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Did the Church burn the first printed copies of the Bible?

Question:

A friend insists the Catholic Church burned the first printed Bibles and punished people who had them. Is there any truth to the story?

Answer:

Nope. Printing with movable type was first used (say most historians, but not all) by Johann Gutenberg, a German Catholic. The first book he printed was the Mazarin Bible, so called because a copy was discovered in Cardinal Jules Mazarin’s library. More commonly known as the Gutenberg Bible, the book was printed more than 60years before the Reformation began.

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