WITH the call ad fontes—“to the sources”—humanists pursued the values of ancient rhetoric and strove to rediscover and purify the texts of Greek and Roman antiquity. Before long, their growing philological and textual expertise began to be applied to biblical texts in their original languages. The Roman Catholic Church formally recognized the desirability of expertise in Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, and Greek in the decree of the Council of Vienne (1311–1312), reissuing the recommendation at the Council of Basel in 1434. Biblical humanists found a model polyglot translator and exegete in Jerome (ca. 347–420; Rice 1985). Some humanists drew on local Jewish scholars to support their study of the Hebrew Bible and rabbinical commentaries, such as Rashi’s (ca. 1100), which informed Nicholas of Lyra’s extremely influential Postilla litteralis super Bibliam (Literal Commentary on the Bible, 1322–1331). Lack of formalized tuition in Greek made its acquisition more difficult in the West, especially north of the Alps, before the emergence of printed grammars and lexica from ca. 1500 (Botley 2010; Hankins 2003; Wilson 1992). In Italy, longstanding Greek communities, the rapprochement with the Eastern Orthodox Church attempted at the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438–1445), and the learned refugees from fallen Constantinople (1453) all fostered Greek studies, and drew humanists to study there (Hankins 2003, 273–92). The medieval text of scripture in the Western Church was, however, the Latin Vulgate, which, although a translation (and the basis of all medieval translations of the Bible), was generally viewed by scholastic theologians as reliable, accurate, and immutable, despite the occasional issuing of corrections to counter corruptions; few considered revising the Vulgate in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Petrarch (1304–1374), who found the Vulgate’s unclassical Latin unappealing, and, like Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), lacked the biblical languages for philological study, returned to scripture through the Latin church fathers. He considered the younger, “Christian Cicero” Augustine (354–430 CE) of the Confessions and The City of God a model exegete, and in his De sui ipsius et multorum aliorum ignorantia (On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Besides, 1370) and elsewhere, Petrarch criticized the scholastic enterprise: it worshipped the pagan Aristotle; its dialectical method was opposed to the animation of a Christian vita activa; and its adversarial disputations were quibbling, contentious, and fundamentally un-Christian. As scholastic logic was relatively unestablished in Italy, humanism could, despite being no alternative philosophical system (Kristeller 1961), emerge there without confronting the powerful philosophical schools of Northern Europe, which would resist the application of humanistic textual and philological techniques to the Bible (Rummel 1995, 30–34).
Ambrogio Traversari led the reception of the Greek church fathers in Italy. Between 1415 and 1439, he translated works of Basil, Chrysostom, Athanasius, Gregory Nazianzen, and others (Stinger 1977; Stinger 1996, 486–87). Patristic commentary had previously been available mostly through such works as Thomas Aquinas’s (1225–1274) continuous gloss on the four Gospels, Catena Aurea (Rex 2000, 57), a decontextualised “golden chain” of extracts from eighty authors (the Greeks often loosely translated), from which scholastics drew propositions to support lines of reasoning, rather than reading their fuller discourses in historical context. Likewise, Peter Lombard’s (d. 1164) topical Libri quatuor sententiarum (Four Books of Sentences) offered biblical and patristic extracts for this dialectical meta-language of syllogism and inference based on late medieval logic. Paolo Cortese’s (1465–1510) humanistic response, a brief commentary on Lombard, Quatuor libri sententiarum (1504), articulated patristic eloquence through presenting quotation in indirect speech (Moss 2003, 66, 72–73).
For the first master of classical usage, Lorenzo Valla (ca. 1407–1457), the Latin translation of the Greek New Testament required revision in order to be an authentic representation of the original text. He also underlined the corruption of the text and denied Jerome’s authorship. Valla’s philological expertise and acute critical spirit had led him to debunk the Donation of Constantine in 1439, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in 1457, and the spurious Seneca–St. Paul correspondence; he also exposed the Apostles’ Creed as dating from the Councils of Nicaea (325 CE) and Constantinople (381 CE). In De vero falsoque bono (On the True and False Good, 1431), Valla stressed that God’s word should appeal to the emotions and excite Christian virtue, and, like Petrarch, he saw the early church fathers as having kept theology uncontaminated by Aristotelian philosophy. He later attacked the ontological and logical categories of scholastic theology as opposed to the Christian teaching available in the text of scripture, in his Repastinatio Dialectice et Philosophie (Replowing of Dialectic and Philosophy) seeking to transform the formal study of logic into a rhetorical-grammatical dialectic (Nauta 2009, 1).
