Someone should write a book on the inordinate significance of the years 1516 and 1517 for the rise of modern biblical scholarship.  Two publications by two ordained Catholic Priests, Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther, revolutionized how the Bible came to be studied, in some ways marking the beginnings of the historical-critical study.  Both men would have been completely surprised by the outcome.

The Bible had long been understood in light of traditional perspectives and interpretations advanced by ecclesiastical writers for centuries; in the Latin-speaking West, based on theological understandings of the Vulgate.  The grounds for a seismic change, for not directly connected reasons, appeared in a less-than two-year span.

Erasmus was an internationally famous humanist scholar from Rotterdam, highly erudite, proficient in ancient languages, and deeply religious.  In 1511 he published his most famous work, In Praise of Folly, a book that begins by celebrating the more-or-less foolish things we tell ourselves to get along in the world – for example, the unspoken self-delusions that bulk up our self image or that we share with a partner or friend to help us get along together.  The book eventually turns to the “follies” of the Catholic Church, such as the worship of relics, the sale of indulgences, and corrupt clergy.

It is a clever, funny, and satirical book and became very popular, and was especially recognized for its religious implications.  Erasmus was not interested in getting rid of the church, moving away from the church, or starting a new kind of church.  He remained a committed Catholic for his entire life.

But he also, as I said, was a serious humanist scholar, interested especially in classical learning and in the Greek and Roman authors who produced it.  Like other intellectuals at the time, he was committed to reading these authors in their original languages — including the authors of the Bible.

Erasmus was the first to publish a Greek version of the New Testament.  For centuries the scholars in the West had transmitted, read, studied, and preached the Bible in its Latin translation, the “Vulgate,” produced by the fifth-century savant, Jerome (he himself did not do the entire translation; for the NT he did only the Gospels).  But Erasmus knew that to understand any ancient text adequately – even if they were writing Scripture – it had to read read in its own language.

The printing press invented by Gutenberg around 1450 created a massive change in the intellectual life of Europe.  Now books could be printed, more or less en masse, precisely the same way every time (as opposed to hand-written copies subject to accidental and intentional alterations).  The first book published by Gutenberg was in fact the Latin Vulgate.

Greek was not as widely known as Latin in European intellectual circles (and Hebrew far less than either), and so it took some time for western scholars to accept the reality that the meaning of the Bible required expertise in Greek.  It is a bit like conservative Christians today not seeing the point of a modern English translation when the King James Version is itself inspired.

But by the early 1500’s there were various biblical experts who realized that having the New Testament in Greek would be a very good thing indeed.  The first Western scholar who conceived of the idea of producing a version of the Greek New Testament was a Spanish cardinal named Ximenes de Cisneros (1437-1517).  Under his leadership, a group of scholars undertook a multi-volume edition of the Bible (both Hebrew Bible and New Testament).

The work was printed in a town called Alcalà, whose Latin name is “Complutum.”  For this reason, Ximenes’s edition is known as the Complutensian Polyglot.  The New Testament volume was the first to be printed (vol. 5; completed in 1514); it contained the Greek text, and included a Greek dictionary with Latin equivalents.  But there was no plan to publish this volume separately – all six volumes (the sixth included a Hebrew grammar and dictionary, to assist in the reading of vols. 1-4) were to be published together.  And this took considerable time.  The entire work was finished, evidently, by 1517; but since it was a Catholic production, it needed the sanction of the pope, Leo X, before it could be published.  This was finally obtained in 1520, but because of other complications, the book did not become available distributed until 1522, some five years after Ximenes himself had died.

In the meantime, Erasmus had decided to try to crank out an edition to be published before the Complutensian could appear.  In 1515 he went to Basel, Switzerland, in search of suitable manuscripts that he could use as the basis of his text.  He did not find a lot of manuscripts, but what he found he felt was sufficient for the task.  These (as was true for the Complutensian as well) were all from the late Middle Ages.  There was just one twelfth-century manuscript for the Gospels and another, also of the twelfth century, for the book of Acts and the epistles – although Erasmus was able to consult several other manuscripts and make corrections based on their readings.

For the book of Revelation he had to borrow a manuscript from his friend, the German humanist Johannes Reuchlin; unfortunately, this manuscript was almost impossible to read in places, and it had lost its last page, which contained the final six verses of the book.  In his haste to have the job done, in those places Erasmus simply took the Latin Vulgate and translated its text back into Greek, thereby creating some textual readings found today in no surviving Greek manuscript.

Erasmus delivered his marked up copies of the manuscripts to the printer by October of 1515, who produced the book in five months.  It included not only the hastily gathered Greek text but also a revised version of the Latin Vulgate (for ease of reading for those whose Greek was not completely up to snuff).  It was, in short, a quick and rather sloppy production. Erasmus himself later said, it was “rushed out rather than edited” (in his Latin phrasing: praecipitatum verius quam editum).

As a result, Erasmus’s New Testament was not the first Greek edition to be produced (the Complutensian was completed earlier), but it was – far more importantly – the first published edition.  Scholars call that the “editio princeps.”  It served as the basis for English Bible translations for a long time, including the King James Bible, made nearly a century later.

In addition, it created the conditions for a radical shift in biblical scholarship that changed the field in a number of ways, including especially these two.

• It made it possible, and even desirable, for European scholars to read and study the New Testament in its original language, which is the very basis for serious, historical interpretation. (As opposed to understanding the text in light of how other scholars had understood it based on traditional expositions going back centuries).
• It somewhat inadvertently revealed a major problem of doing so – if a correct interpretation of the text required a careful analysis of the original Greek words, what if there are disputes about which Greek words were originally written?

From the outset Erasmus was accused of printing an errant form of the text.  A large part of the problem, as is clear today, involved the few (late and rather low-quality) manuscripts he used to establish his text.  For a long time that was not fully appreciated, because other publishers who saw the commercial and academic value of publishing their own versions of the Greek New Testament took the easy route of simply republishing the text Erasmus had produced in the editio princeps — so much so that it came to be known simply as the Textus Receptus (the “c” is pronounced like a “k”) – that is, the “Received Text” (since it was the text all the later publishers received from the earlier ones).  That was seen as a rather comforting notion: THIS is the text that everyone agrees on.  But it was agreed on because very few people had actually looked into the matter.

But before long scholars started paying attention to the reality that Erasmus’s edition had been a bit cobbled together and that other manuscripts existed that worded the text differently in places.  Often these other manuscripts were older and in better condition than the ones Erasmus had used.  It was difficult for anyone to publish a radically different version, since almost everyone had grown accustomed to this one.  But eventually scholars began producing editions that kept the Textus Receptus but noted variant readings found in other manuscripts.  This led scholars to hunt out more and more manuscripts, leading them to find more and more variant wordings of the text, which led them (a) to wonder what the original authors actually wrote, given all the manuscript differences they were finding and (b) to figure out ways to establish that original text.

A crucial juncture occurred nearly two centuries after Erasmus, in 1707, with the publication by the British scholar John Mill of an edition of the Greek New Testament that cited 30,000 places where the manuscripts differed from one another.  That marked a point of crisis.  By this time the Protestant Reformation had made the very words of the Bible incalculably more important than they had been for centuries within the Catholic theological traditions.  But what if we don’t know what the words are?

Enter the world of textual criticism: the academic attempt to establish the “original” wording of the New Testament, and the first modern, academic, historical-critical field of investigation within biblical studies.

In my next post I will deal with an at-least-equally significant event that transpired the very next year, 1517.