HistoricalChristian.Faith
HistoricalChristian.Faith
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a movement of scholars set out to reform Christian faith by going back to its sources. Their two watchwords name the program. Ad fontes — “to the fountains” — meant returning past the accumulated glosses and Latin paraphrases of the medieval schools to the original texts in their original tongues: the Greek New Testament, the Hebrew Old Testament, the fathers read whole rather than in scholastic snippets, the classical authors read for the elegance and wisdom of their own words. Bonae litterae — “good letters” — named the disciplined study of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy (the studia humanitatis, from which “humanist” and “humanities” descend) that the movement believed would purify the mind, the church, and the text of Scripture itself. These were Christian humanists: not the modern secular sense of “humanist,” but scholars who held that a return to the sources and to good letters was the road to a reformed and heartfelt Christianity.
The belief that develops on this page is the question that program forces: does a return to the original sources — pagan as well as patristic, Greek and Hebrew as well as Latin — purify Christian faith, or corrode it? The humanists answered that it purifies: that Jerome’s Vulgate and the schoolmen’s glosses had let errors creep in, that the philosophy of Christ (philosophia Christi) lay open in the plain sense of the Gospels once the text was cleared, and that piety was starved by a religion of ceremonies and syllogisms rather than of Scripture read at the fountainhead. Their critics answered that it corrodes: that turning the Vulgate over to grammarians unsettled the church’s authorized text, that a taste for Cicero and Plato pulled Christians back toward paganism, and — once the Reformation broke — that “Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched.” The movement’s own internal fault line runs right through that charge: Erasmus, who did more than anyone to open the Greek New Testament, broke publicly with Luther over the freedom of the will and refused to follow the reform he had helped set in motion. Whether Christian humanism was the mother of the Reformation, its road not taken, or a third way between Rome and Wittenberg is the argument this timeline exists to weigh.
The witnesses run from the Italian philologists who first turned textual criticism on sacred and ecclesiastical documents, through the northern circle who carried ad fontes into biblical scholarship and church reform, to the collision of humanism and the Reformation that split the movement. Several of its figures also appear on the timeline of the liberal arts, where the question is what education is for; here the question is narrower and sharper — what happens to Christian faith when it is taken back to its sources.
Related doctrines: Learning, the liberal arts, and Christian education — see also the purpose of the liberal arts · vocation and the dignity of work
The witnesses are listed earliest first — the Italian humanists who first applied philology to Scripture and to the church’s own documents (Lorenzo Valla), the northern circle who made ad fontes a program of biblical scholarship and reform (John Colet, Johann Reuchlin, the Complutensian Polyglot, Erasmus, Thomas More), and the generation in which humanism and the Reformation met and divided (Philip Melanchthon; Erasmus against Luther on the freedom of the will). Individual witness blocks — each fully sourced — are slotted in chronological order as they are researched; witnesses shared with the liberal-arts timeline (Erasmus, Melanchthon) are cross-linked there rather than restated.
