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and freedom. This was the invention of the printing press which was invented by John Gutenburg in 1447. This invention allowed books to be printed at a cheaper cost. It also brought about the demise of a monopoly on the bible and learning which was previously controled by the church and kings. As books became more numerous, more people learned to read. They began to question depotism and the church and kings authority.

This struggle between advancement and ignorance was at its height about 1450. To quote a French monk of that period: "They have now found out a new language called Greek. We must carefully guard ourselves against it. That language will be the mother of all Heresies. I see in the hands of a great number of persons a book written in this language, called the New Testament. It is a book full of brambles with vipers in them. As to the Hebrew, whoever learns that becomes a Jew at once." The books the monks are mentioning is the line of manuscripts in the new testament that were written from the oldest known text. It is a type of Syrianic text in the street Greek. This often was combined with the old testament written in the original Hebrew messianic, contrary to the Latin Aramaic testeament of the Catholic Church. The people who carried these bibles were the Anabaptist and French Huguenots. This was even before the great reformation. They longed for the freedom and liberty found in the contents of the scripture.



Columbus also had the hope of the return of Christ, and a new freedom in Christ for the entire world. He wished to Christinize the entire world. Gold, in his mind, was his means to buy the armies that would finance the war that would eventually reclaim Jerusalem from the Muslims. Seen in the light of " The Book of Prophecies," the enterprise of the Indies begins to take on a connotation quite different than the traditional one. It is the beginning of the end. The step which will herald the era of apocalyptic conversion and the Last Crusade in which the infidel will finally be vanquished. In the letter to Ferdinand prefacing his account of the fourth voyage of discovery, Columbus pledged himself as a guide for this Last Crusade. He wrote: "Jerusalem and Mount Zion are to be rebuilt by the hands of Christians as God has declared by the mouth of His prophet in the fourteenth Psalm(vs. 7-8). The Abbe Joaquim said that he who should do this was to come from Spain; Saint Jerome showed the holy woman the way to accomplish it; and the Emperor

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