Valla’s Collatio Novi Testamenti (Collation of the New Testament), a comparison of the Greek New Testament with the Vulgate, was begun in Naples between 1435 and 1448 (Valla 1970, xlvii), and redacted in Rome, probably sometime between 1453 and 1457, but possibly started as early as 1447, when his patron Nicholas V became pope (Wilson 1992; Trinkaus 1970, 2:571–78). Erasmus’s discovery, editing, and publishing of the redacted version (known as the Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum [Notes on the New Testament]) in a manuscript copy he found near Leuven later brought the work to a far wider audience. Valla employed at least seven Greek and four Latin manuscripts (Celenza 1994), yet despite inaugurating the philological approach, he tended to neglect the possible effects of transmission on the Greek text, and so, like Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459), Valla repeatedly conflated the Greek text from several manuscripts at the expense of the Latin tradition (Botley 2004, 95). One result of such a priori privileging of the Greek text over the Vulgate is shown by Valla’s treatment of Matthew 6.13, “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen” (King James Version). Valla considered the Vulgate corrupted because it lacked this clause, whereas, as Erasmus (1466–1536) discussed in his own Annotationes, it was a later addition to the Greek New Testament drawn from liturgy, and was thus not found in any ancient Latin manuscripts or Fathers, except Chrysostom and Theophylactus (Bentley 1983, 151; Metzger 1975, 13–14). Valla was relatively restrained in his conjectural emendations to scripture, and only rarely sought variant readings in patristic commentaries, sources deeply mined by Erasmus. Groundbreaking, however, was Valla’s grasp of the textual corruptions arising from the laziness, ignorance, or incompetence of scribes, who, when faced with ambiguity or uncertainty, wrote out what they assumed should be there, or, during dictation, recorded words misheard, or misinterpreted homonyms. Scribes could also “improve” the text, or assimilate words or phrases from a similar verse nearby (on Luke 6.26 and Luke 6.22–23, see Bentley 1983, 42). In addition to purging medieval usages, Valla equated the Vulgate’s rhetorical variety with potential loss of semantic clarity: for example, the Vulgate uses both senior and presbyter for the Greek presbuteros (“elder, priest”), and at Romans 4.3–8 offers reputare, imputare, and accepto ferre in its rendering of logizomai (“calculate, reckon, consider”; Bentley 1983, 52–53). In contrast, Manetti, although probably influenced by Valla in Rome (Botley 2004, 94–95), retained in his biblical translations some non-classical diction, and allowed context to determine usage (De Petris 1975, 15–32).
The pressure of theological orthodoxy may have governed both Valla’s and Manetti’s treatment of the Comma Johanneum, the passage (or Greek komma) at 1 John 5.7 containing the three heavenly witnesses—Father, Word (Son), and Holy Spirit—a proof-text for the Trinity. Present in most Vulgate manuscripts, it is now known to exist in only two Greek manuscripts copied in the Middle Ages, and in two others as the marginal additions of later scribes (Metzger 1975, 716–18). But Valla, who knew none of these four Greek manuscripts, nevertheless passed over the discrepancy between his Greek sources and the Vulgate in silence and retained the Comma. As Manetti also chose to include the Comma in his Latin translation of the Greek New Testament (the first since Jerome’s), it was left to Erasmus, finding little authority in ancient Latin manuscripts, and none in the Greek, to act on the lack of a Greek witness and omit it from the Greek and Latin in his own edition of the New Testament, first entitled Novum Instrumentum (New Instrument, 1516).
Valla’s emendation went beyond correcting corruptions and failed to respect the sentences on which doctrinal orthodoxy depended. When, in a series of four Orationes in Laurentium Vallam (Speeches against Lorenzo Valla, 1452), the elderly and still querulous Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) attacked the unpublished Collatio as a threat to doctrine, Valla retorted that “if I emend anything, I do not emend Holy Writ, but the translations … strictly speaking, only what the saints themselves wrote in Hebrew and Greek is Holy Writ; for there is nothing in Latin” (Rummel 1995, 103). Although Valla’s annotations are mostly restricted to grammatical points lacking in theological implication (Monfasani 2008, 24), the tripartite sacrament of penance (contrition, confession, satisfaction) was arguably at stake in the translation of metanoia (“repentance”) at 2 Corinthians 7.10. Here Valla offered mentis emendatio (“amendment of mind”) as its Latin equivalent, and distinguished it from metamelomai (“to feel regret”) and that word’s relationship to poenitentia (“moral grief”), tristitia (“sadness”), and a connection to the medieval doctrine (Valla 1505, XXXIIIIv). Equally, Valla found no justification for divine predestination, or its distinction from foreknowledge, in the Greek of 2 Corinthians 9.7, 8.19, and Philippians 3.14. Moreover, at 1 Corinthians 15.10, where St. Paul attributes his success to “the grace of God that is with me” (hē charis tou theou hē sun emoi), the Vulgate reads gratia Dei mecum (“the grace of God along with me”), which scholastic theologians understood as supporting gratia cooperans (“cooperating grace”); Valla stressed that all of Paul’s success was owing to God’s grace, and thus eroded the sense of a human contribution to achievements truly pleasing to God. Overall, the penetrating philological (rhetorical, linguistic, and historical) criticism of Valla’s Collatio exposed sundry inadequacies of the Latin Vulgate as a translation of the Greek New Testament, and laid the foundations for both further textual and philological scholarship and a “rhetorical theology.”
Giannozzo Manetti’s expertise in Hebrew as well as Greek allowed him to defend the Christian understanding of scripture against Jewish criticism of the Greek Septuagint version of the Old Testament—the Septuagint was considered dependent upon, when not debased from, the integrity of the Hebrew manuscripts (Monfasani 2008, 19–20). He also understood the Septuagint translation in relation to its historical audience, an argument echoed by Erasmus, while his criticism of Jews constrained by a monoglot culture resonated with the humanistic commitment to an increasingly rich comparative setting of textual, philological, and then historical criticism.
