Desiderius Erasmus · Philosophy
The humanist watchword <em>ad fontes</em> - ‘back to the sources’ - became a weapon in Erasmus’s hands: his 1516 Greek New Testament used textual criticism to correct the Church’s official Latin Bible, showing how a scholar with a manuscript and a knowledge of Greek could unsettle centuries of doctrine.
The rallying cry of Renaissance humanism was ad fontes - ‘to the sources.’ Instead of studying Aristotle through layers of medieval commentary, or the law through glosses on glosses, the humanists wanted to go back to the original texts in the original languages, cleared of the accumulated distortions of centuries. Erasmus was the greatest master of this method, and he grasped its most explosive application: apply it to the Bible. For a thousand years the Western Church had read Scripture in Latin, in the version called the Vulgate, and had built its theology, its liturgy, and its sacraments on the exact wording of that Latin. But the New Testament had been written in Greek. What, Erasmus asked, if the Latin was in places wrong - if the words on which doctrines rested were mistranslations or later insertions? There was only one way to find out: go back to the Greek. And so a scholar’s philological principle became a lever under the foundations of the Church.
In 1516, from the press of Johann Froben in Basel, Erasmus published the Novum Instrumentum omne: the first Greek New Testament ever to be printed and published, with his own fresh Latin translation printed alongside it and a mass of explanatory Annotations. It was a landmark of scholarship, though a flawed one - Erasmus worked at speed, from a handful of late medieval manuscripts, and where his Greek of Revelation was missing its final verses he even translated them back from Latin into Greek to fill the gap. He later admitted the first edition was ‘thrown together rather than edited.’ Yet its significance was immense. Here, for the first time in print, any scholar in Europe could set the original Greek beside the official Latin and see for himself where they differed. Erasmus’s Latin quietly departed from the Vulgate in hundreds of places, and each departure was an argument that the Church had, for centuries, been reading its own Scripture through a cracked lens.
The sharpest demonstration of philology’s power was a verse that disappeared. The Latin Bible contained, at 1 John 5:7, a sentence about ‘three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit’ - the so-called Comma Johanneum, the clearest proof-text for the doctrine of the Trinity in all of Scripture. When Erasmus went to the Greek manuscripts, the verse was not there. Honesty compelled him to leave it out of his first two editions. The reaction was furious: he was accused of reviving the ancient heresy of Arianism, of attacking the Trinity itself. Erasmus’s reply was pure textual criticism - he had found no Greek manuscript that contained the words, and a translator cannot print what the sources do not say. Under pressure, and after a single suspiciously convenient Greek manuscript containing the verse appeared, he restored it in 1522, while recording his doubts about its authenticity in the Annotations. The lesson was unmistakable: even the Bible’s support for its central doctrine was a question of manuscripts and evidence, not of unquestionable authority.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Erasmus published the first printed Greek New Testament (1516), placing his own fresh Latin translation beside it and defending his changes in his Annotations ; that this applied the humanist principle ad fontes to Scripture; and that textual criticism (the Comma Johanneum, the word for ‘repentance’)…
Leads to Augustine of Hippo.
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