>>8757190
>The catholic church used latin as a means to keep the people from knowing God's word.
No, that's what people claimed in the 20th century when a Bible cost $0.10 to print.
With the political and economic collapse of Rome, and the significant loss of population, a hand written, painted and bound Bible was effectively priceless. Further, the languages were changing, causing all kinds of issues with translations. The Roman church placed a lot of importance on the accuracy of the Latin copies, which took a decade to produce accurately in Latin. Using any of the rapidly changing dielects of the Dark ages would have been impossible. After 10 years of translating Latin into say proto French, you would find that the bible was a bit off. Spend 10 years copying it to deliver the first proto French copy, and it's boderline worthless. It certainly would not be worth keeping for 100 years.
But no one spoke latin anymore. It was frozen in time. It was perfect to preserve the accuracy of the text. After the invention of the printing press, Europe, the Church, could have changed policy, but so many translations, made it very daunting to maintain accuracy. And the church really didn't mass produce things, well Rome anyway, and they were the publisher, so to speak. The Jesuits understood large scale production, but had no interest in multiple translations, especially for the Brazilian tribesmen (the Jesuits effectively owned South America until the Pope and the King of Spain disbanded them).
After WWII, their was no justification for the use of Latin, and the church relented. So y'all Baptists and Protestants out there, preaching literal interpretation, if the Catholic Church had not put accuracy first and foremost all those centuries, their would be so many different versions of the bible you'd look just stupid saying it. And what we know today as Christianity, with various sects having a central consistant story to preach, would not exist. There would be as many variations of Christianity as there were languages speaking it. And each would have their own language Bible, which would have great variation, as local pagan myths more and more found there way in.
People already criticize some of the pagan influences that crept in under Rome. Imagine if the Bible hadn't been in latin, what would have happened.
And inb4 Muh God wouldn't let that happen.
Yes, quite true. Which is why it remained latin for so long.