Erasmus’s arrival back in Basel in July 1515 would mark the start of the annus mirabilis of his career, when, in a frenzied push, he would bring to completion the many projects he had been laboring on for the past fifteen years, with the revised New Testament towering over everything else. His conversations with Colet at Oxford; his discovery of Valla’s annotations in the monastery outside Louvain; his intensive study of pagan and patristic literature; his exhausting efforts to master Greek; his careful inspection of old manuscripts—all had led him to this critical moment, when he was going to apply the tools of syntax and semantics to restore Christianity’s most sacred text and thereby revitalize a continent sunk in violence, malice, and greed.
Erasmus wanted to have the New Testament ready for the Frankfurt fair the following spring—a goal that, given the scale of the project, would keep him tethered to Froben’s shop for the next six months. The conditions were far from ideal. In the printing of Scripture, precision and meticulousness are essential, for every word is invested with meaning, and even the smallest mistake can set off tremors. But Erasmus had before him a jumble of old manuscripts, rough drafts, and scribbled notes that he had to organize even as the printers around him were setting type, mixing ink, and operating the presses.
The first order of business was the Greek text. Among the manuscripts in the Dominican collection, Erasmus had found one that was complete (except for Revelation) and neatly copied, but—suspecting that it had been corrected against the Vulgate—he rejected it in favor of other manuscripts that seemed older and more authentic. Unfortunately, these texts were filled with spelling mistakes and scribal blunders, so Erasmus had to compare them with other manuscripts to determine the most likely reading. When he arrived at it, he jotted it down between the lines and in the margins. Where the Greek was unclear or lacked words that were in the Vulgate, Erasmus translated from the Latin back into Greek—an egregious violation of the rules of critical editing. Given the time pressure he was under, however, he felt he had no choice, and in any case the Greek text was of secondary concern to him.
Far more important was the revised Latin translation, for many more people would read it. Erasmus had by now come to an agreement with Froben to print it. The New Latin text was to appear in parallel columns with the Greek. Erasmus sought to alter the Vulgate in the hundreds of places where it seemed most obviously defective. Where there were textual corruptions, he restored the original; where he found obscure or ambiguous passages, he offered clarifications; where the translation seemed ungrammatical, he proposed an alternative that seemed more faithful to the Greek. Along the way, Erasmus tried to better capture the plain, colloquial way in which he believed the apostles spoke. As he observed, “they had learned Greek not from the speeches of Demosthenes, but from popular speech.” At the same time, Erasmus felt that the power of the Bible derived in part from its rhetorical force, and at certain places he modified the Latin to make it more elegant and thus heighten its impact. This willingness to tamper with Holy Writ for stylistic reasons would infuriate many traditionalists.
Central to Erasmus’s New Testament were his annotations. These were his primary vehicle for communicating the mass of ideas and opinions about Scripture that he had developed during his long immersion in sacred studies. Many of the notes were narrowly technical in nature, pointing out places where the Vulgate’s cases, tenses, and prepositions strayed from the Greek. Like Valla, he criticized the Vulgate for its lack of consistency in translation. He noted, for instance, that in the first chapter of John, the Vulgate gave the Greek word phōs (“light”) as lumen in verse 7 but as lux in verse 8. Such variation, he argued, should be avoided—not because the translation was necessarily wrong but because it could lead readers into needless speculation about the shades of meaning intended.
Seeking to draw a contrast with the stuffiness of traditional commentators, Erasmus salted his annotations with ironic asides, disdainful interjections, and caustic judgments. And at many key points, he ventured far beyond the philological, using grammar to challenge interpretations that had reigned for centuries and hardened into dogma. In his preface to the edition of Valla’s annotations that he had had printed in 1505, Erasmus had written that Theology should not be offended if her humble attendant Grammar offers to help with small details; his own annotations would show the explosive impact such tidying up could have. A good example occurred at Ephesians 5:32. Here, in the Vulgate, Paul refers to the sexual union of a man and his wife as a sacramentum—“sacrament.” Partly on the basis of this passage, the Church had declared marriage one of the seven sacraments. In the Greek manuscripts, though, the word was given as mysterion—“mystery”—and so Erasmus in his own Latin translation decided to use mysterium. In his annotation, he briefly observed that marriage could not be considered a sacrament on the basis of this passage. With this tweak, Erasmus was raising questions about the sacramental status of a central institution.