The Italian philologist who first proved what the new learning could do to a sacred text. In a Declamation of 1440 Valla demonstrated that the Donation of Constantine — the charter on which the medieval papacy’s temporal claims most leaned — was an anachronistic forgery, convicted out of its own Latin and chronology: a fourth-century emperor could not have written of “satraps” in Roman decrees, nor named Constantinople a patriarchal see “when it was not yet… a Christian city, nor named Constantinople, nor founded, nor planned.”1 His Elegantiae linguae Latinae made the recovery of classical Latinity a program, and his Collatio collated the Vulgate against the Greek New Testament — insisting he corrected “not Sacred Scripture, but rather its translation.”2 That notebook is the load-bearing link from Italian philology to northern biblical humanism: the young Erasmus found it, printed it in 1505 as the Annotationes, and took from it the pattern for his own Greek New Testament of 1516.3 So the man who unmasked a forged charter also set in motion the re-editing of the New Testament. Full detail →
The Platonist wing of the movement, and its boldest wager on the page’s central question. Where Valla and the northern circle took ad fontes back to the Greek and Hebrew of Scripture, Pico — a prodigy of the Florentine Academy round Marsilio Ficino — carried it back to Plato, Plotinus, the Hermetica, Zoroaster, Orpheus, Pythagoras, and the Hebrew Kabbalah, in pursuit of a prisca theologia, an “ancient theology” he held to converge on the truth of Christ. His Oration on the Dignity of Man (c. 1486), long called the manifesto of the Renaissance, opens on Hermes Trismegistus and stages God setting man at the world’s centre with no fixed nature: “as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.”4 Prefaced to 900 theses he offered to defend at Rome, drawn from “all the schools” on the premise that truth is one and scattered through them all, it made the most venturesome case that pagan wisdom purifies: that “no science assures us more of the divinity of Christ than magic and Kabbalah,” and that in the Hebrew esoterica he had read “not so much the Mosaic as the Christian religion… the mystery of the Trinity, the Incarnation of the Word, the divinity of the Messiah.”5 His critics answered that this was the corrosion the whole enterprise risked: Innocent VIII’s commission condemned thirteen theses in 1487 — then the whole nine hundred — as “in part heretical, in part the flower of heresy… reproducing the errors of the pagan philosophers,” and Pico’s defiant Apologia only deepened the breach, drawing a flight, a brief arrest in France, and absolution only under Alexander VI in 1493.6 Here the sources-quarrel reached its widest source — not the Greek Testament but the whole pagan and Jewish inheritance — and the “purify or corrode?” question drew its first condemnation. Full detail →
The Englishman who carried ad fontes from the Italian study into the pulpit and the lecture-hall. Returning from Italy, Colet lectured freely at Oxford on St Paul’s epistles — setting aside the scholastic four-fold sense to read the letters continuously, as one man’s words to a real church at a datable moment, dating Romans to “the reign of Claudius… about the twentieth year of St. Paul’s ministry” and reconstructing its occasion out of Suetonius.7 He became the hub of the English humanist circle: Erasmus heard him lecture in 1499 and credited him with the push toward theology — Colet “almost reproachfully” pressing him to expound Moses and Isaiah as Colet was expounding Paul.8 As Dean of St Paul’s he founded St Paul’s School on humanist lines under lay governors, and in 1512 preached a scorching reform sermon to Convocation — calling the “evil and wicked life of priests… a certain kind of heresy” and demanding not new laws but the keeping of the old. This is humanist reform from within the church, a decade before the Reformation broke.9 Full detail →