Manetti’s New Testament and polyglot Psalter were completed between 1455 and 1458. The influence of Leonardo Bruni’s De interpretatione recta (On Correct Translation, ca. 1420) is evident in his Apologeticus (Apology, 1455–1456) appended to the Psalter: translation of philosophical and theological works should be neither too rigid (ad verbum) nor too free (ad sensum), and the text augmented or altered only where a want of clarity or the idiom required (Manetti 1981, 121, 128; Botley 2004, 80–82). Unlike humanists such as Brandolini and Barbaro who favored a rhetorically splendid translation fit for the church’s grandeur, Manetti sought to translate the purer, humbler habit of the primitive origins of scripture by avoiding both the Vulgate’s solecisms and the imposition of Valla’s strict classicism. His more cautious approach anticipated the Complutensian Polyglot Bible (1514–1517; on which, see further below) and Sanctes Pagninus’s Veteris et Novi Testamenti nova translatio (New Translation of the Old and New Testament, 1528), the first complete Latin translation from the Hebrew and Greek; its literalness proved influential.
Following the piecemeal publication of the Old Testament (sometimes with rabbinical commentary), Joshua Solomon Soncino’s editio princeps of the whole, vocalized, and accented Hebrew Bible appeared in 1488. The Hebrew Old Testament published in the Complutensian Polyglot (1520) was edited by Jewish converts working from ancient manuscripts and from finely printed biblical texts in both Hebrew and Aramaic available in Portugal, Spain, and Italy. Sebastian Münster’s Hebrew-Latin Bible (1534–1535), the first edition of the Biblia Rabbinica Bombergiana (Bomberg’s Rabbinic Bible, 1517; named after its printer, Daniel Bomberg), and Robert Estienne’s editions (1539–1546) all depended on these early printed works. The Biblia Rabbinica Bombergiana, edited by Felice da Prato (d. 1539), broke new ground in 1516–1517 by including the Aramaic translations (Targums, or paraphrastic “interpretations,” known as “Onkelos” and “Pseudo-Jonathan” for the Torah or Pentateuch), and several rabbinical commentaries. It was followed by the authoritative second edition in 1524–1525, edited by Jacob ben Hayyim and including his work on the Masorah (i.e., the history of textual transmission of the Hebrew Bible). The Hebrew grammars of Conrad Pellicanus (1478–1556) and Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522) led to the more advanced treatises of the Jewish grammarian and lexicographer Elias Levita (1469–1549), whose works were made available in Latin translations by Münster and Paul Fagius (Kessler-Mesguich 2008). In 1538, Levita importantly argued that the vowel points of the Masoretic text were a seventh/eighth-century addition, an insight Catholics would use to defend the Septuagint (second century BCE) as witness to the original consonantal Hebrew text (Burnett 1996, 205–9).
The humanists’ attitude to the Old Testament varied. Reuchlin’s conviction in De rudimentis Hebraicis (On the Rudiments of Hebrew, 1506) that hearing the original words of God was theologically important, acquired a keener edge in the Swiss reformer Johannes Oecolampadius’s confession in In Iesaiam prophetam hypomnemata (Commentaries on the Prophet Isaiah, 1525, α3v) that his understanding of the prophet depended on Hebrew commentaries. Earlier, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s (1463–1494) sacred philology incorporated syncretic interests and the Jewish mysticism of the Kabbalah, influences developed by Reuchlin in his De verbo mirifico (On the Miracle-Working Word, 1494) and De arte cabbalistica (On the Kabbalistic Art, 1517). For Andreas Masius (1514–1573), reviser of the orientalist Johann Albrecht Widmanstetter’s Syriac New Testament (1555) for the Antwerp Polyglot (1569–1572), the Kabbalah was but one part of a profound encounter with post-Christian Jewish learning (Dunkelgrun 2012, 364–81). Use of Jewish scholarship was met with charges of “Judaizing”—the cause célèbre of the “Reuchlin Affair” (1509 onwards; Price 2011), for instance—as rabbinical sources could supply both lexicographical information and an interpretive framework; in 1553, bonfires of Hebrew books blazed across Italy. Yet if Reuchlin, like Erasmus, was denounced as a forerunner of Martin Luther, Luther would later complain about Pagninus’s and Münster’s reliance on rabbinical learning. Agostino Steuco’s apologetic, Recognitio Veteris Testamenti ad veritatem Hebraicam (Examination of the Old Testament According to the Hebrew Truth, 1529), expresses the fractured and contested field of such scholarship in precariously asserting the superiority of the Vulgate Old Testament over the Septuagint while also—as Erasmus wryly noted—making sundry emendations to it using Hebrew manuscripts and the Biblia Rabbinica (Delph 2008).
The Complutensian’s prime mover, Cardinal Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros (1436–1517), archbishop of Toledo from 1495, chancellor of the Kingdom of Castile, and primate of Spain, sought to reanimate faith, particularly in Iberia, by vigorously promoting biblical and patristic studies along text-critical and philological lines. The University of Alcalá de Henares (Complutum in Latin) was founded in 1498, and Cisneros attracted Greek and Hebrew scholars there to establish the Collegium Trilingue (“trilingual college”) in 1508, ahead of the Collegium Trilingue at Leuven (1518), and François I’s Collège Royal in Paris (1530). The Complutensian Bible edition consisted of six folios: the New Testament volume (fifth of the six folios) was completed in 1514, with the four-volume Hebrew Old Testament edition, including Aramaic, Greek, and Latin translations, undertaken between 1514 and 1517; the sixth volume contained materials for the study of the Hebrew Old Testament. The Complutensian was not officially published until 1520, when the license for 600 copies was approved. More is known about the scholars involved than about the manuscripts, some of which were lent by the Apostolic Library in Rome (Schenker 2008, 288; on the manuscript sources, see Welte 1999). For the New Testament, the most significant contributors were Antonio de Nebrija (1441–1522), Diego López de Zúñiga (Jacobus Stunica, d. 1531), and the Cretan Demetrius Ducas (ca. 1480–ca. 1527), inaugural professor in Greek at Alcalá (1508) following his work with Aldo Manuzio in Venice. Zúñiga probably led the editing of the Vulgate version, and would become its vociferous defender and a tenacious opponent of Erasmus. The Old Testament was handled by three conversos (converts to Catholicism from Judaism or Islam): Pablo Colonel, Alfonso the physician, and Alfonso de Zamora. Ducas and Hernán Núñez most probably edited the Greek Septuagint, and oversaw its Latin translation by Juan de Vergara and others (O’Connell 2006).
