Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Reformation of the Bible: The Bible of the Reformation: Catalog of the Exhibition by Valerie R. Hotchkiss and David Price, pp. 3-62. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996.

[In the following excerpt, Pelikan discusses Bible translations during the Reformation, identifying the significant continuity between the Renaissance traditions of Christian humanism and the translation efforts of Reformation scholars. Hebrew text in this essay has been replaced by transliterations set within brackets.]

SACRED PHILOLOGY

The scholarly foundations for “the Reformation of the Bible” as well as for “the Bible of the Reformation” were laid by the principles and methods of what Paul Oskar Kristeller has called “sacred philology,”¹ which became the common property of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Mutatis mutandis, therefore, Anthony Grafton's description of most humanists in the Renaissance would apply also to many scholars in the Reformation: “The men who called themselves humanists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries … hoped that they could renovate education, literature, philosophy, and theology, not by looking to an uncertain future but by turning backward to a perfect past. Convinced that they could find the best models for literature, the soundest philosophy, the most accurate history, and the best guidance for conduct in the accumulated wisdom of the Greeks and Romans, the Bible, and the writings of the fathers of the Church, they turned to books for the knowledge that they considered most worth having.”²

Thus when Luther's junior colleague, the wunderkind Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560), was teaching the Greek Classics and the Greek New Testament simultaneously at the young University of Wittenberg, he was quite unselfconsciously linking the Reformation and the Christian Renaissance in a relation of mutual support. Luther, too, while at the Coburg during the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, busied himself both with a task that seemed appropriate to the Reformation, translating the Book of Ezekiel from Hebrew to German, and with a task that seemed more appropriate to the Renaissance, translating the fables of Aesop from Greek to German.³

RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION

Through much of the twentieth century, however, such a linkage has not suited scholarly fashion, which, to the extent that it has not subsumed them both under Early Modern social history, has been dictating an increasingly sharp distinction between the two movements traditionally denominated under the titles “Renaissance” and “Reformation.” An instructive documentation of this shift is provided by comparing the volumes bearing the subtitle “Renaissance” in the Cambridge Modern History and in the New Cambridge Modern History, each of these being the first of the set. That volume in the Cambridge Modern History, written around the beginning of the twentieth century and published in 1902, contained a brace of chapters entitled, respectively, “The Classical Renaissance” (by Richard C. Jebb) and “The Christian Renaissance” (by M. R. James), with such Reformation figures as Philipp Melanchthon and Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) appearing in the first, and such Reformation works as the Magdeburg Centuries (1559-74) in the second; there is no genuine counterpart to either of these chapters in the revised work, which was written at midcentury. Nevertheless, whatever abiding validity there may prove to be in such a dichotomy between Renaissance and Reformation, even its most partisan defenders are obliged to recognize that there are also significant points of convergence between the two, and in some respects the growing edge of scholarship gives indications of moving back in the direction of that recognition.⁴ Among such points of convergence between Renaissance and Reformation, none is of greater importance for both than sacred philology. For although the Renaissance was far more than humanism, and humanism was far more than philology, the judgment of the founder of modern Renaissance study, Jakob Burckhardt (1818-97), remains true. Burckhardt felt obliged to “insist upon it, as one of the chief propositions of this book, that it was not the revival of antiquity alone, but its union with the genius of the Italian people, which achieved the conquest of the Western world.” Yet he insisted no less that his entire account of the Italian Renaissance was “coloured in a thousand ways by the influence of the ancient world; and though the essence of the phenomena might still have been the same without the classical revival, it is only with and through this revival that they are actually manifested to us.”⁵

The history of the Renaissance in Italy has, with good reason, predominated in the interpretation of the Renaissance as a whole; with equally good reason, the interpretation of the Reformation as a whole has been dominated by the history of the Reformation in Germany. One unfortunate result of this division of labor, however, has been its effect on the study of the Northern Renaissance, and consequently on the interpretation of the relation between it and the Reformation.⁶ The controversy over the freedom of the will in 1524-25 between Erasmus and Luther has sometimes served as the agon of the distinction. Having been one of the few scholars to have a role in editing the works both of Luther (in the American Edition of Luther's Works, where I had responsibility specifically for his exegetical writings in volumes 1-30) and of Erasmus (in the Toronto Edition of the Collected Works of Erasmus, where I served for some years on the Editorial Board), I have had repeated occasion in both contexts to lament the dichotomy, which tends to obscure Luther's dependence on the scholarship of Erasmus for his study and interpretation of the Greek New Testament, as well as Luther's major contribution, as an exegete and perhaps above all as a translator of the Bible, to the clarification and even the correction of some of the philological insights of Erasmus. In a personal sense, then, this essay is my attempt to redress that imbalance.