The scholar who carried ad fontes to its hardest source — the Hebrew Old Testament. His De rudimentis hebraicis (1506), the first workable Hebrew grammar a Christian had written, opened the language of Moses and the prophets to a Latin church that had known Scripture only through the Vulgate; Reuchlin closed the volume with Horace’s boast — “I have raised a monument more lasting than bronze” — claiming for a Hebrew grammar the immortality the poet had claimed for his odes.10 When the convert Johannes Pfefferkorn and the Cologne Dominicans won an imperial mandate to confiscate and burn Jewish books, Reuchlin — alone of the experts consulted, and the one who could actually read them — argued for their preservation: one may not condemn “the Talmud, a work which they themselves do not even understand,” and the rabbinic commentaries “keep alive the original Hebrew” that Christian study of the Old Testament cannot do without. As a jurist he added that Jews were “fellow citizens of one and the same Roman Empire,” their books protected property.11 For this he was tried for heresy (acquitted at Speyer in 1514, but the Augenspiegel condemned by Leo X in 1520); his younger backers answered with the Letters of Obscure Men, the age’s sharpest lampoon of the schoolmen who “could not read the languages they wished to burn.”12 Here the sources-quarrel reached the Hebrew fountain and, for the first time, drew blood. Full detail →
The institutional face of ad fontes — the sources-program carried out not by one scholar and a printer but by a cardinal’s university. Where Reuchlin opened the Hebrew fountain almost single-handed, Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros founded the University of Alcalá and its trilingual College of San Ildefonso, gathered a standing team of Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic scholars, and bought and borrowed manuscripts to produce the first printed Greek New Testament and the editio princeps of the Septuagint — the originals of Scripture set in type, in their own alphabets, for the first time.13 Yet the same enterprise shows how conservative ad fontes could be. When Antonio de Nebrija pressed to correct the Vulgate against the Hebrew and Greek — urging Cisneros to “light up once more the two unlit torches of our religion” — the cardinal refused and Nebrija withdrew; and the preface set the recovered originals below the Latin, the Hebrew and Greek flanking Jerome’s Vulgate “just as the thieves were hung, one on each side of Jesus, who represents the Roman, or Latin, Church.” Cisneros printed no vernacular column and wanted none: the Word of God, he held, must stay “far from the reach of the common man” — the exact opposite of Erasmus’s wish, published two years later, that the plowman sing Scripture at the plow.14 Printed first (1514) but held back and delayed to c. 1522, it lost the market to Erasmus’s one-man edition of 1516 (weighed in the Arguments below). Its bearing on the Old Testament canon is treated on its canon page. Full detail →
The movement’s centre of gravity, who realized ad fontes on the one text that mattered most. In 1516 Erasmus edited and printed the first published Greek New Testament (the Novum Instrumentum), with a fresh Latin translation and critical Annotationes going behind the Vulgate to the Greek. The method cut where it mattered: at Matthew 3:2 he judged that the Baptist’s metanoeite — for generations rendered poenitentiam agite, “do penance,” and read as a prop of the sacrament of penance — “could suitably have been translated Resipiscite” (“come to your senses”), an inward change of mind, not a rite; the young Luther seized on the point.15 He framed the whole as a philosophia Christi — a plain philosophy of Christ open to all — and prefixed to it the Paraclesis, wishing the Scriptures translated into every tongue, “that the plowman would sing a text of the scripture at his plowbeam, and that the weaver at his loom.”16 Already in the Enchiridion (1503) he had made the case that religion is inward, not outward ceremony — asking why a Christian would “worship the bones of Paul preserved in a relic casket, but not… the mind of Paul hidden away in his writings.”17 Yet he refused to follow the reform he helped set in motion, breaking with Luther in 1524 over the freedom of the will — the movement’s internal fault line. (His classical-education program is treated on the liberal-arts timeline.) Full detail →