The printer Arnao Guillén de Brocar’s mise-en-page (page layout) and typography are rightly celebrated. The lack of breathings and almost all accents in the Greek New Testament is defended in the Greek preface (probably Ducas’s) as preserving the archaic majesty of the Greek originally used, an argument drawn from Poliziano’s defense of the like printing of Callimachus’s verses and the Sibylline Oracles; the Septuagint, being a translation, could, it was argued, be printed in the common manner (Lee 2005, 257 and 263). The edition of the Vulgate New Testament in the parallel column is similarly conservative, with the Vulgate’s centrality in the Old Testament volumes conveyed by the flanking Masoretic Hebrew and the Greek Septuagint (with interlinear Latin). The Pentateuch’s Aramaic paraphrase, with Latin translation, runs along the foot of the page.
The Complutensian editors engaged with the transmission of the Greek New Testament far more than Valla had done. Nebrija, however, sought more radical criticism of the Vulgate New Testament, and had earlier produced philological and textual notes, which had been confiscated by the Inquisitor General of Spain, Diego de Deza. When Cisneros succeeded Deza in 1507 and became cardinal, Nebrija was given freer rein, and dedicated to Cisneros his Apologia (Apology, 1516) in which he defended recourse to the Greek text of the New Testament, and the Hebrew of the Old Testament, to solve problems arising from discrepancies between manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate. In contrast, Zúñiga would later assert in his Annotationes contra Erasmum Roterodamum (Notes Against Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1520) that the Latin manuscripts were less corrupted than the Greek ones. Nebrija’s collected notes (Tertia quinquagena, The Third Fifty, being the third redaction of fifty annotations on the text of the Old and New Testaments), which accompany the Apologia, display a critical expertise that rivals Valla’s. However, his quitting of the project around the turn of 1514–1515, having arrived from his chair in grammar at Salamanca in 1513, limited his impact on the Complutensian. Moreover, it was Cisneros who insisted that emendation be justified by an early Latin witness and had prioritized the “optimizing” of the Vulgate’s text on the basis of the Latin manuscript tradition.
Bending to preserve the Vulgate’s authority and support Roman Catholic tradition, the Complutensian scholars seemingly failed to establish firm editorial principles. The Comma Johanneum, handled according to Aquinas’s view that it had been suppressed by anti-Trinitarian heretics, was thus added to the Greek (the editors would not have seen any of the four Greek manuscripts possessing that passage; Bentley 1983, 95–97); yet the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6.13) was approached more independently. The editors understood both the influence of Greek liturgy on the transmission of the Greek New Testament, and that the Greek scribes’ familiarity with the liturgy, which led them unintentionally to distort the scriptural text towards it, had not had an impact on some Latin Vulgate manuscripts, which therefore preserved more faithfully the original, pre-augmented Greek (Metzger 1968). Although they appreciated how scribal errors had been introduced into the Latin manuscripts through, for example, the harmonizing of similar phrases and sentences, where New Testament Greek and early Vulgate manuscripts agreed and could have justified revision of the then-standard Vulgate reading, the Latin was sometimes left unaltered, while elsewhere emended on the authority of the Greek alone, with no warrant from the Latin tradition. Although inconsistency similarly marred the edition of the Septuagint, the quality of the manuscripts employed and the competence of individual editors offset the lack of editorial regulation.
As Erasmus stated in his edition of Valla’s Adnotationes (1505), “Queen Theology” should not begrudge the indispensable claims of her “humble attendant, Grammar,” who perhaps “discusses trivial questions, but these have important corollaries,” just as biblical translation was “clearly the task for the grammarian” (CWE 2:94). His Novum Instrumentum appeared in five editions between 1516 and 1535 as he refined and reinforced to differing degrees the work’s three parts: the editio princeps of the Greek New Testament; his Latin translation (little reworked after mostly typographical correction for the retitled second edition, Novum Testamentum [New Testament], 1519); and his Annotationes commenting on and justifying his emendation of the Greek and his Latin translation. The Annotationes, which were as central as the Paraphrases of the New Testament (1517–1524) in the expression of Erasmus’s exegetical commitments, grew as his scholarly labors continued and his opponents’ objections mounted (Rummel 1986; Erasmus 1986 and 1990; Pabel and Vessey 2002). Unlike the Paraphrases, in which Erasmus recast the New Testament books in more classicized Latin to enhance their persuasiveness, he wrote the Annotationes in a far more accommodating, but also apologetic, form, which allowed him to respond to challenges to his interpretation of the Greek, and to win assent through his textual, philological, and rhetorical analysis.
