professional clerics. Such a viewpoint also helps explain why for many years the Roman Catholic Church resisted translation of the Bible into people’s everyday language and kept it in Latin, which only the priests could read and understand. In the Catholic Church a layperson’s relationship with the Bible only changed in the 1960s at Vatican Council II. So it may be in defense of the important idea of the priesthood of all believers that some readers will be skeptical about my urging the help of professional