The Waldensians also known as Vallenses, Valdesi or Vaudois are a Christian movement and religious cultural group in the southern French region of the French Alps and centered on Piedmont in northern Italy. History says the Waldensians as they became known, were organized by Peter Waldo, a wealthy merchant who gave away his property around 1173, but they had a much longer line in history. Soon after the Eastern Roman Empire fell, and the Roman Catholic Church unveiled its true nature, Waldensian teachings came into conflict with the Roman Catholic Church. By 1215, the Waldensians were declared heretical and subject to intense persecution; the group endured near annihilation in the seventeenth century.
The Roman Inquisitor Reinerus Sacho writing c. 1230 held the sect of the Vaudois to be of great antiquity, thus long preceding Waldo by centuries. In the Waldensians, Sabbatati or Insabbatati, there was a more or less continuous tradition of Sabbath-keeping from the early church of the Apostles, throughout southern Europe. There are also accounts of Paulicians, Petrobusians, Pasaginians along with the Waldenses of the Alps, who kept the Saturday for the Lord's day or Sabbath, which was in conflict with the change to Sunday held by the Roman Catholic Church. The Sabbatati were known also by the name Pasigini. In reference to the Sabbath-keeping Pasigini, one scholar wrote: "The spread of heresy at this time is almost incredible. From Bulgaria to the Ebro, from Northern France to the Tiber, everywhere we meet them. Whole countries are infested, like Hungary and southern France; they abound in many other countries; in Germany, in Italy, in the Netherlands and even in England they put their efforts."
Another scholar, Bonacursus, is also quoted in writing against them:
"Not a few, but many know what are the errors of those who are called Pasigini. ... First, they teach that we should obey the sabbath. Furthermore, to increase their error, they condemn and reject all the church Fathers, and the whole Roman Church" In Spain the persecution was specifically directed at the Waldensian Sabbath-keepers.
We find Ellen White wrote in 'The Abiding Gift of Prophecy', Pages 206- 208, "Historians have brought to light a vast amount of information about the people and events that center in the Christian church, or churches, known as the Waldenses, or Vaudois. It is now certain that the Waldenses were not a single, isolated class of one nation only. In their broadest and most comprehensive history, they embrace and represent, under variant names, many of the protesting, reforming groups of Christians from early centuries to the Reformation of the sixteenth century, and on for a hundred years later. Concerning their antiquity and origin, Alexis Muston in his monumental work, based on sources, says:
The Vaudois of the Alps are, in my opinion, primitive Christians, or descendants and representatives of the primitive church, preserved in these valleys from the corruptions successively introduced by the Church of Rome into the religion of the gospel. It is not they who have separated from Catholicism, but Catholicism which has separated from them by changing the primitive religion. History of the Waldenses, Vol. I, p. 17, 1875.
The noted Waldensian authority, William S. Gilly, M. A. states the same essential fact in these words:
The terms, Vaudois in French, Vallenses in Latin, Valdesi, or Vallesi in Italian, and Waldenses in English ecclesiastical history, signify nothing more or less than Men of the Valleys; and as the valleys of Piedmont have had the honor of producing a race of people, who have remained true to the faith introduced by the first missionaries, who preached Christianity in those regions, the synonyms Vaudois, Valdesi, and Waldenses, have been adopted as the distinguishing names of a religious community, faithful to the primitive creed, and free from the corruption of the Church of Rome.
Long before the Roman Church, (that new sect, as Claude, Bishop of Turin in 840, called it,) stretched forth its arms, to stifle in its Antæan embrace the independent flocks of the Great Shepherd, the ancestors of the Waldenses were worshiping God in the hill countries of Piedmont, as their posterity now worship Him. For many ages they continued almost unnoticed. Waldensian Researches During a Second Visit to the Vaudois of Piemont, p. 6. London: Printed for C. J. G. & F. Rivington, 1831.
Speaking further of these relationships, he adds:
The Waldenses of Piemont are not to be regarded as the successors of certain reformers, who first started up in France and Italy at a time, when the corruptions of the Roman Church and priesthood became intolerable, but as a race of simple mountaineers, who from generation to generation have continued steadily in the faith preached to their forefathers, when the territory, of which their valleys form a part, was first Christianized. Ample proof will be given of this, as I proceed, and without attempting to fix the exact period of their conversion, I trust to be able to establish the fact, that this Alpine tribe embraced the gospel as it was first announced in all its purity, and continued true to it, in the midst of almost general apostasy. Nothing is more to be regretted than the mistakes which have been made upon this point, even by Protestant authors.