The most interesting venue for the study of the implications of philology for the interrelation of Renaissance and Reformation is the sixteenth-century university. Already a century before, at Oxford and then even more dramatically at Prague, universities had been the battleground of the Reformation. As a Master of Arts in the university, as university professor and preacher, and then as rector at Prague, Jan Hus (ca. 1372-1415) was able to apply critical analysis to the issues of Christian doctrine and practice, and to take advantage of the traditional, if limited, guarantees of academic freedom provided by the medieval university in articulating and defending his findings; significantly, in the standard volume on the history of Charles University an entire chapter by František Šmahel is entitled simply “The Hussite University.”⁷ In Italy, by contrast, the scholars of the Renaissance, for example, Lorenzo Valla (ca. 1406-57), Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), and Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), did not congregate chiefly at such universities as Bologna but did their work with the support of noble and wealthy patrons and cultivated their intellectual association through the formation of such institutions as the celebrated Platonic Academy in Florence, where the study of Greek philology—and, through it, the study of Greek philosophy—made significant advances. It is to the Florentine Academy that we owe such foundational works as a complete translation of Plato into Latin by Marsilio Ficino; the scholarly quality of the edition is evidenced by its thirty-two-page index of concepts and technical terms at the beginning, and by Ficino's preface to his translation of Timaeus (replacing the Latin version of Calcidius), for example, its forty-one brief dissertations on various philological and philosophical problems of that influential Platonic dialogue.

The international intellectual traffic between the Northern and the Southern Renaissance is illustrated by the publishing history of Erasmus's Hecvba, et Iphigenia in Aulide. Between 1506 and 1518, it was published in Paris, Venice, Basel, and Florence. By contrast, at various new universities of Northern Europe the philological methodology of the new learning came into conflict both with the authority of Thomistic scholasticism and with the several varieties of nominalism and the via moderna. Two case studies for our purposes here are Tübingen and Wittenberg. Tübingen, in spite of its deserved reputation as a center of scholarly study, had not been hospitable to the new learning, and Melanchthon, having earned the degree of Master of Arts there in 1514 at the age of seventeen, departed for Wittenberg in 1518.⁸ Once arrived there and once associated with Martin Luther, he played a major role in what has been termed the “triumph of biblical humanism in the University of Wittenberg.”⁹ The controversy between Erasmus and Luther (in which Melanchthon found his loyalties deeply torn¹⁰) did nothing to diminish Luther's admiration for Erasmus as a philological scholar, much as he condemned Erasmus (unjustly) as an Epicurean skeptic. For his part, Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531) became the Reformer of Zurich in significant measure through the study of Erasmus, as his handwritten marginal glosses on the humanist's writings show.¹¹

THE RECOVERY OF GREEK

More recent scholarship has not discarded Burckhardt's conception of “the revival of antiquity” as a category for Renaissance learning, but it has amplified and deepened it. Fundamental to that “revival” was the rediscovery of Greek. To a degree that is easy to overlook, the ignorance of Greek had been a chronic disease in the intellectual life of Western Europe during an entire millennium, from the death of Augustine in 430 to the Council of Florence in 1439. Augustine himself was, as Peter Brown has said, “the only Latin philosopher in antiquity to be virtually ignorant of Greek.”¹² But he was by no means the last to suffer from such ignorance. An inability to read Byzantine Christian writers (not to mention the New Testament) with any real expertness in the original language led Thomas Aquinas astray into a dependence on misinterpretations of Eastern Christian theology, and therefore into a distortion of the differences between it and the Western church on so fundamental a point of dogma as the Filioque.¹³ The epics of Homer were known to the Middle Ages only at second hand, so that, as one Dantista has put it, “Homer is present merely as a quotation in the Vita Nuova. … Of Homer, ‘sovereign poet,’ Dante could have no direct knowledge. … He knew a few quotations from Homer and Aristotle, he knew ‘the matter of Troy’ from the current medieval romances, and he accepted Homer's sovereignty on authority.”¹⁴ Of the Platonic corpus, the West during most of the medieval period had little more than Timaeus, and that in the “crabbed”¹⁵ Latin translation of Calcidius, necessitating the explanatory comments of Ficino mentioned earlier; but the Republic and even the Apology were largely inaccessible.¹⁶ The preface to the edition of Homer published in 1488 presents itself as seeking to correct that “inopia librorum”, and in a touching letter dated 10 January 1354 Petrarch had described the thrill of finally owning a manuscript of Homer in Greek—but the frustration of not being able to read it!¹⁷

