The Waldensian Bible

The Waldenses lived in northern Italy and France and had congregations in many other parts of Europe through their missionary work. The name “Waldenses” encompassed a variety of doctrine and practice, but most Waldenses held the Bible as the sole authority for faith and practice and rejected Rome’s errors. Many, if not most, were baptistic (prior to the Reformation). For this reason, they were bitterly and terribly persecuted for hundreds of years. They believed in salvation by God’s grace alone without works and loved the Bible as God’s infallible Word. They read the Bible, memorized the Bible, and taught the Bible. One of their Bible colleges was in Piedmont in northern Italy. A beautiful, full-size model of the multi-room stone building can be seen in the Waldenses museum in Valdes, North Carolina, where a group of Waldenses settled in 1893. Their most ancient Bible was in the Romaunt language, a common language of the south of Europe from the 8th to the 14th centuries. It was the language of the troubadours, nobles, knights, and men of letters. Only seven of the Waldensian Romaunt New Testaments survived Rome’s burnings, and I have examined two of these, one at Cambridge University and one at Trinity College, Dublin. They were based on the Latin text, and as a result they have the Trinitarian “comma” in 1 John 5:7, but they lack “God” in 1 Timothy 3:16, which was preserved in Greek but not in Latin. For many centuries, Rome forbad the Bible to be translated into and read in the common languages. Well into the 19th century, the popes continued to hurl curses at the Bible societies for the “sin” of distributing the Bible among the people, even though those Bibles were usually “without note or commentary.” Rome cursed the Waldo Romaunt, the Olivetan French, and the Diodati Italian. But in the 1970s, the Waldenses joined hands with the Roman Catholic Church to produce an “interconfessional Bible” based on the corrupt Egyptian text of ancient heretical origin. It is this corrupt interconfessional Bible that Pope Francis kissed in his visit to the Waldenses of June 2015. (Our studies on the Waldenses can be found in the book Rome and the Bible: Tracing the History of the Roman Catholic Church and Its Persecution of the Bible and Bible Believers, available from www.wayoflife.org.)

(Friday Church News Notes, December 18, 2015, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)

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