“Fidelius,apertius,significantius”: The New Testament Translated and Edited by Erasmus of Rotterdam,1516

On one of the first days of March 1516, now five hundred years ago, Johann Froben, printer and publisher in Basle, published the first edition of the New Testament prepared by Erasmus of Rotterdam (1467/9–1536). The book was a folio volume of 1027 printed pages. It included as its principal constituent a new Latin version of the entire New Testament, as well as a recension of the Greek text and an extensive commentary in which Erasmus explains and justifies the choices he had made in his translation in deviating from the Latin Vulgate. Twelve hundred copies of the first edition were printed, ¹ 3,300 of the first and second editions together, enormous numbers at the time. ² During the rest of his life, Erasmus kept working at his New Testament: he produced four revised and expanded editions in 1519, 1522, 1527, and 1535.

Erasmus’s editions of the New Testament are incontestably a landmark in the history of biblical scholarship as well as in the history of Bible translation. His new version of the whole New Testament in more contemporary, humanistic Latin was the first Latin version to be published since the Vulgate had appeared more than a millennium before. Gradually, the Vulgate had obtained a dominant position. The great merit of Erasmus is that he raised many people’s consciousness that the Bible they used was not the unassailable, sacrosanct original text, but a translation admitting of discussion and dependent on texts—written in other languages—which demand interpretation and often allow more than one interpretation. He made it clear that, grammatically speaking, the authority of any translation, even the Vulgate, was dependent on that of the underlying Greek and Hebrew texts. He showed that the source text may admit of, and sometimes requires, another rendering than the current one. He also argued that the translator has to take into account the audience and readership for which the translation is designed and to determine beforehand in which style the translation will be composed. Nowadays such ideas may seem self-evident, but to many of Erasmus’s contemporaries they were not; it is to a large extent owing to him that they have progressively found acceptance.

The Greek text edited by Erasmus was the first printed Greek text of the whole New Testament ever published. It has exercised an enormous influence on the textual form and versions of the New Testament in the sixteenth and later centuries. The 1519 edition became the basis of Luther’s German version (1521). The editions of Henricus Stephanus and Theodorus Beza are heavily dependent on that of Erasmus; via these editions, his text became the basis of the English Authorized Version and other translations in national languages. Until far into the nineteenth century the Erasmian text was “generally accepted,” the textus receptus. Nowadays, most textual critics prefer another text type, but one cannot blame Erasmus for having spread an inferior text. In his time, the criteria we use to assess readings and manuscripts were still largely unknown; his use of Byzantine manuscripts is fully understandable given the dramatic under-representation of other text types in the manuscripts available both to him and to us.

The long commentary accompanying Erasmus’s New Testament, his Annotationes in Novum Testamentum, is important because it is the earliest specimen of an extensive critical philological discussion of the meanings of the Greek text. Erasmus discusses the meaning of Greek words and compares their use with that in Hellenistic authors (he had translated Lucian and Plutarch himself). He records variant readings in Greek and Latin manuscripts and discusses exegetical views of patristic authors. He often concludes that a translation different from that of the Vulgate has to be preferred. Theological remarks are not entirely absent, but linguistic, philological, text-critical, and historical observations prevail.

Up to the present day, Erasmus’s editions continue to influence our Bibles in an important way. In most if not all Bibles and New Testaments, Greek as well as translated, Acts figures between John and Romans. This is in contravention to the Greek manuscripts, in which Acts occurs normally in combination with the Catholic Epistles. Erasmus wanted to keep Acts as close to Luke as possible, as works of one and the same author, but did not dare separate John from the other Gospels; he therefore placed Acts immediately after John. ³ The sequence John–Acts–Romans in modern Bibles is directly due to Erasmus’s New Testament.

The significance of Erasmus in the history of Bible translation and biblical studies in general cannot possibly be overrated. The editors of this journal have decided therefore to mark the 500th anniversary of Erasmus’s first edition of the New Testament by devoting an entire issue to aspects of his work on the New Testament and its reception. They consider themselves fortunate to have found a group of highly competent authors willing to contribute to this project. Keith Elliott traces the sources Erasmus used for his editions and treats the significance of Erasmus for the history of the New Testament text. Henk Jan de Jonge examines the purpose Erasmus had in making his new Latin translation and the methods he used to realize this purpose. Grantley McDonald goes into the question of why Erasmus first omitted and later included the Comma Johanneum (1 John 5.7-8) in his editions, and both the causes and far-reaching consequences of this change. Alejandro Coroleu provides an overview of the debates Erasmus’s New Testament unleashed in Spain. Wim François investigates Erasmus’s ideas about the translation of the Bible in the vernaculars and the impact of his Latin translation on versions in the Low Countries.

The authors have used three major editions of Erasmus’s works. First, reference is made to the Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami: Recognita et Adnotatione Critica Instructa Notisque Illustrata, originally published by the North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam, subsequently by Elsevier in Amsterdam, and now currently by Brill in Leiden. This edition is referred to as ASD, an abbreviation of Amsterdam, the seat of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, under whose auspices the Opera omnia are being prepared. The ASD is organized in nine “Ordines,” following the way Erasmus himself had organized his oeuvre (see more on this in the article by J. K. Elliott). Second, the authors also have made use of the early eighteenth-century Leiden edition of Erasmus’s works, which was prepared by Jean le Clerc (or Johannes Clericus) and appeared in ten volumes in 1703–1706. Usually, this edition is referred to as LB, which stands for Lugdunum Batavorum, the Latin name for Leiden, where the books were published. Finally, the authors have used P. S. Allen’s edition of Erasmus’s correspondence, which was published in eleven volumes from 1906 to 1958 in Oxford. Although Allen was not the only editor (among the other editors were his wife, H. M. Allen, and from 1938 onwards, H. W. Garrod), the work is usually referred to as “Allen.”

The editors wish to thank all five authors very much for their original contributions for this special issue.

Dr. Marijke H. de Lang, Guest EditorUnited Bible Societies