The lay, civic face of the movement — the London lawyer and courtier who turned the new learning on his own society. Utopia (1516), written in polished humanist Latin and seen through the press with Erasmus’s help, is the studia humanitatis aimed at a Christian commonwealth’s ills: in Book 1 More indicts the enclosures that were depopulating England — sheep “become so great devourers… that they eat up, and swallow down the very men themselves” — and in Book 2 sets a rational, propertyless island against it, the “only commonwealth that truly deserves that name,” blocked from imitation only by pride, “that plague of human nature… that infernal serpent.”18 It is criticism, not blueprint — a no-place (Greek ou-topos) held up as a mirror. More was the closest English friend of Erasmus, who wrote The Praise of Folly in More’s house and punned its Greek title (Moriae) on More’s name, “which comes so near the word… folly… as you are far from the thing,”19 and he defended Greek studies at Oxford against the scholars who mocked them.20 Yet the same man served as Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, wrote at length against Luther and Tyndale, and was beheaded a loyal Catholic in 1535 — the pointed case of a humanist who stayed with Rome, and so a chief exhibit for reading humanism and the Reformation as two roads, not one.21 Full detail →
The pivotal case of humanism folded into the Reformation — not broken with, as with Erasmus, nor kept within Rome, as with More. A great-nephew and protégé of Reuchlin — who Graecized the boy’s German name “Schwartzerdt” (“black earth”) into its Greek form and won him the Wittenberg chair of Greek at twenty-one, judging him second among the Germans only to “Erasmus…a Dutchman” — Melanchthon arrived a finished humanist and at once joined Luther’s cause. His 1518 inaugural De corrigendis adolescentiae studiis made the recovery of the sources a necessity of theology itself: since theology is “partly Hebrew and partly Greek,… the eternal languages are to be learned, and not be just mute actors when we deal with theology.”22 His Loci Communes (1521), the first systematic theology of the Reformation, turned the ad fontes reading of Romans into Protestant dogma, opening by setting the reformer’s salvation-centred theology against scholastic speculation: “to know Christ means to know his benefits and not… to reflect upon his natures and the modes of his incarnation.”23 Yet he kept the pagan classics in the Christian school while denying them any part in salvation — in his 1534 preface to Cicero’s De Officiis, “Philosophy does not provide confirmation of the will of God…; that pertains properly to the Gospel,” but its “precepts for civic life” a Christian commonwealth still needs.24 Where Erasmus’s philosophia Christi stopped short of Luther’s doctrines and broke with him, Melanchthon’s humanism ran straight on into them — the same tools pressed all the way to the Reformation’s conclusions. He is the Praeceptor Germaniae, the “teacher of Germany.” (His education program is on the liberal-arts timeline.) Full detail →
Off-timeline sub-claims about Christian humanism — theses, proof-texts, and controversies weighed on their own merits — are added here as they are researched. Related arguments that share a theme are grouped first; standalone arguments follow.
Two cases of the humanist method turned on an authoritative text — philology brought to bear on a document the church leaned on, correcting Scripture in the one case and convicting a forged charter in the other. Read together they are the movement’s clearest demonstration of what ad fontes criticism could do, and of why its critics feared it.
The sharpest single test of the humanist method. The “three heavenly witnesses” of 1 John 5:7 — the explicit trinitarian gloss the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit… these three are one — is a late Latin interpolation: no early Greek manuscript has it, no Greek father cites it through the fourth-century Arian controversies when it would have been decisive, and its documented trail runs from a c. 380 Latin allegory (Priscillian) into the Vulgate and only thence, in Erasmus’s own age, into a few Latinizing Greek copies.25 Erasmus omitted it from his 1516 and 1519 Greek New Testaments because he found it in no Greek copy; his critics said grammarians were unsettling the church’s authorized text, and under pressure he restored it in 1522 — from a single late manuscript (Codex Montfortianus, apparently rendered from the Latin) — with a note doubting it. So the method corrected rather than corroded: an interpolation removed is Scripture restored, and the Trinity was confessed by the very fathers whose text lacked the verse. Two favourite embellishments — that Erasmus made a rash promise, and that Montfortianus was forged to trap him — are later legends absent from his own works, not documented history.26 Full assessment →