The country in which we find the earliest of these protesters is Italy. The See of Rome, in those days, embraced only the capital and the surrounding provinces. The diocese of Milan, which included the plain of Lombardy, the Alps of Piedmont, and the southern provinces of France, greatly exceeded it in extent. It is an undoubted historical fact that this powerful diocese was not then tributary to the papal chair...
Withstood Rome a Thousand Years
But the bishops in the region of Piedmont and the adjoining provinces did more than decline to go to Rome for ordination.
In the year 590, the bishops of Italy and the Grisons (Switzerland) to the number of nine, rejected the communion of the pope, as a heretic. Dr. Allixs Remarks on the Ancient Churches of Piedmont, chap. 5, p. 32, quoted in The History of the Christian Church, William Jones, chap. 4, sec. 1, p. 244.
About a century later, Paulinus, Bishop of Aquileia, in Italy, stood firmly against the domination and the innovations of the papacy, and was joined by other bishops in condemning the worship of images as idolatrous.
Turin, an important city a short distance to the west of Milan, was the center of an important diocese at the beginning of the ninth century. About the year 817 A. D. Claudius was appointed Archbishop of Turin, by Emperor Louis. Of him we read:
This man beheld with dismay the stealthy approaches of a power which, putting out the eyes of men, bowed their necks to its yoke, and bent their knees to idols. He grasped the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, and the battle which he so courageously waged, delayed, though it could not prevent, the fall of his churchs independence, and for two centuries longer the light continued to shine at the foot of the Alps. The History of Protestantism, J. A. Wiley, Vol. I, p. 21.
This is all supported by Lawrence, the learned essayist, who writes:
Here, within the borders of Italy itself, the popes have never been able, except for one unhappy interval, to enforce their authority. Here no Mass has been said, no images adored, no papal rites administered by the native Vaudois. It was here that Henry Arnaud, the hero of the valleys, redeemed his country from the tyranny of the Jesuits and Rome; and here a Christian church, founded perhaps in the apostolic age, has survived the persecutions of a thousand years. Historical Studies, Eugene Lawrence, p. 199.
Soon after the dawn of Christianity, they assert, their ancestors embraced the faith of St. Paul..."
"The Scriptures became their only guide; the same belief, the same sacraments they maintain today they held in the age of Constantine and Sylvester. They relate that, as the Romish Church grew in power and pride, their ancestors repelled its assumptions and refused to submit to its authority; that when, in the ninth century, the use of images was enforced by superstitious popes, they, at least, never consented to become idolaters; that they never worshiped the Virgin, nor bowed at an idolatrous Mass. When, in the eleventh century, Rome asserted its supremacy over kings and princes, the Vaudois were its bitterest foes. The three valleys formed the theological school of Europe. The Vaudois missionaries traveled into Hungary and Bohemia, France, England, even Scotland, and aroused the people to a sense of the fearful corruption of the church. They pointed to Rome as the Antichrist, the center of every abomination. They taught, in the place of Romish innovations, the pure faith of the apostolic age. Lollard, who led the way to the reforms of Wycliffe, was a preacher from the valleys; the Albigenses of Provence, in the twelfth century, were the fruits of the Vaudois missions; Germany and Bohemia were reformed by the teachers of Piedmont; Huss and Jerome did little more than proclaim the Vaudois faith; and Luther and Calvin were only the necessary offspring of the apostolic churches of the Alps. The Advocate, 200, 201."
Now interestingly the Waldensians held and preached a number of truths as they read from the Bible. These included:
1.The atoning death and justifying righteousness of Christ
2.The Godhead
3.The fall of man
4.The incarnation of the Son
5.A denial of purgatory as the "invention of the Antichrist"
6.Valued voluntary poverty
They held that temporal offices and dignities were not meant for preachers of the Gospel; that relics were simply rotten bones which had belonged to one knew not whom; that to go on pilgrimage served no end, save to empty one's purse; that holy water was not a whit more efficacious than rain water; and that prayer in a barn was just as effectual as if offered in a church. They were accused of having scoffed at the doctrine of transubstantiation, and of having spoken of the Roman Catholic Church as the harlot of the apocalypse.