Erasmus shared Valla’s disdain for scribes’ errors and his genius for correcting them, but went far further in amassing variant readings, which informed his understanding of how corruptions arose from homonyms, assimilation, negligence, or theological anxiety. His famous principle of the harder reading (difficilior lectio potior) resulted: “Whenever the ancients report variant readings, that one always seems to me more esteemed which at first glance seems more absurd, for it is likely that a reader who is either not very learned or not very attentive was offended by the spectre of absurdity and altered the text” (Rummel 1986, 117; Bentley 1978, 318–20). His keener understanding of the relative value of the manuscripts allowed his work on the Greek text to surpass that of Valla and the Complutensian editors (the Complutensian nevertheless helped improve Erasmus’s fourth edition of 1527; Metzger 1968, 102). Erasmus also importantly related the corruptions in the Greek tradition to those in the Latin one, arguing that correction of each text could be informed by the other and not, therefore, privileging the Greek over the Latin, or vice versa. For example, where Valla, at 2 Peter 2.18, considered the Latin adverb paululum (“a little”) in the Vulgate to be a corruption of plane (“clearly”) approximating acceptably to the Greek ontōs (“actually”), Erasmus saw that paululum could instead correct the corrupted Greek to oligōs (“a little”; Bentley 1983, 149). The immense value of Erasmus’s Annotationes lay in the clarity with which evidence in support of an emendation was discussed. Yet, despite professing merely to “correct what is corrupt” and “explain what is obscure,” Erasmus blurred the distinction between grammarian and theologian, especially as he embraced issues of composition, authorship, and authenticity. Moreover, Erasmus’s treatment of Revelation was less than rigorous: where Reuchlin’s single Greek manuscript from which Erasmus worked lacked its final page, Erasmus simply translated the five missing lines into Greek from the Vulgate and added them to his editio princeps. When Erasmus came to address Revelation more carefully, he ended up making ninety revisions to the Greek text for the fourth edition.
Erasmus’s Latin translation proved extremely controversial, despite his insistence that it was as provisional as any translation and was offered to support interpretation of the Vulgate. Nevertheless, his Annotationes worked to reduce the Vulgate from (in conservative eyes) an inerrant textual foundation of doctrine, to a representation of the Greek New Testament unflatteringly comparable to his own. Erasmus characterized the Vulgate’s language as the common speech of late antiquity to argue that a translation should now conform more to the classicized Latin of its intended “common” readership. He aimed not for Ciceronian eloquence, unlike the “literary” version of Sebastian Castellio (1551), but achieved a lucid, literal translation of the koiné (“common”) Greek that captured its colloquial idiom and rhetoric; this, according to Erasmus, minimized the need for the allegorical exegesis he criticized in some Fathers. Such literalness, however, acknowledged the need for a given Greek word to be translated by different Latin terms, depending on context, and this variation of scriptural vocabulary contributed to the destabilizing of a theology based on the repeated use of particular words.
The Annotationes, which included moral teaching and political comment, expanded into a full-scale commentary in response to critical pressures, continued collation, and the garnering, for the third edition onwards, of variant patristic readings; Erasmus, first to appreciate their value, edited Cyprian, Jerome, Lactantius, Ambrose, Athanasius, Chrysostom, Irenaeus, Augustine, and Origen. Thus Erasmus could use Cyprian’s quotation of 1 Corinthians 13.7 as omnia diligit (“esteems all”) to emend correctly the Greek panta stegei (“endures all”) to panta stergei (“esteems all”; Bentley 1983, 144–45). Although the beleaguered Erasmus later retreated from some bolder interpretations and conjectural emendations, including those based on the sacred authors’ “human error” (omitted from the 1527 and 1535 editions), he used the Annotationes to underline the lack of evidence for whatever he felt politically needed to be included. This was the case with the Comma Johanneum, which he included under some duress in the last three editions (De Jonge 1980).
To some, especially in Italy, Erasmus’s rhetorical approach to the interpretation of scripture, together with his broader appeals to the laity and criticism of the church, had helped initiate the Lutheran revolt (Seidel Menchi 1987, 41–67). Erasmus’s unsettling of time-honored texts made him seem to some a hydra of Arian, Pelagian, and Apollinarian heresies. His plight only worsened when evangelicals exploited his work to denounce the Roman Church, attack the Vulgate’s authority, or endorse vernacular Bible translations. The collision between the scholastics’ ontological preoccupation with the word and the humanists’ rhetorical emphasis on discourse is captured in Erasmus’s daring rendering of John 1.1 (“In the beginning was the Word”) as In principio erat sermo: sermo for the Greek logos (“speech, account”) pointed to a dialogue or conversation rather than a simple utterance; Jarrott 1964; Drysdall 2012). He was later accused of attacking the sacrament of marriage—Luther rejected it as unbiblical—because he was critical of the Vulgate’s use of sacramentum to translate mustērion at Ephesians 5.31–32. Gratia also became a highly charged word, so when Erasmus chose to rewrite Gabriel’s famous greeting of Mary in the Annunciation (Luke 1.28), the Vulgate’s Ave gratia plena (“Greetings, one full of grace”) to Ave Gratiosa (“Greetings, beloved one”), there was more than salutatory manners at stake. In rendering kecharitōmenē as “beloved one” or “one highly favored” (gratiosa) Mary is no longer necessarily the sinless repository of grace, but rather, as Erasmus remarks from Origen’s Homily on Luke, a woman greeted in unfamiliar terms (Erasmus 1986, 154–55). The understanding of original sin—concupiscence inherited from Adam, whose state was transformed by the Fall—was likewise disturbed by Erasmus’s rendering of Romans 5.12: the Annotationes states, “I consider this [propensity] arises more from example than from nature” (CWE 56:140), and the second book of Hyperaspistes (Protector, 1527) against Luther, “death … as referring to the sin by which we imitate Adam” (CWE 77:704). This implication that imitating Adam’s fallen state seems willed rather than ineluctably destined, unsurprisingly prompted charges of Pelagianism from the conservatives Edward Lee and Franz Tittelmans (Bentley 1983, 210). Erasmus’s interpretation of metanoia (“repentance”) and its lack of support for the sacrament of penance, including confession to a priest and the penitential works of satisfaction, was seized upon by evangelicals: where the Vulgate has Poenitentiam agite (“do penance”) at Matthew 4.17, Erasmus first suggested poeniteat vos (“repent”) in 1516, and then, in 1519, respiscite (“change your mind, return to your senses”), further suggesting the non-sacramental interior act of the individual.