The paradigm case of humanist philology turned on an ecclesiastical document. The Constitutum Constantini — the charter on which the medieval papacy’s temporal claims most leaned — is a later (eighth-century) forgery, and the text convicts itself on several independent counts: anachronistic vocabulary (“satraps” in a Roman decree; a feudal “fief”), institutions that did not yet exist (Constantinople named a patriarchal see “when it was not yet… a Christian city, nor named Constantinople, nor founded, nor planned”), and a self-contradictory date (Constantine’s fourth consulate, 315, paired with the consulate of Gallicanus, 317).27 Valla gave the case its decisive philological form in 1440, but he was not alone or even first: Nicholas of Cusa reached the verdict on historical grounds in 1433, and Reginald Pecock independently in England soon after — a threefold, independent conviction that no living scholarship disputes.28 Two honest limits keep it from being a clean win for its famous proponent: Valla’s tract is a politically-occasioned, invective-laden polemic (written for Alfonso of Aragon against Pope Eugenius IV over Naples) that was right about the philology, and unmasking the document removes one prop of the papacy’s temporal claims without by itself refuting the others. Full assessment →
The early-Reformation jibe — “Erasmus laid the egg, and Luther hatched it” — began as a charge from the monastic and Louvain critics who wished to discredit both men, and states a real thesis: that humanism’s ad fontes scholarship and its critique of ceremonies, indulgences, and the schoolmen caused the Protestant Reformation.29 The enabling form holds and is scarcely disputed: Luther used Erasmus’s Greek New Testament, opened the Ninety-Five Theses on Erasmus’s metanoeite correction, and inherited the Scripture-in-lay-hands piety of the Enchiridion and Paraclesis. But the parentage form the quip actually asserts is overstated — Erasmus repudiated Luther and stayed with Rome, the free-will controversy of 1524–25 exposed a doctrinal chasm, humanist “reform from within” ran on as a road not taken, and the Reformation had ample independent causes — so the historiography splits and Luther’s precise debt stays “an elusive problem.” Erasmus’s own retort named the gap: “I laid a hen’s egg; Luther hatched a bird of quite a different feather.”30 Full assessment →
The charge against the heart of the Erasmian program. Erasmus framed his whole ad fontes labour as a philosophia Christi — a “philosophy of Christ” open to every plowman and weaver, religion as an inward change of mind, “a life rather than a disputation” — and critics from Luther onward answered that this thins the Gospel into an imitable ethic, making Christ a teacher and example rather than a redeemer.31 The verdict turns on the yardstick. On Erasmus’s own texts the reading is a faithful, Christocentric piety: he grounds it in renascentia (“rebirth”), affirms sin, grace, atonement, and the sacraments, and aims the cleared text at the living “mind of Paul,” not a code of conduct — so the sharpest form of the charge (“example, not redeemer”) overstates. But it is not baseless: his emphasis falls by design on inward moral renewal and light on the mechanics of grace, and he wished to leave the freedom of the will — which Luther called “the vital spot” — undisturbed, so that a later moralizing Christianity could plausibly claim him.32 Faithful by the lights of Erasmus scholarship, thin by Reformation and Augustinian ones — genuinely contested, no clear winner. Full assessment →
A case study in humanist print culture. The Complutensian Greek New Testament was printed at Alcalá in 1514 — two years before Erasmus — but Cardinal Cisneros held it for the complete Bible; Erasmus, hearing of the project, rushed his Novum Instrumentum through Froben’s Basel press in 1516, secured a four-year exclusive privilege from Pope Leo X and the Emperor Maximilian, and reached the market first. His edition — by his own word “precipitated rather than edited” (praecipitatum verius quam editum), error-riddled, resting on late Byzantine minuscules — nonetheless hardened into the Textus Receptus behind the German and English Bibles, while the more careful Complutensian text arrived too late and in too small a printing to seize that place. So first-to-market speed and commercial privilege, more than scholarship, decided the printed Bible’s ancestor. Two honest limits: the Polyglot’s delay had several causes besides the privilege, and its readings survived diffused into the later received text through Stephanus and Beza — but neither touches the core.33 Full assessment →