Sounds almost like Adventist, but there is more as they also kept the text of the early church which they held and passed to the Protestant Reformers, which was then passed on to us in the form of the Textus Receptus or Majority Text. Here is the line of the various versions which followed the reading of the Textus Receptus and you can see why the Waldensians were persecuted and their Bibles and manuscripts burned as they showed that the Roman church was not following the truth.
These versions include: The Pesh*tta Version (AD 150), The Italic Bible (AD 157), The Waldensian (AD 120 & onwards), The Gallic Bible (Southern France) (AD177), The Gothic Bible (AD 330-350), The Old Syriac Bible (AD 400), The Armenian Bible (AD 400 There are 1244 copies of this version still in existence.), The Palestinian Syriac (AD 450), The French Bible of Oliveton (AD 1535), The Czech Bible (AD 1602), The Italian Bible of Diodati (AD 1606), The Greek Orthodox Bible (Used from Apostolic times to the present day by the Greek Orthodox Church). [Bible Versions, D.B. Loughran]
http://home.sprynet.com/~eagreen/kjv-3.htm
THE OLD TESTAMENT
The Masoretic Text
1524-25 Bomberg Edition of the Masoretic Text also known as the Ben Chayyim Text
THE NEW TESTAMENT
All dates are Anno Domini (A.D.)
30-95------------Original Autographs
95-150----------Greek Vulgate (Copy of Originals)
120---------------The Waldensian Bible
150---------------The Pesh*tta (Syrian Copy)
150-400--------Papyrus Readings of the Receptus
157--------------The Italic Bible - From the Old Latin Vulgate used in Northern Italy
157--------------The Old Latin Vulgate
177--------------The Gallic Bible
310--------------The Gothic Version of Ulfilas
350-400-------The Textus Receptus is Dominant Text
400--------------Augustine favors Textus Receptus
400--------------The Armenian Bible (Translated by Mesrob)
400--------------The Old Syriac
450--------------The Palestinian Syriac Version
450-1450------Byzantine Text Dominant (Textus Receptus)
508--------------Philoxenian - by Chorepiscopos Polycarp, who commissioned by Philoxenos of Mabbug
500-1500------Uncial Readings of Receptus (Codices)
616--------------Harclean Syriac (Translated by Thomas of Harqel - Revision of 508 Philoxenian)
864--------------Slavonic
1100-1300----The Latin Bible of the Waldensians (History goes back as far as the 2nd century as people of the Vaudoix Valley)
1160------------The Romaunt Version (Waldensian)
1300-1500----The Latin Bible of the Albigenses
1382-1550----The Latin Bible of the Lollards
1384------------The Wycliffe Bible
1516------------Erasmus's First Edition Greek New Testament
1522------------Erasmus's Third Edition Published
1522-1534----Martin Luther's German Bible (1)
1525------------Tyndale Version
1534------------Tyndale's Amended Version
1534------------Colinaeus' Receptus
1535------------Coverdale Version
1535------------Lefevre's French Bible
1537------------Olivetan's French Bible
1537------------Matthew's Bible (John Rogers Printer)
1539------------The Great Bible
1541------------Swedish Upsala Bible by Laurentius
1550------------Stephanus Receptus (St. Stephen's Text)
1550------------Danish Christian III Bible
1558------------Biestken's Dutch Work
1560------------The Geneva Bible
1565------------Theodore Beza's Receptus
1568------------The Bishop's Bible
1569------------Spanish Translation by Cassiodoro de Reyna
1598------------Theodore Beza's Text
1602------------Czech Version
1607------------Diodati Italian Version
1611------------The King James Bible with Apocrypha between Old and New Testament
1613------------The King James Bible (Apocrypha Removed) (2)
There was a school in Antioch of Syria in very early Christian times that had the ancient manunscripts pf the Scriptures. Preachers like Chrysostom held to the Syrian Text that agrees with our KJV.