Zúñiga, who attacked the Pauli epistolae (Epistles of Paul, 1512) of the French humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples (ca. 1455–1536) in Annotationes contra Jacobum Fabrum Stapulensem (Notes Against Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, 1519), and denounced him as a Lutheran even before d’Etaples had commenced his vernacular Bible translation (1523–1530), unleashed six polemics against Erasmus between 1520 and 1524, branding him “the standard-bearer and Prince of the Lutherans” in Erasmi Roterodami blasphemiae et impietates (Blasphemies and Impieties of Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1522, Aiir-v); “either Erasmus Lutherizes or Luther Erasmusizes,” cried Zúñiga in Libellus trium illorum voluminum praecursor (A Little Book as Precursor of Those Three Volumes, 1522, fols. Givv-Gvv; the title refers to three earlier attacks on Erasmus); and he tarred Reuchlin and Lefèvre with the same brush. He defended the Vulgate on philological grounds in the Assertio ecclesiasticae translationis Novi Testamenti (Assertion of the Ecclesiastical Translation of the New Testament, 1524), for example: scribes, not the translator, had introduced solecisms; philology and theology were to be kept separate; usage was fittingly literal or appropriately expressed Hebrew idioms of the koiné (Tittelmans and others advocated faithful preservation of any opacity in the original). Noël Béda (ca. 1470–1537), the conservative Paris theologian, in 1526 similarly associated Lefèvre’s Pauli epistolae and Erasmus’s Paraphrases of the New Testament with the Lutheran challenge, condemning “these theologizing humanists” for attempting to explain all sacred matters through profane learning and languages (Rummel 2002; Crane 2010). In his Annotationes (1526) against d’Etaples and Erasmus, Béda set the scholastic authority of Peter Lombard, William of Auxerre, Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Richard of Middleton, Ockham, and Peter Paludanus, many of whom had written commentaries on Lombard’s Sentences, against that of the humanists’ Greek and Latin Fathers, the “poets” Origen, Tertullian, Basil, Hilary, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, and their like (Aa1v); Erasmus termed them “grammarians” (CWE 4:49). Béda’s colleague Pierre Cousturier (Petrus Sutor), in his De tralatione bibliae (On the Translation of the Bible, 1525), rejected wholesale any tampering with the faultless Vulgate as blasphemous, perverted heresy, the product of madness or stupidity, conceited self-interest, shocking audacity, and so on, as he emptied his polemical scattergun. For him, if not for Béda, Jerome’s version was divinely inspired, just as the Septuagint had been, with Jerome’s distinction between prophet and translator, commonly restated in the apologies (apologiae) of humanists’ biblical works, betokening only the church father’s modesty.
What was to be considered old or new was violently contested: for conservatives, scholastic tradition and the Vulgate had superseded “the sources”; for others, a return to classical Latin would redeem true discourse, as opposed to the barbarous innovations of scholastic terminology and the peculiar form of language through which philosophy and theology were pursued. In his Ratio seu methodus compendio perveniendi veram theologiam (Plan or Method for a Compendious Arrival at True Theology, 1518), Erasmus stressed that scripture was not intelligible without the original biblical languages. Scholastics, who possessed the higher university degrees and training authorizing theological inquiry, condemned the humanists as unqualified for the determination of Christian doctrine, and attacked the Hebrew and Greek scriptures as unreliable in comparison with Jerome’s translation, whether inspired or not. The Greeks were considered notoriously heterodox, while inveterate anti-Semitism overshadowed the handling of the “Hebrew truth”: at best, philology could only be applied to the Latin tradition. Although divisions between the humanist and scholastic camps were far from neat, the Reformation inevitably intensified the climate of intolerance, rendering dialogue less audible amid noisy controversy, with print efficiently amplifying the polemical cacophony.
