Did the Church burn the first printed copies of the Bible?
August 4, 2011
Full 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.