He was even bolder at Romans 5:12. In the Vulgate, this passage read: “Wherefore as by one man sin entered the world and by sin death: and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned.” Augustine had maintained that the “one man” in question was Adam, and that it was he “in whom all have sinned.” In other words, all men were doomed to sin because of Adam’s original sin. Thus interpreted, this passage had become the foundation for the doctrine of original sin. In examining the Greek, however, Erasmus saw that the underlying term for the Latin in quo (“in whom”) was ἐφ΄ ᾦ (eph’ho) and from the context he concluded that it was being used in the sense of “inasmuch as” or “since” we have all sinned. In other words, Erasmus explained, Paul meant to say not that man is doomed to sin because of Adam’s original transgression but rather that death is a companion to sin and, inasmuch as all sin, death comes to all. Through this grammatical adjustment, Erasmus was challenging a central tenet of the faith.
With another subtle change, he struck at the cult of the Virgin Mary. At Luke 1:28 in the Vulgate, the angel Gabriel greets Mary, Ave gratia plena—“Hail, full of grace.” Most medieval exegetes had interpreted gratia plena to mean that Mary was full of God’s grace (as defined by medieval theologians) and so free of sin. But the underlying Greek word was κεχαριτωμένη (kecharitomene), and Erasmus, citing Homer and other authorities, observed that this was more commonly used in the sense of “beloved,” as with a person held in affection. A better rendering, he felt, was Ave gratiosa (“Greetings, beloved one”), and he changed it to this in his translation. In so doing, Erasmus was casting doubt on the doctrine that Mary had remained free of sin through God’s extraordinary grace. Going further, he noted that kecharitomene has a loving, amorous connotation. Without realizing it, Erasmus was opening himself to the charge that he was implying an improper relationship between Mary and the angel and so showing a lack of respect for her.
Even more controversial would be his handling of 1 John 5:7. In the Vulgate, this verse read, “And there are three that give testimony in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit. And these three are one.” Known as the comma Johanneum (“phrase of John”), this verse was the scriptural foundation for the doctrine of the Trinity. Yet none of the Greek manuscripts examined by Erasmus had it. Instead, they simply said, “There are three that bear witness: the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one.” Jerome had conjectured that the comma had been inserted into the text by Latin scribes after the Council of Nicaea in 325 to refute the Arians. This early-fourth-century movement, which held that the Son, though the first creature, was neither equal to nor coeternal with the Father, had set off one of the most wrenching of all Christian disputes. In Erasmus’s day, Arianism remained a heretical offense, and Church theologians relied on this passage to rebut it; omitting it would open Erasmus to charges of anti-Trinitarianism. Nonetheless, he decided to follow through on his scholarly instincts and drop it from his revised translation, explaining in his annotations that the words were missing from the Greek codi
ces.
In the end, the most dramatic consequence would result from what was seemingly one of his most modest changes. It came at Matthew 3:2. Here, the Vulgate has John the Baptist saying, Poenitentiam agite: appropinquavit enim regnum caelorum—“Do penance: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” From Valla, Erasmus had learned that the Vulgate’s use of poenitentia in 2 Corinthians was a misleading rendering of the underlying Greek word μετάνοια (metanoia), meaning repentance or a change of mind. From his inspection of Greek manuscripts, Erasmus could see that, at Matthew 3:2 as well, the Greek word underlying poenitentiam agite was metanoein, the verb corresponding to the noun metanoia. In other words, John the Baptist was calling on people not to perform the sacrament of penance but to feel repentant within. Erasmus thus decided to change poenitentiam agite to poeniteat vos, meaning “repent,” so that the passage read, “Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” As he explained in his annotation, “Our people think that poenitentiam agite means to wash away one’s sins with some prescribed penalty,” yet “metanoia is derived from metanoein, that is, to come to one’s sense afterwards—when someone who sinned, finally, after the fact, recognizes his error.” As small as this adjustment might seem, it put a powerful weapon in the hands of those beginning to question the sacrament of penance and the clergy’s control over contrition and absolution.
