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.
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 ‘repenta…
Leads to Augustine of Hippo.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.