This Received Text as the Majority Text (Textus Receptus) was also known, was soon translated into a old Latin version before Jeromes Latin Vulgate and was called the Italic Bible. The Vaudois (later called Waldensians) of northern Italy used the Italic Bible.
The Vaudois (Waldenses) the Albigenses, the Reformers (Luther, Calvin and Knox) all held to the Received Text.
The Roman Inquisitor Reinerus Sacho writing c. 1230 held the sect of the Vaudois to be of great antiquity, thus long preceding Waldo by centuries. In the Waldensians, Sabbatati or Insabbatati, there was a more or less continuous tradition of Sabbath-keeping from the early church of the Apostles, throughout southern Europe. There are also accounts of Paulicians, Petrobusians, Pasaginians along with the Waldenses of the Alps, who kept the Saturday for the Lord's day or Sabbath, which was in conflict with the change to Sunday held by the Roman Catholic Church. The Sabbatati were known also by the name Pasigini. In reference to the Sabbath-keeping Pasigini, one scholar wrote: "The spread of heresy at this time is almost incredible. From Bulgaria to the Ebro, from Northern France to the Tiber, everywhere we meet them. Whole countries are infested, like Hungary and southern France; they abound in many other countries; in Germany, in Italy, in the Netherlands and even in England they put their efforts."
Another scholar, Bonacursus, is also quoted in writing against them:
"Not a few, but many know what are the errors of those who are called Pasigini. ... First, they teach that we should obey the sabbath. Furthermore, to increase their error, they condemn and reject all the church Fathers, and the whole Roman Church" In Spain the persecution was specifically directed at the Waldensian Sabbath-keepers.
We find Ellen White wrote in 'The Abiding Gift of Prophecy', Pages 206- 208, "Historians have brought to light a vast amount of information about the people and events that center in the Christian church, or churches, known as the Waldenses, or Vaudois. It is now certain that the Waldenses were not a single, isolated class of one nation only. In their broadest and most comprehensive history, they embrace and represent, under variant names, many of the protesting, reforming groups of Christians from early centuries to the Reformation of the sixteenth century, and on for a hundred years later. Concerning their antiquity and origin, Alexis Muston in his monumental work, based on sources, says:
The Vaudois of the Alps are, in my opinion, primitive Christians, or descendants and representatives of the primitive church, preserved in these valleys from the corruptions successively introduced by the Church of Rome into the religion of the gospel. It is not they who have separated from Catholicism, but Catholicism which has separated from them by changing the primitive religion. History of the Waldenses, Vol. I, p. 17, 1875.
The noted Waldensian authority, William S. Gilly, M. A. states the same essential fact in these words:
The terms, Vaudois in French, Vallenses in Latin, Valdesi, or Vallesi in Italian, and Waldenses in English ecclesiastical history, signify nothing more or less than Men of the Valleys; and as the valleys of Piedmont have had the honor of producing a race of people, who have remained true to the faith introduced by the first missionaries, who preached Christianity in those regions, the synonyms Vaudois, Valdesi, and Waldenses, have been adopted as the distinguishing names of a religious community, faithful to the primitive creed, and free from the corruption of the Church of Rome.
Long before the Roman Church, (that new sect, as Claude, Bishop of Turin in 840, called it,) stretched forth its arms, to stifle in its Antæan embrace the independent flocks of the Great Shepherd, the ancestors of the Waldenses were worshiping God in the hill countries of Piedmont, as their posterity now worship Him. For many ages they continued almost unnoticed. Waldensian Researches During a Second Visit to the Vaudois of Piemont, p. 6. London: Printed for C. J. G. & F. Rivington, 1831.
Speaking further of these relationships, he adds:
The Waldenses of Piemont are not to be regarded as the successors of certain reformers, who first started up in France and Italy at a time, when the corruptions of the Roman Church and priesthood became intolerable, but as a race of simple mountaineers, who from generation to generation have continued steadily in the faith preached to their forefathers, when the territory, of which their valleys form a part, was first Christianized. Ample proof will be given of this, as I proceed, and without attempting to fix the exact period of their conversion, I trust to be able to establish the fact, that this Alpine tribe embraced the gospel as it was first announced in all its purity, and continued true to it, in the midst of almost general apostasy. Nothing is more to be regretted than the mistakes which have been made upon this point, even by Protestant authors.