Here, as throughout his notes, Erasmus sought to cast the New Testament as a summons to virtuous living rather than a collection of disconnected citations. At Luke 6:20, for example, where Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor,” Erasmus wrote: “Christ’s words are what make us true Christians, not the subtle arguments of Scotists and Ockhamists, nor the insipid, meaningless institutions of men.” In a note to 1 Timothy 1:6, he warned that we must take care not to turn theologia into mataiologia—a word used by Paul to mean “idle talk” and which Erasmus took to signify “endless fighting about frivolous claptrap. Let us rather be concerned with those things that transform us into Christians and make us worthy of heaven. How important is it to argue in how many ways sin can be interpreted, whether it is only a privation or leaves a blot on the soul? Let the theologians rather effect that all men fear and hate sin.”
Erasmus did not shrink from calling out theologians by name. Augustine, he wrote, “was undeniably a saint and a man of integrity endowed with a keen mind, but immensely credulous and, moreover, lacking the equipment of languages.” On this last point, Augustine “was so inferior to Jerome that it would be impudent to compare one man with the other.” Erasmus was even sharper toward Aquinas, deriding him for, among other things, working in haste, offering contrived explanations, obscuring the simple meaning of texts so as to support Church doctrines, suggesting ill-informed etymologies, and knowing only one language, “and not even that one fully.” Again, he seemed heedless of the offense such comments might give.
As Erasmus neared the end of the project, he faced a delicate problem. In the Greek codex he had received from Reuchlin, the text of Revelation was embedded in a commentary by Andreas of Caesarea, a sixth-century exegete. The two texts were so closely entwined that it was hard to tell what was Scripture and what commentary, and the typesetter had so much trouble deciphering them that he introduced many errors. In about fifty places, moreover, the Greek text was so unclear that Erasmus had to translate from the Latin back into Greek. Finally, the codex lacked its final leaf and along with it the last six verses of Revelation. Since he could hardly issue a Bible without them, he decided to translate the verses from the Latin of the Vulgate into Greek—a mortal sin in sacred studies.
Through January and February 1516, two presses were devoted full-time to the project, with a ternion (twelve pages) produced every day. Erasmus kept expanding and revising his notes even “among the clanging of the presses,” as his assistant Beatus Rhenanus put it. (As Erasmus would later admit, the New Testament was “rushed into print rather than published.”) To help him, he had two assistants—Nicholas Gerbel, a doctor in canon law who was hired as a corrector, and Johannes Oecolampadius, who had studied under Reuchlin in Stuttgart and who knew not only Latin and Greek but also Hebrew. One of Oecolampadius’s tasks was checking the New Testament quotations that were taken from the Septuagint against the original Hebrew of the Old Testament. Neither man was up to the job, however. As for the printers, they treated Erasmus’s corrected manuscript as if it were any ordinary copy rather than a sacred text, and so many errors got through that Erasmus was obliged to take upon himself the revision of the final proofs.
This was an imperfect solution, however, for Erasmus hated proofreading and was not very good at it. What’s more, while racing to finish the New Testament, he had to deal with several other projects, including completing a treatise on governance that he planned to dedicate to Prince Charles of Burgundy, to whose advisory council he had recently been appointed. Throughout, Erasmus was interrupted by visitors, among them a messenger from Duke Ernst of Bavaria who conveyed the duke’s readiness to pay him two hundred gold pieces a year if he would accept a chair at the University of Ingolstadt. (Erasmus graciously declined.)
