"...we see the same phenomenon: newly literate people claiming that the sacred text speaks for itself, and legitimates violence and repression..."

This statement is grossly false.  It was the Establishment Clergy, especially the ones who were the least familiar with the scriptures, who were engaging in or urging on the violence.

The "newly literate" people were the persecuted ones.

They also miss the key difference between the Bible and the Quran.  The Bible teaches propagation of the Gospel through preaching, the Quran teaches the propagation of Islam (which literally means 'submission') through conquest and force.

These people should try reading Fox's Book of Martyrs if they really want to know what went on...

These liberal college boys are always half baked and always wrong about historical context.

If one examines Christianity, one finds Rome was slaughtering Christians........and not Christians slaughtering Romans.

In time the Roman government created the Holy Roman Empire.....not the Holy Christian Empire, which in various forms was right back at slaughtering Christians who were fundementalists.

Jerome the Catholic created a version of Vulgate bible which kept the Roman Empire control of Catholics and set to work against the Christians again.

The Roman Empire only came out with an English version of the Vulgate the D/R bible which uses inferior translations because the Geneva and the King James Bibles were sweeping all through the European continent..........being a challenge to Roman Power held in various noble clans that finally ended in the Hapsburgs of Austria.

For the record, the leader of the Reformation was Martin Luther and he was under attack from an established RELIGIOUS RULING EMPIRE in Rome. Puritans and Pilgrims were fleeing this persecution AND WERE NON VIOLENT and NON ALIGNED to any government just like modern Christians are.

Now take modern Islam which is state sponsored. Take bin Laden who is Islamofascist and Zawahiri who is ISLAMOCOMMUNIST and both groups including the Muslim Brotherhood of Keith Ellison ALL DEMAND THE OVERTHROW BY POLITICAL MEANS OR VIOLENCE of standing governments for a Caliph.......or MUSLIM EMPIRE.

Christianity has NOTHING to do with this. The wars mentioned in Angle Land or England dealt with Roman Empire religious control over English governments and faiths. It was religion in a empire fight and had nothing to do with Christians.

Harvard should fire James Simpson as he is a moron in it's truest sense of the word as he has no historical perspective of any of this or what Christianity even is compared to state sponsored Islam.

*HIC IACET ARTORIVS REX QVONDAM REXQVE FVTVRVS

There are a few problems with this article:

 1.  Liberalism brought forth heretical interpretation of the Bible, not vernacular translations.  At the time, virtually anyone who could read, could read Latin. 

2. And from "Where We Got The Bible": 

***

...there were actually in existence among the people many copies of the Scriptures in the English tongue of that day. To begin far back, we have a copy of the work of Caedmon, a monk of Whitby, in the end of the seventh century, consisting of great portions of the Bible in the common tongue.

In the next century we have the well-known translations of Venerable Bede, a monk of Jarrow, who died whilst busy with the Gospel of St. John. In the same (eighth) century we have the copies of Eadhelm, Bishop of Sherborne; of Guthlac, a hermit near Peterborough; and of Egbert, Bishop of Holy Island; these were all in Saxon, the language understood and spoken by the Christians of that time. Coming down a little later, we have the free translations of King Alfred the Great who was working at the Psalms when he died, and of Aelfric, Archbishop of Canterbury; as well as popular renderings of Holy Scripture like the Book of Durham, and the Rushworth Gloss and others that have survived the wreck of ages.

After the Norman conquest in 1066, Anglo-Norman or Middle-English became the language of England, and consequently the next translations of the Bible we meet with are in that tongue. There are several specimens still known, such as the paraphrase of Orm (About 1150) and the Salus Animae (1250), the translations of William Shoreham and Richard Rolle, hermit of Hampole (died 1349). I say advisedly ‘specimens’ for those that have come down to us are merely indications of a much greater number that once existed, but afterwards perished.

***

source:

http://www.geocities.com/thecatholicconvert/biblegrahamch11.html

Without the clergy guiding them, and with religion still a very important factor in the average person's life, their fate rested in their own hands, Simpson said.

  You realize of course this also the MSM view of the 'New Media'.  We are the newly unleashed 'fundamentalists' who are taking our fate and the fate of the world into our misguided and untrained hands.  May Edward R. Murrow have mercy on our souls.