The country in which we find the earliest of these protesters is Italy. The See of Rome, in those days, embraced only the capital and the surrounding provinces. The diocese of Milan, which included the plain of Lombardy, the Alps of Piedmont, and the southern provinces of France, greatly exceeded it in extent. It is an undoubted historical fact that this powerful diocese was not then tributary to the papal chair...
Withstood Rome a Thousand Years
But the bishops in the region of Piedmont and the adjoining provinces did more than decline to go to Rome for ordination.
In the year 590, the bishops of Italy and the Grisons (Switzerland) to the number of nine, rejected the communion of the pope, as a heretic. Dr. Allixs Remarks on the Ancient Churches of Piedmont, chap. 5, p. 32, quoted in The History of the Christian Church, William Jones, chap. 4, sec. 1, p. 244.
About a century later, Paulinus, Bishop of Aquileia, in Italy, stood firmly against the domination and the innovations of the papacy, and was joined by other bishops in condemning the worship of images as idolatrous.
Turin, an important city a short distance to the west of Milan, was the center of an important diocese at the beginning of the ninth century. About the year 817 A. D. Claudius was appointed Archbishop of Turin, by Emperor Louis. Of him we read:
This man beheld with dismay the stealthy approaches of a power which, putting out the eyes of men, bowed their necks to its yoke, and bent their knees to idols. He grasped the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, and the battle which he so courageously waged, delayed, though it could not prevent, the fall of his churchs independence, and for two centuries longer the light continued to shine at the foot of the Alps. The History of Protestantism, J. A. Wiley, Vol. I, p. 21.
This is all supported by Lawrence, the learned essayist, who writes:
Here, within the borders of Italy itself, the popes have never been able, except for one unhappy interval, to enforce their authority. Here no Mass has been said, no images adored, no papal rites administered by the native Vaudois. It was here that Henry Arnaud, the hero of the valleys, redeemed his country from the tyranny of the Jesuits and Rome; and here a Christian church, founded perhaps in the apostolic age, has survived the persecutions of a thousand years. Historical Studies, Eugene Lawrence, p. 199.
Soon after the dawn of Christianity, they assert, their ancestors embraced the faith of St. Paul..."
"The Scriptures became their only guide; the same belief, the same sacraments they maintain today they held in the age of Constantine and Sylvester. They relate that, as the Romish Church grew in power and pride, their ancestors repelled its assumptions and refused to submit to its authority; that when, in the ninth century, the use of images was enforced by superstitious popes, they, at least, never consented to become idolaters; that they never worshiped the Virgin, nor bowed at an idolatrous Mass. When, in the eleventh century, Rome asserted its supremacy over kings and princes, the Vaudois were its bitterest foes. The three valleys formed the theological school of Europe. The Vaudois missionaries traveled into Hungary and Bohemia, France, England, even Scotland, and aroused the people to a sense of the fearful corruption of the church. They pointed to Rome as the Antichrist, the center of every abomination. They taught, in the place of Romish innovations, the pure faith of the apostolic age. Lollard, who led the way to the reforms of Wycliffe, was a preacher from the valleys; the Albigenses of Provence, in the twelfth century, were the fruits of the Vaudois missions; Germany and Bohemia were reformed by the teachers of Piedmont; Huss and Jerome did little more than proclaim the Vaudois faith; and Luther and Calvin were only the necessary offspring of the apostolic churches of the Alps. The Advocate, 200, 201."
Now interestingly the Waldensians held and preached a number of truths as they read from the Bible. These included:
1.The atoning death and justifying righteousness of Christ
2.The Godhead
3.The fall of man
4.The incarnation of the Son
5.A denial of purgatory as the "invention of the Antichrist"
6.Valued voluntary poverty
They held that temporal offices and dignities were not meant for preachers of the Gospel; that relics were simply rotten bones which had belonged to one knew not whom; that to go on pilgrimage served no end, save to empty one's purse; that holy water was not a whit more efficacious than rain water; and that prayer in a barn was just as effectual as if offered in a church. They were accused of having scoffed at the doctrine of transubstantiation, and of having spoken of the Roman Catholic Church as the harlot of the apocalypse.
