Thread by @Read_Her_Books

Book of Mulling: Saint John Evangelist
late 7th Century, Fol. 193

**Book of Kells
**Temptation of Christ 202v

*Book of Kells
*Arrest of Christ 114v

Book of Durrow
Eagle : Symbol for St. Mark (see text below)

Jerome’s tradition of associating the Eagle with St. John and the Lion with St. Mark has been reversed. The Book of Durrow follows the tradition of St. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon from the 2nd century.

See Irenaeus’ work Adversus Haereses
newadvent.org/fathers/010331…

***Bible of S Paolo fuori le Mura
***Frontispiece to Revelation 331(cccxxviii)v

Job
fol 168v God correcting Satan

Where We Got the Bible: Our Debt to the Catholic Church

by The Right Rev. HENRY G. GRAHAM,

Author of "Hindrances to Conversion," etc.

catholicapologetics.info/apologetics/pr…

"Dedicated to all lovers of the written word.

'In which are certain things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, to their own destruction.' 2 Peter iii. 16

"(I) The persecutors of the Church for the first 300 years of Christianity destroyed everything Christian that they could lay their hands on.

"Over and over again, barbarous pagans burst in upon Christian cities, and villages and churches, and burned all the sacred things they could find.

"And not only so, but they especially compelled Christians to deliver up their sacred books, under pain of death, and then consigned them to the flames. Among these, doubtless, some of the writings that came from the hand of the Apostle and Evangelist perished."

[...] "THUS far we have been speaking of the Bible as found written in the old manuscripts, mostly in the very early centuries of Christianity.

"Now the next question after settling how the Bible was made and collected and committed to writing, is, how was it preserved and multiplied and diffused throughout the centuries previous to the invention of printing?

"For you will bear in mind that we are as yet a long way off the day when the first printing press was invented or set up. Did the people at large know anything at all about the Sacred Scriptures before it was printed and put into their hands?

"Here we are suddenly plunged into the Middle Ages; what was the history of the Holy Book during that time which people in these countries generally call 'Dark'?

"If you have patience with me for a little I shall prove to you that, just as the Catholic Church at the very beginning wrote and collected together the sacred books of the New Testament,

"so by her monks and friars and clergy generally she preserved them from destruction during the Middle Ages and made the people familiar with them;

"and, in short, that it is to the Roman Church again under God that we owe the possession of the Bible in its integrity at the present day.

"Now of course, this will sound strange and startling in the ears of those who have imbibed the common notions about the Middle Ages.

"As I said there was a traditional Protestant delusion about the Catholic Church and the Bible in general, so there is a traditional opinion which every good Protestant must adopt about those Ages of Faith, as we Catholics prefer to call them.

"The general idea is that they were centuries (from the 8th c. to the end of the 14th) of profound ignorance, oppression, superstition & of universal misery—that the monks were debauched, greedy & lazy—

"—that the people in consequence were illiterate & immoral, only half civilised, and always fighting—that the whole of Europe was sunk in barbarism and darkness,

"men's intellects enslaved and their wills enervated, and all their natural energies paralysed and benumbed by the blighting yoke of Rome—

"that (in the comprehensive language of the Church of England Homilies) 'laity & clergy, learned & unlearned, all ages, sects & degrees of men, women & children, of whole Christendom, had been altogether drowned in damnable idolatry, and that by the space of 800 years and more'.

"That is fairly sweeping.

"How they can reconcile that alleged state of things with the unconditioned promises of Our Blessed Lord that 'the gates of hell should never prevail against the Church'

"and that He would 'be with her always to the end of the world', and that the 'Holy Ghost would lead them into all the truth'—is to me a mystery.

"But let that pass.

"We are asked then to believe that during the Middle Ages true Christianity was overlaid and buried beneath a mass of Popish fables and traditions,

"and that of course the Bible in consequence was unknown except to a very few; was neglected and ignored and kept out of sight, because it would have destroyed Popery if it had been known.

"Only when the light of the Reformation shone out did the Holy Book appear openly in the world, and become familiar to the faithful of Christ as that which was to 'make them wise unto salvation'.

Now, I am not going to enter into a general defence of the condition of things in the Catholic world during these Ages of Faith, though, if time permitted, nothing would be more congenial to me.

We've been idiots. Dolts. Fools. And tools of the Jews, the enemies of Christ. SMH

"Again, the ages which covered the face of Europe with universities and schools of learning, which produced philosophers and theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure, and Albertus Magnus and Scotus and Bacon, and which built up the scholastic system—

"a system which, for logical acuteness and metaphysical accuracy, for subtilty and unity and complete consistency, has never been equalled, and which still stands unshaken by all attacks and triumphing over all its rivals that 'have their day and cease to be'—

"that age, I say, could hardly have been intellectually dark or barren.

"Once more: an age which produced saints like Dominick and Francis and Bernard, and was fruitful in bringing forth Orders of men and women for assisting our poor humanity in every form and stage of its existence—

"teaching the ignorant, caring for the sick and the afflicted, and even redeeming captives from the yoke of slavery—

"the age, besides, which witnessed the Crusades, those magnificent outbursts of Christian chivalry and of loyalty to Jesus Christ Our Lord—

"when men, kings, and princes, and subjects, seizing the Crusader's cross, went cheerfully to lay down their lives in myriads on the burning plains of Syria in their glorious attempts to rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the hand of Turk and infidel—

"that age, I say, cannot have been altogether devoid of the love of Him who Himself gave His life for men, and Whose feet had trod those sacred places in the days of His Flesh.

"People speak glibly nowadays of the ignorance of these far-back times;

"but it seems to me that no man who is really grounded in the truth of Christianity, who knows his Pater Noster, Ave, Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Seven Sacraments, and puts them into practice, can ever be said to be truly ignorant.

"He might not have been able to build a motor car or even to drive one—to turn out a steamship or a flying machine or speak the weird language of Esperanto.

#Soros-speak

"Neither could St. Peter or St. Joseph, for the matter of that. Nevertheless the practical teaching the people of those ages received from priest and monk in church and school was,

"I submit, of far more real moral and intellectual value than the hash of scraps of hygiene and science, French and cookery, civics and art which is crammed into the unwilling brain of our twentieth century public school children.

"Generally speaking, the mediaevalists, so despised, had the knowledge of God and of the world to come; and that was really the best knowledge they could have. (See preface to Dr. Maitland's Dark Ages.)"

SOURCE: Where We Got the Bible: Our Debt to the Catholic Church

by The Right Rev. HENRY G. GRAHAM,

Author of "Hindrances to Conversion," etc.

catholicapologetics.info/apologetics/pr…