Chapter 174: Peace in Front, Hate in Back (3)
“I have a way to solve the church’s budget shortage. Let’s hear it.”
“How about selling Bibles?”
The Cardinal tilted his head after hearing my suggestion.
“A Bible is, after all, a craft and a piece of art. But how could we make a large profit by selling Bibles?”
In the Tuscany Empire, printing technology hasn’t spread that widely.
Thus, the price of a single Bible or an academic book is roughly the price of a house.
For high-ranking individuals, that might not be much, but it takes an average of 3 months to a year to hand-copy a single book.
So, logically speaking, making a fortune by selling Bibles is virtually impossible.
“What if we printed Bibles as if stamping them out of a mold? To put it more simply, we can create a giant stamp with the Bible’s text on it and print it onto paper.”
“This is something I never thought of. Please, continue.”
One common misconception we have due to the Catholic Church’s history during the Reformation is that the clergy feared people reading the Bible. They supposedly claimed that if the Bible wasn’t written in Latin, it was “heresy,” and even banned printing and distributing the Bible.
However, in reality, the Catholic Church never claimed that the Bible had to be in Latin to be valid, nor did they ever ban printing the Bible for distribution.