Who "Owns" the Scriptures? A Brief Consideration from a Roman Catholic Perspective: **
"This is always a difficult subject—mostly because students of history have to wrap their heads around one very important consideration (before launching off into the analysis mode of “persecution and power”). That consideration is the issue of “ownership of texts” before copyright law. If one once understands that, it makes things a little easier to put in proper perspective.
A few hundred years from now, when studying history, I wonder how students will view the draconian copyright laws of the 21st century. Perhaps they will, in that later age, view it as “persecution” that men and women were fined huge sums (or even put in jail) for pirating copies of films, musical pieces, etc., and for selling them on their own, etc. Perhaps they will look at copyrights on books and music sheets and all the rest as hopelessly repressive—as a matter of the companies wanting to keep as much money for themselves as possible, or whatever.
The bottom line is that a society will jealously guard its “texts” (written, visual, musical) based on its highest values. Ownership of “texts” will be related to the most important thing in that culture. Modern copyright law is based on one thing: money. (This is not necessarily a bad thing—just a point I’m making.) The Church’s desire jealously to guard Scripture was based on one thing (NOT money, but) keeping orthodox belief intact. That might have been a stupid thing, in the age of the printing press, or a well-meaning but misguided thing, or an honorable thing, but it was the Church’s viewpoint, and the Church (like a modern producer who has made a film) viewed itself as “owning” (if you will) the right to publish the text.
That is all. That is a big point, but that is all.
What is going on, under the surface, if you will, during the 16th century (and somewhat before, as you mention Wycliffe and Huss) is that there was a fight to challenge this long-standing assumption—namely, that the Scriptures were the Church’s own documents. Were the Scriptures “the people’s”? Were they “the scholars’”? Who could “own” them? Who could interpret and read them according to their own lights? Etc.
If the Church was “repressive” in wanting (before copyright law) to restrict the translation, publication, and/or sale of Holy Scripture, and if that’s the only lens through which to view the situation, then it is “repressive” for copyright law to exist today. But of course it is not repressive for there to be copyright law, because we would agree that (1) the people making the film or book or music should, after all have certain rights to its distribution, replication, and production; and (2) that if people “owning” this stuff couldn’t be paid for it, then people wouldn’t (or couldn’t) make films, music, or books.
Well, it is manifestly true that the Church had always viewed herself (without objections anywhere) as the “producer” and “interpreter” and the “guardian” of Holy Scripture. For the Church (in the Catholic model) is the very basis for Scripture, not the other way round. So when private persons, or states, or whatever, presumed to “take” these Scriptures, translate them (according to their own scholarship and lights), and print and distribute and sell them, and particularly when these persons, as judged by the Church, were heretics (even worse), a problem was developing that, by the standards of the 16th century (and earlier) could only be met by firm punishment. (And note: the Church always handed such people over to the state for punishment; the only thing the Church did was judge the person in question to be in violation of the Church’s lawful restrictions on “copyright,” if you will.)
Modern history, looking back on the Reformation and pre-Reformation period, does something very “unhistorical” by starting with the principle (assumed) that every one walking about should be able to own and translate and read and pontificate upon Holy Scripture, since (assumed) the Church doesn’t “own” the Bible, but people do. Because, says the modern, the Holy Spirit (through the Church—He always, or in all normal cases, works “through” the Church) didn’t write the Scriptures—just plain people did and that was that. To get back into the heads of the early modern people, however, is, I think, to see this problem in a very different light. The Bible is the Church’s Bible. Her apostles and evangelists and early witnesses wrote the Bible, she kept the Bible safe, she (yes) translated it (that is, scholars like Jerome, for example, translated it under the lawful gaze of the Church and submitted it to the Church and lived and breathed and moved in the Church), and she, under threat of death, refused to give the Scriptures up to pagan authorities (think of the Decian persecutions, for example). She got to say what WAS scripture and what was not. Her monks copied them out. Her universities and theology departments mulled them over and wrote theologies based on them. She knew that when people took them and ran with them, they got themselves into heaps and heaps of theological trouble. So, during the 14th and 15th and 16th centuries, she proceeded along a consistent road: private persons would have to be dealt with, since it was a problem of the first magnitude that people were simply translating based on their own lights, and putting the Bible into the hands of people who couldn’t possibly begin to understand how the Scriptures backed up the Church’s teaching. (Instead, to turn it around, they wanted to use the Bible to start fresh and find out what the Church really should teach—something that the Church, in principle rejected from the very start as a principle of biblical usage.)
For these reasons, it was a crisis of huge proportions.
To use another illustration: What would the United States government do if the written Supreme Court decisions were interpreted by private parties to their own ends, and what if these private parties (gathering sympathetic people around them) set themselves up, legally, as the “real” interpreters of the decisions (or, worse, said that there was really NO “official” interpretation of the decisions, but rather each person could interpret the decisions for him/herself)? There would be absolute legal chaos in this country, and, frankly, the United States government wouldn’t put up with that for two seconds flat. There would be (in some people’s eyes, what they would call) “repression,” “persecution,” an unwillingness to be open to new interpretations…. That’s because the United States government is a visible, viable, “real” entity—just like the Catholic Church. But of course, if one grants as a primary assumption that “the Church” is invisible, or just a collection of private Christians who happen to set up structures of convenience to run things as best they can from century to century—structures that can be changed by them at their will, but which are not the TRUE heart of the Church, which is actually “in the hearts of every private person,” then certainly it would follow that the Church was hopelessly cruel in the 16th century."
**From a conversation with a friend.