The Bible Translator: Volume 67, Issue 1

The 500th anniversary of Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum commemorates the first printed and published Greek New Testament in 1516. This article emphasizes that Erasmus’s original motive for this publication was his new Latin version verifiable by his accompanying the translation by a Greek text. The latter was concocted from manuscripts he located in Basle; the article describes the manuscripts used. It also assesses the five editions of this bilingual text published in Erasmus’s lifetime. A discussion covers the nature of his Latin compared to that of the Vulgate then currently in use and the opposition which his version caused. Later editions of the Greek New Testament are also described. An examination of the Comma Johanneum (1 John 5.7-8) is included. View Less

Erasmus’s main aim in making his new translation of the New Testament was to present the writings of the apostles and evangelists in better, more classical Latin than that of the Vulgate. He believed that the new age of renaissance and humanism demanded a new translation of the Bible in Latin and that its language must be adapted to the criteria of classical Latin. His translation was neither meant to replace the Vulgate, nor to be used by everybody; its target readership was primarily theologians, who could use it as a study Bible. In his translation, Erasmus wanted to correct textual corruption and translation errors that had crept into the Vulgate. He also wanted to render the Greek in a clearer, purer, and more expressive language, but most of all in a grammatically and syntactically more correct Latin. He rejected the idea that each word in the original text must be matched by a word in the translation: the idiom of the target language is the first requirement of a good translation. Not words, but meanings must be rendered. More generally, Erasmus wanted his translation to serve the spreading of the “wisdom of Christ”: it was to serve the reform of church and society and the spiritual and moral renewal of Europe. View Less

Erasmus’s 1516 Latin–Greek New Testament edition differed from the Latin Vulgate in several ways. A small number of textual variants with doctrinal implications involved Erasmus in considerable controversy. Medieval Western theologians had often relied on the “Johannine Comma” (the long reading of 1 John 5.7-8), established in the Latin Vulgate during the late Middle Ages, as an important scriptural foundation for the doctrine of the Trinity. However, when Erasmus showed that this variant was not present in the Greek manuscript tradition, he was accused of promoting Arianism. Erasmus’s debates with the cleric Edward Lee and the textual critic Jacobus Stunica exposed tensions between theologians, jealous of their authority in scriptural interpretation, and humanists, who claimed to understand the Bible better than theologians by virtue of their philological skills. This article concludes by exploring the Inquisition’s failed attempt to find a consensus on this issue in 1527. View Less

As with other parts of Europe, in Spain the publication in 1516 of Erasmus’s edition of the New Testament together with his Latin version of the text soon ignited a series of scholarly controversies on his interpretation and translation of the Gospels. Yet what began as a discussion on the validity of Erasmus’s historical and philological approach to the study of Scripture became a heated polemic on issues of doctrine that escalated in the early 1520s and culminated in the severe examination of Erasmus’s works at Valladolid in 1527. This article aims at providing an overview of the reception of Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum in Spain in the years immediately after the text was published in Basle. View Less

This article re-examines the influence of Erasmus’s Latin–Greek New Testament upon Dutch vernacular Bible translations. Whereas scholarship up until the present has focused on the translation of Erasmus’s New Testament published by Cornelis Hendricksz. Lettersnijder (Delft, 1524), this article stresses that the Dutch New Testament published earlier in 1524 by the Antwerp printer Adriaen van Berghen played a more crucial role in the development of an Erasmian translation than has been assumed until now. In the Dutch vernacular editions of the years 1525–1526, which the scholarly literature has often labelled as combined Erasmian-Lutheran editions, the influence of Erasmus’s text only decreased in favour of Luther’s translation. Erasmus’s influence was felt in particular in the Low Countries by way of the Catholicized or “Vulgatized” version published by Michiel Hillen van Hoochstraten (Antwerp, 1527 and later editions). View Less