em since they were written only in Latin and Hebrew and only monks and highly educated people could read those languages. They even set a law which prohibited to everyone but the church to have Bibles, and if anyone else wanted to translate it, he had to translate it from the Catholic manuscripts and not from the original Hebrew or Latin texts. As I said before, books were not very abundant and making one was not an easy task. Edith Simon writes, “The making of a book was a slow, expensive process that had improved but little in a thousand years. The professional scribe might spend four or five months copying out a 200-page text; even more costly than his labors were the 25 sheepskins needed to make enough parchment for a book of that length”(134). Therefore, if you wanted to have a Bible of your own, you did not only had to pay a lot for it but had to know how to read Latin or Hebrew and since in those days education levels were so poor and Alvarez 3expensive, only a small number of people could afford it, making it for anyone a great privilege to read and write. However, in 1450, Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press and by 1501, there were printing presses in 110 European towns and cities. This made literature available to all class levels, opening people’s minds and encouraging them to study and educate themselves in any field of education that they wanted. This invention became later one of the key tools God used to carry the Gospel to all parts of the world. Throughout all this time the Roman Catholic Church dominated almost every social aspect of the European life, including politics, economy, religion and education, but once men realized the great teachings the Bible possessed, there was nothing that could stop the truth from coming out. Some might say that the Reformation began many decades before Martin Luther lived but the thing is that none of them had so permanently influenced the world as he di...
