Censorship of the Bible includes restrictions and prohibition of possessing, reading, or using the Bible in general or any particular editions or translations of it.
Violators of Bible prohibitions have at times been punished by imprisonment, forced labor, banishment and execution, as well as by the burning or confiscating the Bible or Bibles used or distributed. The censorship may be because of explicit religious reasons, but also for reasons of public policy or state control, especially in authoritarian states or following violent riots.
Censorship of the Bible occurred in the past and is still going on today. In the 20th century, Christian resistance to the Soviet Union's policy of state atheism occurred through Bible-smuggling.[1] The People's Republic of China, officially an atheist state, engages in Bible burning as a part of antireligious campaigns there.[2]
From the point of view of most Protestants, the topic mostly refers to historical and regional prohibitions of the Catholic Church or Catholic states against reading or possessing Bibles, especially not of the Latin Vulgate translation, and particularly the laity.
From a Catholic point of view, the censorship of the Bible in certain regions was done both by restricting Bibles from those lacking instruction and by censoring translations thought to encourage deviations from Catholic doctrine.[3] The Index Librorum Prohibitorum[a] of the Catholic Church included various translations or editions of the Bible. In most cases, the bans on pious lay people possessing or publicly reading certain Bibles were related to vernacular Scripture editions not derived from the Vulgate, or from heretical or confusing material included in the same book. Clerics were never forbidden to possess the Vulgate Bible translation in the Latin language.
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Bodeen2019was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Ludwig Friedrich Otto Baumgarten-Crusius: Lehrbuch der christlichen Dogmengeschichte. Zweite Abtheilung. Verlage der Crökerschen Buchhandlung, Jena 1832; Zweiter Theil: Spezielle Dogmengeschichte. 21: Angelegenheit des Schriftgebrauchs. pp. 901–911 (Online-Version)
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