Sounds almost like Adventist, but there is more as they also kept the text of the early church which they held and passed to the Protestant Reformers, which was then passed on to us in the form of the Textus Receptus or Majority Text. Here is the line of the various versions which followed the reading of the Textus Receptus and you can see why the Waldensians were persecuted and their Bibles and manuscripts burned as they showed that the Roman church was not following the truth.
These versions include: The Pesh*tta Version (AD 150), The Italic Bible (AD 157), The Waldensian (AD 120 & onwards), The Gallic Bible (Southern France) (AD177), The Gothic Bible (AD 330-350), The Old Syriac Bible (AD 400), The Armenian Bible (AD 400 There are 1244 copies of this version still in existence.), The Palestinian Syriac (AD 450), The French Bible of Oliveton (AD 1535), The Czech Bible (AD 1602), The Italian Bible of Diodati (AD 1606), The Greek Orthodox Bible (Used from Apostolic times to the present day by the Greek Orthodox Church). [Bible Versions, D.B. Loughran]
http://home.sprynet.com/~eagreen/kjv-3.htm
THE OLD TESTAMENT
The Masoretic Text
1524-25 Bomberg Edition of the Masoretic Text also known as the Ben Chayyim Text
THE NEW TESTAMENT
All dates are Anno Domini (A.D.)
30-95------------Original Autographs
95-150----------Greek Vulgate (Copy of Originals)
120---------------The Waldensian Bible
150---------------The Pesh*tta (Syrian Copy)
150-400--------Papyrus Readings of the Receptus
157--------------The Italic Bible - From the Old Latin Vulgate used in Northern Italy
157--------------The Old Latin Vulgate
177--------------The Gallic Bible
310--------------The Gothic Version of Ulfilas
350-400-------The Textus Receptus is Dominant Text
400--------------Augustine favors Textus Receptus
400--------------The Armenian Bible (Translated by Mesrob)
400--------------The Old Syriac
450--------------The Palestinian Syriac Version
450-1450------Byzantine Text Dominant (Textus Receptus)
508--------------Philoxenian - by Chorepiscopos Polycarp, who commissioned by Philoxenos of Mabbug
500-1500------Uncial Readings of Receptus (Codices)
616--------------Harclean Syriac (Translated by Thomas of Harqel - Revision of 508 Philoxenian)
864--------------Slavonic
1100-1300----The Latin Bible of the Waldensians (History goes back as far as the 2nd century as people of the Vaudoix Valley)
1160------------The Romaunt Version (Waldensian)
1300-1500----The Latin Bible of the Albigenses
1382-1550----The Latin Bible of the Lollards
1384------------The Wycliffe Bible
1516------------Erasmus's First Edition Greek New Testament
1522------------Erasmus's Third Edition Published
1522-1534----Martin Luther's German Bible (1)
1525------------Tyndale Version
1534------------Tyndale's Amended Version
1534------------Colinaeus' Receptus
1535------------Coverdale Version
1535------------Lefevre's French Bible
1537------------Olivetan's French Bible
1537------------Matthew's Bible (John Rogers Printer)
1539------------The Great Bible
1541------------Swedish Upsala Bible by Laurentius
1550------------Stephanus Receptus (St. Stephen's Text)
1550------------Danish Christian III Bible
1558------------Biestken's Dutch Work
1560------------The Geneva Bible
1565------------Theodore Beza's Receptus
1568------------The Bishop's Bible
1569------------Spanish Translation by Cassiodoro de Reyna
1598------------Theodore Beza's Text
1602------------Czech Version
1607------------Diodati Italian Version
1611------------The King James Bible with Apocrypha between Old and New Testament
1613------------The King James Bible (Apocrypha Removed) (2)
There was a school in Antioch of Syria in very early Christian times that had the ancient manunscripts pf the Scriptures. Preachers like Chrysostom held to the Syrian Text that agrees with our KJV.
This Received Text as the Majority Text (Textus Receptus) was also known, was soon translated into a old Latin version before Jeromes Latin Vulgate and was called the Italic Bible. The Vaudois (later called Waldensians) of northern Italy used the Italic Bible.
The Vaudois (Waldenses) the Albigenses, the Reformers (Luther, Calvin and Knox) all held to the Received Text.
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