On top of it all, Erasmus decided to prepare a series of prefaces for the New Testament, including an essay on exegetical methodology, an Apologia defending the revised Latin translation, a preface to the annotations, and, finally, a Paraclesis (Greek for “exhortation” or “summons”). In the last of these, Erasmus offered, more than in any other work, the clearest distillation of his religious ideals. Platonists, Pythagoreans, Stoics, and Epicureans all fully appreciate the doctrines of their sects, he wrote; why, then, were Christians so ignorant of the philosophy of Christ? While treasuring his sacraments, they paid little heed to his doctrines, “which offer the most certain happiness to all.” He disagreed with those who objected to having the Bible translated into vernacular languages so that it could be read by the uneducated, “as if the strength of the Christian religion consisted in men’s ignorance of it.” Kings might want their mysteries kept concealed, but Christ wished his to be “published as openly as possible.”
Then, in one of his most lyrical passages, Erasmus declared:
I would that even the lowliest women read the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles. And I would that they were translated into all the languages so that they could be read and understood not only by Scots and Irish but also by Turks and Saracens. . . . Would that, as a result, the farmer sing some portion of them at the plow, the weaver hum some parts of them to the movement of his shuttle, the traveler lighten the weariness of the journey with stories of this kind! Let all the conversations of every Christian be drawn from this source.
Christianity, Erasmus noted, is most truly taught not by trained theologians but by those who show by their very lives that riches should be disdained, that a wrong should not be avenged, that good should be wished for those deserving ill, and that death should be desired by the devout, “since it is nothing other than a passage to immortality.” Anyone who, inspired by Christ, preaches to, inculcates, and exhorts men with such teachings “is indeed truly a theologian, even if he should be a common laborer or weaver.”
At bottom, the Paraclesis was a radical call for broadening access to Scripture. Its central ideas—that the New Testament offers the truest expression of Christ’s teachings; that the Bible is the common property of all Christians and so should be translated into all the languages; that the humblest laborer who embraces the way of Christ could be more pious than a priest or professor—would all be taken up by the reformers, especially Luther, who would give them a far more populist, and provocative, twist. In light of its future impact, the Paraclesis may have been the single most important thing Erasmus ever wrote.
Finally, on March 1, 1516, the New Testament was done. It was a handsomely produced folio of about a thousand pages. On some 550 of them, the Greek text and the revised Latin translation appeared in parallel columns; another 300 or so were filled with the annotations; the rest were given over to the prefaces and ot
her introductory material. Erasmus decided to title the work Novum Instrumentum rather than Novum Testamentum, arguing that whereas a testamentum is a will or covenant that might or might not be written down, an instrumentum is a written document that establishes the terms of a pact or agreement and hence is a more accurate description of the Christian Scriptures. (Loudly criticized for tinkering with so hallowed a name, Erasmus would restore testamentum in later editions.) The volume opened with a three-page dedication to Pope Leo X. The total press run came to 1,200 copies.
The new edition of the New Testament was a milestone in biblical scholarship—indeed, in Western thought. For the first time, scholars had access to a printed edition of the New Testament in the language in which it had originally been written. Erasmus’s text would become the foundation for all Western scholarship on the Greek New Testament for the next three centuries. In addition, his revised translation of the Vulgate offered alternative readings of many phrases that had been sanctified by centuries of use. Most pioneering of all were the annotations. In them, Erasmus argued for a new way of reading the Bible—for seeing it not as an infallible, divinely given text but as a literary document whose meaning could best be unlocked through a knowledge of grammar, philology, history, and classical culture. Erasmus thus sought to move the Bible from the realm of the God-given to that of the man-made. In this way, he hoped that the text would be read not as a collection of miracles, prophecies, and supernatural acts but as the story of a transcendent being whose simplicity, humility, and compassion could encourage readers to change their ways and follow a more pious path.
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