and Enzinas were captured and burned by the Inquisition. But not all, and the smuggling did not cease with the capture of Hernandez. "Many copies of the Spanish Bible, published by Cassiodoro de Reyna at Basle in 1569, made their way into Spain, notwithstanding the severest denunciations of the Holy Office, and the utmost vigilance of the familiars" (M’Crie, p. 332). Some of these were smuggled in casks of wine.

Not being able to get their hands on the Bible translator himself, the raging inquisitors burned an effigy of Perez in Seville in 1560. Perez died of a disease in Paris in 1567 and "bequeathed all his fortune to the printing of the Bible in his native tongue" (M’Crie, pp. 200,201).

CASSIODORO DE REINA

Another of the men who fled Spain’s inquisition terrors was Cassiodoro de Reina [Reyna] (1520-1594). Reina is described by Thomas M’Crie as "the person who had the greatest influence in effecting" the change previously mentioned at the San Isidro del Campo monastery (p. 222). He was soon caught in the inquisition net. Dozens of persons in Seville were arrested and charged with the crime of being "Lutheran," a term broadly applied to those who rejected Romanism and took the Bible alone as their authority. In September 1559, twenty-one were burned at the stake;, but before this some escaped from prison; Reina, among them. [The autos-de-fe were held at least annually from 1559 until 1570 in Spain in all of the twelve cities which had inquisition tribunals. By 1570 the reformation had been suppressed in Spain. "After that date, protestants were still discovered at intervals by the Inquisition, and brought out in the autos-de-fe; but they were ‘as the gleaning grapes when the vintage is done’" (M’Crie, p. 336).] Reina escaped the Spanish inquisition in 1557 and fled to London, where he preached to a Spanish congregation (Lupton, A History of the Geneva Bible, I, p. 40). Later he journeyed to Geneva and associated with a Protestant Spanish church, the pastor of which was Juan Perez de Pineda. In 1567 he completed a Spanish New Testament which "is hailed to this day as the greatest literary triumph in Spanish history." Reina settled in Basle, where "meeting with a kind reception in that seat of literature, he finished his translation of the Bible, which had been his chief employment for several years" (M’Crie, p. 349). The entire Bible appeared in 1569. Reina later pastored a Spanish church in Antwerp until 1585. He died in 1594, and his work was taken over by a friend who had fled from Spain.

CIPRIANO DE VALERA

Reina’s friend was Cipriano de Valera (1532-1602?). Thus we see the origin of the name of the popular Spanish translation called the Reina-Valera. It was probably in 1550, at the arrest of Juan Gil, that Valera fled Spain, though it might have been later, such as in 1557 when the first large-scale arrests were made. In 1565 he joined Oxford University and became well known for his linguistic expertise, "having mastered at least ten languages." He revised and corrected Reina’s work and published the New Testament in London in 1596, and, the entire Bible in 1602 in Amsterdam.

All of these Spanish Bibles "were accompanied with vindications of the practice of translating the scriptures into vernacular languages, and the right of the people to read them" (M’Crie, p. 202). What a contrast this was with the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church. A Spaniard, Alfonso de Castro, gave the opinion of the latter in these words: "the translation of the scriptures into the vernacular tongues, with the reading of them by the vulgar, is the true fountain of all heresies." As late as 1747, the inquisitor general in Spain fretted that "some men carried their audacity to the execrable extreme of asking permission to read the sacred scriptures in the vulgar tongue, not afraid of finding in them the most deadly poison" (M’Crie, p. 202, f3).

The Roman Catholic authorities poured hatred and contempt upon the work of these men throughout that entire era, doing everything in their power to keep the pure Word of God from the Spanish-speaking people. "One of the most important of the functions of the Inquisition was its censorship of the press. No book could safely be printed, imported, or offered for sale, without its permission" (Hulme, The Renaissance, p. 334). Pope Julius III addressed a bull to the inquisitors in 1550 in which he warned them of the Spanish Bibles which were being smuggled into the country (M’Crie, History of the Reformation in Spain, p. 203). The inquisitors were given instructions "to seize all the copies, and proceed with the utmost rigour against those who should retain them, without excepting members of universities, colleges or monasteries." "At the same time the strictest precautions were adopted to prevent the importation of such books by placing officers at all the sea-ports and land-passes, with authority to search every package, and the person of every traveller that should enter the kingdom" (M’Crie, p. 204).

