1430 – Cowboy era and the Gutenberg bible

G: I have another person here. He seems to be a bit older, a bit like the cowboy era where you had somebody in charge of the church. So you get one church in a town. And there wasn’t a specific religion in those days. There was one church, one God, and it all sort of works the same.

 

S: One little township, so there is one.

 

Spirit: Yeah, so, they had what they call the Good Book in those days.

 

S: That’s right.

 

Spirit: And that was, it was before your St. James Bible and it was called the Gutenberg Bible. It was taken across by the local fathers from England and introduced into America and then it got into the Wild West, you would call it. It was a good book. Very similar, with just a few things changed, but they each developed their own way of working.

 

The reason that happened is because you had a few ships went across, then they bought a few more and a few more, and they started to spread out right across America. And after a few years they travelled from the east over to the west, to what is now California. And there were very few preachers, if you like, who understood, who were trained in religious studies and trained in this particular Bible. And so a lot of them were made up.

 

So if you, for example, were the most astute in your village or town, they’d say, right, you can be in charge of the church, you can give the sermons and give the speeches and so on. And that’s the way they viewed it. Not so much as somebody who was trained to be a bishop or a deacon or whatever. So, it was just the most suitable person.

 

S: Yeah.

 

Spirit: That’s the way that was done. And this guy was one of those. And he said it was very, again, not a lot of people could read, and it was written in a very old language, not a modern-day English. A very sort of oldie-worldy English. And he said, we would interpret it what we thought was the best way for the actual town. The best way for the congregations to hear.

 

So a lot of them were fables and stories and all sorts of things. A lot of them didn’t actually make sense. A lot of them seemed to be way too far out. They were fables from a different land and so on. And they used to take what they wanted out of the Bible, various verses, but they would interpret it their own way to suit the morals and the judgements of the day, for that particular area.

 

And so in different towns and different areas, they had different solutions. And again, it’s where your religions got very mixed up, separated, and grew from there. In mining towns, for example, there was always a lot of deaths, tragedies, through mines and so on. A lot of arguments and killings. And they needed to give the people a good send-off to heaven. That was also the person in charge of the town, or the local church. He would handle that side of it. Again, he put together what he thought was the right thing. And don’t forget in those days, we believed in heaven and hell.

 

So if somebody, for instance, killed somebody else, then it was pretty normal that he would go to hell. We would simply say, well, he’s off to hell and the person he killed was off to heaven. And that’s the way it was. And that, again, went on to be taught from one generation to the next. And that was quite acceptable. So, that perpetuated the idea of there being a hell.

 

S: Mmm. Yeah.

 

G: Alright, now he’s going to go. Let me see who is next.