Early sixteenth-century humanists also demanded curricular reform. Petrus Mosellanus’s Oratio de variarum linguarum cognitione paranda (Oration on Obtaining Knowledge of the Various Languages, 1518) was countered (together with swipes at Erasmus’s Annotationes) by Jacques Masson (Jacobus Latomus, ca. 1475–1544), in the second book of his De trium linguarum et studii theologici ratione dialogus (Dialogue Concerning the Three Languages and the Plan of Theological Study, 1519). For Masson, Augustine’s support for the learning of languages, when “the endless diversity of the Latin translators throw [the scriptures] into doubt” (On Christian Doctrine 2.11), was no longer pertinent, as the Vulgate, proved by tradition, was sufficient for exegesis, with scholastic commentary, rather than the philology of the humanists or the eloquence of the Fathers, ensuring that scriptural interpretation conformed to tradition and doctrinal orthodoxy (Rummel 1989, 1:79–87; François 2005). While some humanistically trained scholastic theologians like Maarten van Dorp (ca. 1485–1525) at Leuven publically migrated into the Erasmian fold, others, like Girolamo Aleandro (1480–1542), considered the textual, rhetorical, and historical practices of “the captious tribe of grammatists and poetasters” perverted displays of learning. The widely trained Alberto Pio (1475–1531), also alarmed by the appealing populism of Erasmus’s “rhetorical theology,” finally condemned Erasmus as having aided Luther, and in Book 10 of Tres et viginti libri in locos lucubrationum variarum (Twenty-Three Books on the Topics of Various Studies, 1531) defended scholastic method as divinely invented for handling scriptural obscurity, lauded Aristotle as a miracle of nature, and attacked Erasmus’s anti-scholastic rhetoric (Minnich 2008). For Pio, the Vulgate’s language was minus Latina sed nota verba (“less proper Latin, but familiar”)—better for the grammar to be unorthodox than the thought (Pio 1529, 29r). He also countered the equation of wisdom with eloquence by asserting that language (verba) does not determine reality (res), but reality creates words: rational study of nature (philosophy) should inform revelation (theology). Likewise, Masson saw theology as conceptual, governing the interpretation of scripture rather than arising from it, a truth delivered in “words of no language” (Masson 1519, D1r).
Luther’s new understanding of the Pauline doctrine of salvation was not based on any textual correction made by the humanists. Nevertheless, his and Melanchthon’s attacks on the scholastic understanding of justification would readily be associated with the humanists’ criticism of theological authority, just as some humanists at first welcomed Luther’s anti-scholastic stance. Overall, biblical humanists seem to have been no more disposed to convert to Protestantism than to remain Catholic, however much the humanistic emphasis on the purified text of scripture—from the Hebrew and Greek originals to faithful translations—mutated into the reformers’ attack on unwritten verities and their demands for untrammeled access to the Word of God. Humanistic influence on Protestant exegesis and theology varied: Bucer’s (Strasbourg) and Zwingli’s (Switzerland) emphasis on the ethical (tropological) sense of scripture shows greater Erasmian influence than is evident in Luther’s primary concern with the nature of Christ’s sacrifice and what is imputed to believers through faith (McGrath 2012, 106). Zwingli’s humanistic training informed his analysis of rhetorical figures of speech, especially alloiosis (“alteration”), synecdoche, and, as in the following example, catachresis, a figure of abuse. At Matthew 26.26, as Aramaic lacks the copulative verb (“to be”), Zwingli could renegotiate the relationship between “This” and “my body” as “signifies” rather than “is”—equivalence rather than identity—to argue for the commemoration of the historical event of Christ’s sacrifice in the sacrament and thus against transubstantiation (Rex 2000, 63; McGrath 2012, 181–82).
For religious reformers, philology served theological needs, and the Fathers were judged according to their conformity to evangelical doctrine. Melanchthon’s application of rhetorical analysis to biblical texts, although originating in humanistic training, sought to define “the principal topics of Christian teaching” chiefly from scripture to displace the scholastics’ “theological hallucinations.” Erasmus had developed the idea of commonplacing the key phrases and sentences from scripture under a set of headings (loci theologici), little nests for the fruits of reading, as he termed them. Melanchthon radically transformed Erasmus’s idea of “theological topics” in his lecturing on Romans in 1519 and 1521, which resulted in the first evangelical systematic theology, Loci communes theologici (Theological Commonplaces, 1521). Rather than dispersing biblical texts under topical headings, Melanchthon interpreted Romans as Paul’s writing in a new literary form, which Melanchthon dubbed the genus didacticum (“didactic genre”). This radically reorientated how the work should be read: for Melanchthon, Paul’s scopus (“goal”) of justification without merit or works determines the book’s structure and language for the persuasive teaching of this doctrine. Melanchthon therefore extolled Paul’s letter, essentially on theological grounds, as rhetorically and dialectically excellent, whereas Erasmus preferred to paraphrase Paul’s off-putting style to make it more attractive and accessible to “pure Romans and adult Christians” (CWE 4:195–99). The Reformation thus confessionalized the energies and talents previously expended in humanist-scholastic skirmishes, drawing them into the imperatives of Catholic and Protestant doctrine and church discipline. Melchor Cano’s highly influential De locis theologicis (On Theological Topics, 1563) in turn defended Catholic scholasticism and eschewed eloquence (Rummel 1995, 82), but also required engagement with the original biblical texts in order to counter the textual and philological arguments of opponents on their own terms (Book 2, chapters 12–15).