THE SPANISH INQUISITION

The Spanish Inquisition was incredibly horrible. It was established in 1480 and the first chief Confessor of the Inquisition, or Grand Inquisitor, was Thomas de Torquemada. Described as "a pitiless man," he ruled the so-called Holy Office in Spain for 18 years, during which "ten thousand two hundred and twenty individuals were burned alive, and ninety-seven thousand three hundred and twenty-one punished with infamy, confiscation of property, or perpetual imprisonment, so that the total number of families destroyed by this one friar alone amounted to one hundred and fourteen thousand four hundred and one" (Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, cited by Heron, Evolution of Latin Christianity, p. 325). The awful "auto de fe" was instituted, whereby groups of "heretics" were burned publicly at the conclusion to an impressive public pageant. "Auto de fe" means "act of faith," because it was considered an act of faith to punish and burn heretics. Thus did the Roman Catholic authorities strike terror into the hearts of people, and thus did they impress men’s minds with the heavy price they would pay if they dared to follow the Bible alone. Llorente, a Spanish priest who had been general secretary of the Inquisition at Madrid, had access to all its archives. He affirms that the Spanish Inquisition, down to the date of its suppression in 1808, had executed 31,912 persons, burned in effigy 17,659, and inflicted severe punishment on 291,456 (Shaw, The Roman Conflict, p. 383). "These figures have been criticised by Hefele, Ranke, Prescott, and others, but the consideration of there being a few more or less matters little" (Heron, Evolution of Latin Christianity, p. 326).

I believe it is important at this point to give a description of the details of these torments which were poured out upon humble, Bible-believing people (as well as upon unsaved victims of the Inquisition):

The iniquity of the method of trial to which the victims were subjected was simply colossal. The proceedings were conducted in secret. The accused was kept in ignorance of the charges against him, as well as of the evidence on which the charges were based. The tribunal of monks ‘had its familiars in every house, diving into the secrets of every fireside, judging and executing its horrible decrees without responsibility.’ The accuser might be the man's own son or daughter, or the wife of his bosom; for all were required under the penalty of death to inform the Inquisitors of every suspicious word a man spoke. It was assumed from the first that he was guilty, and every effort was made to force him to confess. Persons pretending to be friendly were allowed to interview him in order to entrap him into admissions, and to frighten him with fictitious evidence. Then, when worn out by solitude, suffering, hunger and terror, he was exposed to the most cruel tortures, often fiendish in their ingenuity.

‘The torture took place at midnight in a gloomy dungeon, dimly lighted by torches. The victim—whether man, matron, or tender virgin—was stripped naked, and stretched upon the wooden bench. Water, weights, fires, pulleys, screw—all the apparatus by which the sinews could be strained without cracking, the bones bruised without breaking, and the body racked exquisitely without giving up the ghost—were now put into operation. The executioner, enveloped in a black robe from head to foot, with his eyes glaring at his victim through holes cut in the hood which muffled his face, practised successively all the forms of torture which the devilish ingenuity of the monks had invented. The imagination sickens when striving to keep pace with these dreadful realities’ (Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, Part II, Chap. III).

Scathing as they are, Dr. Gwatkin's words are amply justified: ‘Ghastly as the records of heathen persecution are, the work of blood was never done with the infernal thoroughness of Papal Rome’ (Gwatkin, Early Church History, I, p. 210).

‘Had the Son of Man been in body upon the earth during the Middle Ages, hardly one wrong and injustice would have wounded His pure soul like the system of torture. To see human beings, with the consciousness of innocence, or professing and believing the purest truths, condemned without proof to the most harrowing agonies, every groan or admission under pain used against them, their confessions distorted, their nerves so racked that they pleaded their guilt in order to end their torture, their last hours tormented by false ministers of justice or religion, who threatened eternal as well as temporal damnation, and all this going on for ages, until scarce any innocent felt themselves safe under this mockery of justice and religion—all this would have seemed to the founder of Christianity as the worst travesty of His faith and the most cruel wound to humanity’ (Brace, Gesta Christi, p. 274).

The procession that took place at the execution of heretics was known as the Auto-de-Fe. It was generally held on a Sunday, often on ‘All Saints' Day.’ The tolling of a bell at dawn was the signal for the opening of the horrible pageant. Men of the highest rank, even the Sovereign himself, found it prudent to countenance it with their presence. The procession itself was led by the Dominicans, carrying the banner of the Inquisition in the van; then followed the penitents; behind them, but separated from them by a great cross, came those condemned to death, barefooted, clad in the ‘san benito,’ [yellow dress with pictures of demons drawn on it] with a pointed cap on the head; then effigies of the fugitives; lastly, the bones of dead culprits in black coffins, painted with hellish flames and other symbols; while an army of priests and monks formed the rear of the procession. If at the last any of the condemned professed the Catholic faith they were strangled before being burnt.

Instead of being burnt many were ‘immured’ in cells or narrow niches made in the walls of the ‘house of inquisition,’ and kept there for years or for life. In 1312, for example, the penalty of being perpetually ‘immured’ was inflicted on some eighty-seven persons. Three men, one of them old, and three women, two of them widows, are condemned to be ‘perpetually shut up in closer wall and straiter place, in fetters and chains.’