Lorenzo Valla, The Treatise of Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine, trans. Christopher B. Coleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922), p. 85 (satraps) and p. 95 (Constantinople); the analysis is “often seen as marking the beginning of modern textual criticism” (Harvard University Press notice of the I Tatti edition). ↩
Valla, preface to the Annotationes in Novum Testamentum, trans. Christopher S. Celenza, “Lorenzo Valla’s Radical Philology,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42, no. 2 (2012): 365–394 (article). ↩
Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), ch. 2, on Erasmus’s 1505 Paris edition of Valla’s notes and its influence on the Novum Instrumentum of 1516. ↩
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (Oratio de hominis dignitate, c. 1486), trans. Elizabeth Livermore Forbes, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 223–225 (the Hermes Trismegistus opening and the God-to-Adam speech, “the maker and molder of thyself”). ↩
Pico, Oration, trans. Forbes (1948), pp. 242–245 (“pledged to the doctrines of no man, I have ranged through all the masters of philosophy… the ancient theology of Hermes Trismegistus… the Chaldaeans… Pythagoras… the occult mysteries of the Hebrews”) and p. 252 (the Kabbalah books, in which he saw “not so much the Mosaic as the Christian religion… the mystery of the Trinity, there the Incarnation of the Word, there the divinity of the Messiah”). The magic-and-Kabbalah thesis (Conclusiones 9>9, “Nulla est scientia quae nos magis certificet de divinitate Christi quam magia et Cabala”) is edited and translated in S. A. Farmer, Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486) (Tempe: MRTS, 1998), and quoted in “Christian Kabbalah,” Wikipedia. ↩
On the Rome disputation (planned January 1487), Innocent VIII’s commission, the condemnation of thirteen theses and then all nine hundred, the Apologia (1487), Pico’s flight and brief arrest in France, and his absolution under Alexander VI in 1493, see Paul Oskar Kristeller’s introduction in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (1948), pp. 215–219, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.” The condemnation’s language (“in part heretical, in part the flower of heresy… reproduce the errors of pagan philosophers”) is quoted at Wikipedia, “Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.” ↩
John Colet, An Exposition of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans… about the year 1497, trans. J. H. Lupton (London: Bell and Daldy, 1873), p. 95 (dating the epistle to Claudius’s reign and reading Romans xiii against Suetonius on the expulsion of the Jews from Rome). ↩
Erasmus to John Colet, October 1499, trans. in J. H. Lupton, A Life of John Colet, 2nd ed. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1909), p. 111; and Erasmus’s memorial letter to Justus Jonas (1521), The Lives of Jehan Vitrier… and John Colet, trans. Lupton (London: George Bell and Sons, 1883), pp. 23–24. ↩
The Convocation Sermon of Doctor John Colet Made at St. Paul’s, ed. Katherine Stearns (University of Dallas: CTMS Publishers, 2020), pp. 4–5 (original text in Lupton, Life of John Colet, 1909, Appendix C, pp. 298–300). On St Paul’s School under the Mercers, Erasmus, Lives of Vitrier and Colet, trans. Lupton (1883), pp. 27–28. ↩
Johann Reuchlin, De rudimentis hebraicis (Pforzheim: Thomas Anshelm, 1506), closing colophon (“Exegi monumentum aere perennius”, after Horace, Odes 3.30.1); facsimile at the Internet Archive. On the work as the first substantial Christian Hebrew grammar, see Britannica. ↩
Reuchlin, Recommendation whether to Confiscate, Destroy, and Burn All Jewish Books (1510), trans. Peter Wortsman, German History Intersections (Talmud and the commentaries); the concives line (“fellow citizens of one and the same Roman Empire”) as quoted in David H. Price, Johannes Reuchlin and the Campaign to Destroy Jewish Books (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), ch. 5. ↩
On the trial (Speyer acquittal 1514; Leo X’s condemnation of the Augenspiegel, 23 June 1520), Price, Campaign to Destroy Jewish Books (2011); the satire in Letters of Obscure Men (Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, 1515–1519), trans. Merrick Whitcomb, A Literary Source-book of the German Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1900), pp. 67–80. ↩
