ABSTRACT
THE same punishment, too, is inflicted on those who, by false expositions, corrupt the laws with wicked deceits. Also in this category belong those who have falsely translated the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, the sacred canons, and the writings of the holy Fathers from one tongue into another, or add to them or deduct from them. For if deceivers who by their evil wiles corrupt publicly promulgated decrees suffer the penalty, how much more severely must those be punished who with sacrilegious intent mar and pervert the commandments of God, written down at the instigation of the Holy Spirit and set out for all the faithful? So also those who seize the words of the Holy Scriptures and of the laws and, reading or teaching them according to the cast of their own mind or intelligence, twist them into a meaning different from the one which the spirit of truth desires, if indeed they do it through guile, are punished as heretics or men guilty of criminal fraud. 1 So Gregory VII wrote to Vratislav, duke of Bohemia, and ordered that the Holy Scriptures should not, as the latter desired, be rendered into the vulgar tongue, for there is such arcane grandeur in them that, after they had been with difficulty translated, the purport of God’s secrets might later be discovered in them. Certainly the people would never become more devout when, knowing how readily available they 812were, they would turn contemptuous towards things they had been accustomed to revere and marvel at, and would now mockingly sing over and over again in a beer tavern. 2