The affordability of Erasmus’s Greek New Testament extended its influence, and it informed, defects and all, the Greek editions by Robert Estienne (1546, 1549, 1550, and 1551), who also drew on the superior (and costly) Complutensian text, and those of Théodore de Bèze (1565, 1582, 1588–1589, and 1598), who built on Estienne’s editions using the so-called Codex Bezae and Codex Claromontanus. Enshrined by some as the textus receptus (the universally agreed version of the text), de Bèze’s editions were defended with as much passion and unreasonable commitment as the Latin Vulgate continued to be in Catholic quarters (Metzger 1968, 106). Nor was the text of the Vulgate neglected. In 1528, Robert Estienne published the first of his much-improved critical editions; his 1540 edition was further collated with some thirty manuscripts for the Biblia Latina ad vetustissima exemplaria castigata (Latin Bible, Corrected According to the Most Ancient Copies, 1547), edited by Jean Henten (ca. 1500–1566) and reprinted several times by Plantin from 1559. A later Estienne edition provided the basis of the short-lived Vulgata Sixtina (1590, prepared under Pope Sixtus V) and the enduring revised edition, the Vulgata Clementina (1592, prepared under Pope Clement VIII; Hall 1963, 64–68).
Fundamental to the biblical scholarship of the Counter-Reformation was the Tridentine Decree (1546) underlining the authenticity of haec ipsa vetus et vulgata editio (“this ancient and vulgate edition”; Tanner 1990, 2:664–65); the focus was on improving the editions of the Vulgate and Greek Septuagint. Cano (2.13) repeated the charge that use of the Hebrew text rendered Christian exegesis dependent on Jewish learning. The Sixtine Vetus Testamentum iuxta Septuaginta (Old Testament according to the Septuagint, 1587), based on the manuscript Vaticanus Graecus 1209 discovered by Cardinal Antonio Carafa, became the textus receptus, and was reprinted in the London Polyglot (1657; Hall 1963, 58). Yet it was for later scholars to explore how the Septuagint could be used to criticize the Protestants’ “inspired” Hebraica veritas (“Hebraic truth”), once the complex history of the Masoretic apparatus—including vowel points, pronunciation marks, and accents—which protected the text against corruption, was better understood. Christian Hebraism developed more vigorously in Protestant centers, especially after the 1559 (Roman) and 1564 (Tridentine) Indices of Prohibited Books outlawed the scholarship of Protestant Hebraists, although lectureships were established at Catholic and Protestant universities, which fostered a Christian scholarly culture independent of Jews and Judaism (Burnett 2012, 7–9). The turn by Christian Hebraists to the ancient authorities of Josephus and Philo, as well as to the Jewish religious texts, had signaled the departure from patristic authority. The deepening interest in the Old Testament drew scholars to the problems of sacred history and its relationship to ancient chronology. Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609) and Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) interpreted the Hebrew Bible and Targumim in light of the Mishnah and Talmud, commentaries on Jewish laws and customs, as philology began to give place to the investigation of routine cultural and social praxis (Shuger 1994, 31–32; Grafton and Weinberg 2011). The extended apparatus of the eight-volume Antwerp Polyglot (1569–1572), edited under Benito Arias Montano, similarly included treatments of ancient measures, coinage, architecture, clothing, as well as political geography and further fruits of the emerging oriental studies. The printing of the Gospels in Arabic (1591) added to the ever-richer comparative philology and reception history.
If the close of the sixteenth century saw no end to the religious controversy that stimulated and shaped biblical scholarship, the immense, nine-folio Critici Sacri (Sacred Critics, 1660), edited by John Pearson and others, sought common ground in both blending the key Latin works of humanists into rich commentaries and reissuing their treatises, so that works of Valla, Erasmus, Nebrija, Zúñiga, François Vatable, Münster, Fagius, Angelo Canini, Castellio, Johannes Drusius, Masius, Montano, Scaliger, Casaubon, Petrus Cunaeus, Kaspar Waser, Grotius, and many more, complemented Brian Walton’s Biblia Polygotta, the so-called London Polyglot (1653–1657). The London Polyglot and Critici Sacri arguably represent the final, monumental gathering together of the scholarship devoted to the literal and grammatical sense of the scriptures, offering, in the tradition of the polyglots of Alcalá, Antwerp, and Paris (the Paris Polyglot, edited by Guy Michel Lejay, was published in 1645), yet further enhanced fullness of scriptural meaning in the historical witnesses of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, Samaritan, and Persian (Miller 2001, 465–68). Yet from Scaliger’s revolutionary work on chronology onwards, the very preserve of sacred history began to transform the interpretation of scripture into the study of a text subject to historical analysis. Masius, in his commentary on Joshua (1574), planted the seeds for the more radical assertion of the Ezran authorship of the Pentateuch found in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651, Chapter 33.2–4), which argued, on the grounds of textual criticism and historical reasoning, that Moses could not be its author (Malcolm 2002). In the freethinking Isaac Vossius (1618–1689), who lacked his father’s respect for sacred text, we again arguably find the tipping point between “late humanism” and the radical criticism of the Bible associated with Spinoza (1632–1677) and the Enlightenment: the valuing of human reason over the traditions of textual authority, and the triumph of philosophy over theology and ecclesiastical imperium (Grafton 2012; Israel 2001, 449).
SUGGESTED READING
Relationships between biblical humanism and scholasticism are explored in Rummel (2008 and 1989). On the Old Testament, see Saebø (2008). Rummel (1995) handles the larger scope of humanist–scholastic relations in the Renaissance, and Hamilton (1996), humanists and the Bible. For New Testament scholarship in this period, see Bentley (1983), and for further issues of translation, Botley (2004). Pabel (2008) studies, through Jerome, the editing and printing of sixteenth-century patristic scholarship; more widely, see Backus (1996). For the exegetical dispute between Erasmus and Melanchthon, see Wengert (1998). For other work by the author relevant to this chapter, see Taylor (2010a and 2010b).
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