On the University of Alcalá, the trilingual College of San Ildefonso, the standing team of Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic scholars, and the Polyglot’s achievement (the first printed Greek New Testament, colophon 10 January 1514, and the editio princeps of the Septuagint), see Basil Hall, “The Trilingual College of San Ildefonso and the Making of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible,” Studies in Church History 5 (1969): 114–146, Cambridge Core, and Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ (Princeton, 1983), ch. 3; printing dates at “Complutensian Polyglot Bible,” Wikipedia. Full detail on the witness page. ↩
Antonio de Nebrija’s plea (“light up once more the two unlit torches of our religion, the Hebrew and the Greek languages”) and his withdrawal after Cisneros declined to let the Vulgate be corrected against the originals: Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ (1983), ch. 3; the plea reproduced in “The Complutensian Polyglot—A Historic Translation Tool.” The prologue’s “two thieves” account of the layout (the Vulgate between the Hebrew and Greek as Jesus between the two thieves, the Roman Church in the centre) and Cisneros’s refusal of a vernacular column (“far from the reach of the common man”): Bridwell Library Special Collections, “The Complutensian Polyglot Bible” and Wikipedia. The contrasting Erasmian plowman wish is from the Paraclesis (see n. 13). ↩
Erasmus, Annotationes in Novum Testamentum, note on Matthew 3:2 (“Meo iudicio commode verti poterat Resipiscite”), against the Vulgate’s poenitentiam agite; text and translation in Andrew J. Perreault, “The Annotations of Erasmus on Matthew 3:2,” GraceLife. On the correction removing the philological link to the sacrament of penance, and Luther’s use of it, Roland H. Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom (New York: Scribner, 1969), ch. 6. ↩
Erasmus, Paraclesis (1516), anonymous early English translation, Hanover College Historical Texts; the standard modern rendering in John C. Olin, ed., Christian Humanism and the Reformation: Selected Writings of Erasmus, 3rd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1987), the Paraclesis. ↩
Erasmus, Enchiridion militis Christiani (1503), trans. Charles Fantazzi, in The Erasmus Reader, ed. Erika Rummel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 145; reproduced at Wikiquote, “Relic.” ↩
Thomas More, Utopia — Book 1 (the “sheep… eat up… the very men themselves” enclosure passage) in Ralph Robinson’s 1551 translation, Luminarium; Book 2 (“the only commonwealth that truly deserves that name… where no man has any property”; pride, “that plague of human nature… that infernal serpent”) in Gilbert Burnet’s 1684 translation, Project Gutenberg. ↩
Erasmus, dedicatory epistle (“Erasmus to his friend Thomas More”) prefixed to The Praise of Folly (Moriae Encomium, composed 1509 in More’s house), trans. John Wilson (1668), Project Gutenberg. ↩
Thomas More, “Letter to the University of Oxford” (1518), Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 15, ed. and trans. Daniel Kinney (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); on the letter’s occasion and its defence of Greek and liberal studies against the self-styled “Trojans,” see Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Thomas More.” ↩
On More’s chancellorship (1529–1532), his controversy against Luther (Responsio ad Lutherum, 1523) and Tyndale (A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, 1529; The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, 1532–33), and his execution on 6 July 1535, see Wikipedia, “Thomas More” and Britannica. ↩
Johann Reuchlin to the Elector of Saxony (1518), recommending his great-nephew for the Wittenberg chair of Greek (“I know of no one among the Germans who is superior to him, save only Erasmus Roterodamus, and he is a Dutchman”); on the kinship and the 1509 renaming of Schwartzerdt to the Greek Melanchthon, see Wikipedia, “Philip Melanchthon.” The inaugural quotation is from De corrigendis adolescentiae studiis (1518), trans. Ralph Keen, A Melanchthon Reader (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), p. 55 (= Corpus Reformatorum 11:23), reproduced in Robert A. Sorensen, “Philip Melanchthon and Classical Christian Education” (2010), p. 8. ↩
Philip Melanchthon, Loci Communes theologici (1521), trans. Wilhelm Pauck, in Melanchthon and Bucer, Library of Christian Classics 19 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), the Loci Communes. ↩
Philip Melanchthon, preface to Cicero’s De Officiis (1534), trans. Sachiko Kusukawa, Philip Melanchthon: Orations on Philosophy and Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 81 (= Corpus Reformatorum 11:259); reproduced in Sorensen, “Philip Melanchthon and Classical Christian Education” (2010), p. 6. ↩
Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994), pp. 647–649 (the Comma’s absence from the early Greek witnesses and fathers, its origin as a Latin allegory of the earthly witnesses, the Priscillian citation of c. 380, and its spread through the Old-Latin and Vulgate tradition); Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 146–147. Full adjudication on the argument page. ↩
H. J. de Jonge, “Erasmus and the Comma Johanneum,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 56, no. 4 (1980): 381–389, Leiden University repository (no evidence in Erasmus’s works or letters of a “promise” to insert the Comma, or that he thought Montfortianus forged; Metzger later added a corrective footnote); on the manuscript, see Wikipedia, “Codex Montfortianus.” ↩
Lorenzo Valla, The Treatise of Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine, trans. Christopher B. Coleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922), p. 85 (satraps) and p. 95 (Constantinople); on the anachronistic feudal vocabulary and the self-contradictory consular date (Constantine’s fourth consulate, 315, with the consulate of Gallicanus, 317), and the modern dating of the forgery to the eighth century, see Wikipedia, “Donation of Constantine.” Full adjudication on the argument page. ↩
On Nicholas of Cusa’s earlier detection (De concordantia catholica III.2, 1433, calling the Donation a dictamen apocryphum) and Reginald Pecock’s independent English detection (The Repressor of over much Blaming of the Clergy, c. 1450–57), see Joseph M. Levine, “Reginald Pecock and Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine,” Studies in the Renaissance 20 (1973): 118–143, Cambridge Core; on Valla’s political occasion (secretary to Alfonso of Aragon during his conflict with Pope Eugenius IV over Naples), see the Hanover College Historical Texts introduction. ↩
On the saying’s origin as a charge from Erasmus’s monastic and Louvain critics, and on the debated extent of Luther’s debt, see the Christian History account, “The man who yielded to no one” (Christian History Institute); Roland H. Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom (New York: Scribner, 1969), ch. 8; and Arnoud Visser, “Irreverent Reading: Martin Luther as Annotator of Erasmus,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 48, no. 1 (2017): 87–109, preprint (“Luther’s precise debt to Erasmus has remained an elusive problem”). Full adjudication on the argument page. ↩
Erasmus’s reported retort (“I laid a hen’s egg; Luther hatched a bird of quite a different feather”), widely repeated in the Erasmus–Luther literature and discussed in Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom (1969); a reported saying current in the scholarship rather than a line traced to a single dated autograph. ↩
Erasmus, Paraclesis (1516), anonymous early English translation, Hanover College Historical Texts (the “philosophy of Christ… a life rather than a disputation… the restoring or repairing of our nature,” which Erasmus calls renascentia, rebirth); modern rendering in John C. Olin, ed., Christian Humanism and the Reformation, 3rd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1987), the Paraclesis. Full adjudication on the argument page. ↩
Martin Luther, De servo arbitrio (The Bondage of the Will, 1525), trans. Henry Cole, Christian Classics Ethereal Library (“we make Christ superfluous…”; the praise of Erasmus for aiming at “the vital spot” rather than trifles); on Erasmus’s theology as genuinely Christocentric against the older “rationalist” portrait, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Desiderius Erasmus,” with Roland H. Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom (1969) and Cornelis Augustijn, Erasmus: His Life, Works, and Influence (1991). ↩
On the priority dispute: the Complutensian Greek New Testament printed 1514 but held for the complete Bible; Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum printed at Basel (October 1515–March 1516) under a four-year exclusive privilege from Pope Leo X and the Emperor Maximilian, reaching the market first; Erasmus’s own verdict on his rushed first edition (“praecipitatum verius quam editum,” 1517) and its reliance on late Byzantine minuscules that nonetheless became the Textus Receptus. See “Novum Instrumentum omne,” Wikipedia; Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 145–146; and “Complutensian Polyglot Bible,” Wikipedia (Complutensian readings drawn into the later received text through Stephanus and Beza). Full adjudication on the argument page. ↩