Dr. Rule in his History of the Inquisition gives an account of walled-up victims, the skeletons of three of which were found in the Convent of Santo Domingo in Mexico, and four in the Inquisition at Puebla. These were carefully photographed on their discovery. Dr. Rule mentions that the skeletons of about two hundred human bodies were found in a long gallery in the Inquisition at Puebla; and while these were being removed another discovery was made. ‘What seemed to be the interior face of the main wall, not interrupted by door or window, was for some distance smooth with a brick facing, but in some places along the smooth part the bricks had been broken away from the floor upward, disclosing spaces resembling very narrow closets, empty, as if rifled of their contents. These breakages excited suspicion that the remaining unbroken surface might cover similar recesses. Dr. Butler, therefore, had that part of the wall sounded with hammers; in four places he found it hollow, and had the bricks carefully removed. To the horror of the explorers four human bodies [or skeletons rather] met their view; one man sitting on a stone; two men standing; one woman laid on her back; with a bundle at her feet, said to contain an infant. … The niches which held three of the four were vertical, and must have resembled narrow chimney-flues, barely sufficient for a living person to stand upright, and not wide enough to allow the body to fall prone when life became extinct. Although it might bend a little, the body was held up by the sides of the tomb, and stiffened after death in the same posture that it had in its last agony.’ … Think of the horrible sufferings and inevitable death to which they were subjected!" (Heron, Evolution of Latin Christianity, pp. 326-328).

Thomas M’Crie, in his History of the Reformation in Spain, gives a description of the prisons in which tens of thousands of people suffered under the Inquisition:

"The injustice of the inquisitorial process can only be equalled by its cruelty. Persons of undoubted veracity, who had the happiness to escape from the secret prisons of the Inquisition during the sixteenth century, have described them as narrow and gloomy cells, which admitted the light only by a small chink,—damp, and resembling graves more than prisons, if they were subterraneous; and if they were situated in the upper part of the building, feeling in summer like heated furnaces. … even those who give the most favourable description of these abodes admit, that nothing can be conceived more frightful than the situation of the individual who is immured in them, left as he is to conjecture respecting his accuser and the particular crime with which he is charged; kept in ignorance of the state of his process; shut out from every kind of intercourse with his friends; denied even the consolation of conversing confidentially with the person to whom his defence has been intrusted; refused all use of books; afraid, if he has a fellow-prisoner for a few days, to do more than exchange salutations with him, lest he should be confiding in a spy; threatened if he hum a tune, and especially a sacred one, to relieve his languor; plunged, during the rigour of the winter months, in total darkness for fifteen hours of every day in an abode that never saw the cheerful blaze of a fire; and, in fine, knowing that if ever he should be set free, he must go out to the world lost for ever in public opinion, and loaded with an infamy, heavier than that of the pardoned assassin or parricide, which will attach to his children of the remotest generation" (M’Crie, History of the Reformation in Spain, pp. 99,100).

The prisoners were required to be completely silent. When a Mr. Martin was led to his cell in Grenada, after being arrested by the Inquisition, he was given these orders: "You must observe as great silence here, as if you were dead; you must not speak, nor whistle, nor sing, nor make any noise that can be heard; and if you hear any body cry, or make a noise, you must be still, and say nothing, upon pain of 200 lashes" (Foxe, abridged, pp. 116,117). The requirement of complete silence was the same in Inquisition prisons in other lands: "Sentinels walk about continually to listen; if the least noise is heard, they call to, and threaten the prisoner; if the noise is repeated, a severe beating ensues. The following is a fact: a prisoner having a violent cough, one of the guards came and ordered him not to make a noise; to which he replied that it was not in his power to forbear. The cough increasing, the guard went into the cell, stripped the poor creature naked, and beat him so unmercifully that he soon after died" (Foxe, abridged, p. 108).

"When the French invaded Spain and took Madrid, the army broke open the Inquisition, and Colonel Lemanouski found in the dungeons dead and dying bodies, with a large number of both sexes, from the young man and maiden up to persons of threescore and ten, all naked, as when born into the world, with the instruments of torture of every kind which the ingenuity of men or devils could invent" (Shaw, The Roman Conflict, p. 383).

It must not be forgotten that, as we have seen, these bitter torments were frequently used against men who sought to give the common man the Bible in his own tongue, and against the men and women whose only "crime" was their love for the Bible.

____________________

This article is from the book ROME AND THE BIBLE: TRACING THE HISTORY OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH AND ITS PERSECUTION OF THE BIBLE AND OF BIBLE BELIEVERS. To our knowledge, this is the first history ever published that details the relationship of the Roman Catholic Church to the Bible through the centuries. It covers the Roman Catholic Inquisition from the 11th to the 19th centuries, particularly the role played by the Inquisition to keep translations of the Bible out of the hands of the common people. It contains the history of ancient separated Christians, including the Waldensians and the Lollards. The book could also be titled "The Bible Through the Centuries." It gives the history of the English Bible from John Wycliffe to William Tyndale, and the history of the Spanish, German, French, and Italian Bibles. It contains amazing biographies of royal queens who loved the Bible. It gives the decade-by-decade details of papal condemnations of 19th-century Bible societies and of Roman Catholic persecution in the 19th century. It describes the 20th-century phenomenon of Rome changing tactics and joining hands with the Bible societies. It answers the question: Has the Roman Catholic Church changed? The book contains 74 illustrations, many of which are from rare out-of-print books. 200 pages, 8.5X11, perfect bound $19.95 + $4 S/H. Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, Michigan 48061, fbns@wayoflife.org (e-mail).