There had, of course, been exceptions all along.¹⁸ At least three of the most influential deserve to be mentioned individually for their relevance to our subject.¹⁹ The Greek learning of Jerome (ca. 347-ca. 419) was so substantial—indeed, Augustine called him an “expert in all three languages” because of his knowledge of Hebrew as well²⁰—that he was able to translate into Latin not only the Greek New Testament but several writings of the Greek church fathers, including the treatise of Didymus the Blind, On the Holy Spirit, which now survives only in that translation.²¹ Boethius (ca. 480-524) wanted to be seen as a faithful pupil of Augustine, bringing forth fruit from his “seeds.”²² But he far surpassed his master in philological erudition, translating the Organon of Aristotle into Latin and, in a celebrated poem in his Consolation of Philosophy, rendering a central passage of Plato's into Latin meter.²³ And John Scotus Erigena (ca. 810-ca. 877), “one of the most remarkable phenomena of intellectual history,”²⁴ acquired enough sophistication in Greek to take on the translating of the pseudonymous work of the Christian Neoplatonist who around the year 500 had written under the biblical name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of the apostle Paul (Acts 17:34). Despite his ignorance of Greek, therefore, Thomas Aquinas was able to draw on the work of these translators, so that, to cite the most striking instance, he quoted the Latinized Corpus Areopagiticum more than a thousand times in his works, including some crucial places in the Summa Theologica.²⁵ He also wrote a commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius.

It was, however, another and more recent translator of Greek into Latin who proved to be both a major influence on the thought of Thomas Aquinas and an anticipation of the revival of Greek with which we are concerned here: his fellow Dominican, William of Moerbeke (ca. 1215-ca. 1286), who, along with other Western scholars, undertook the retranslation of Aristotle directly from Greek into Latin as a replacement for the defective and misleading translations by way of Arabic that were in circulation.²⁶ An elegant eventual product of this medieval process of publishing the works of Aristotle in both Latin and Greek was to be the beautifully crafted volumes of Aristotle published at Venice by Aldus Manutius (1449/50-1515) in 1495-98, the fifth volume of which contains the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics in Greek. As Heiko Oberman has pointed out in commenting on the new edition of Aristotle that was subsequently projected by Melanchthon, such an interest in publishing an “authentic” text of Aristotle should by no means be regarded as an exclusive prerogative of humanism in its opposition to scholasticism, but represented a connection to the work of such scholars as William of Moerbeke, and thus to that of the high scholastics.²⁷

For during the century and a half that followed the death of Thomas Aquinas in 1274, the knowledge and study of Greek, that is, of the Greek Classics but also of the Greek church fathers as well as of the Greek New Testament, had increased mightily in the West.²⁸ In part this was due to the renewal of union negotiations between the Eastern and the Western churches from the Council of Lyons in 1274 (which his death prevented Thomas Aquinas from attending) to the Council of Florence in 1439.²⁹ Eventually the instruction in Greek grammar that had been made available through tutoring by refugee Greeks took printed form for students in the West who knew Latin but not Greek. Constantinos Lascaris (1434-1501) was the author of the first book to be printed entirely in Greek, which appeared in 1476 and which was subsequently published by the celebrated Aldine Press at Venice in 1495.³⁰ His grammar contained, among other grammatical helps, explanations of the distinctive characteristics of Greek nouns and verbs and a guide to Greek prepositions; later editions had Greek and Latin on facing pages. The first Greek Classic to be printed was the 1488 edition of Homer, both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Particularly interesting as an ancestor of Renaissance interests was Plutarch, whose Parallel Lives had compared Greek and Roman culture as embodied in various of their great men: the edition of the Vitae Parallelae of Plutarch first published at Rome by Ulrich Han and later at Venice by Nicolas Jenson in 1478 documents Renaissance interest in this Greco-Roman writer, who, in the words of a modern reference book, “was in his writings an active exponent of the concept of a partnership between Greece, the educator, and Rome, the great power,”³¹ thus between the ancient Hellenic culture toward which the humanists of the Renaissance were aspiring and the ancient Latin culture of which they regarded themselves as the legitimate heirs and restorers after the neglect and misunderstanding of the Middle Ages.

Neither Hellenic culture nor Latin culture, moreover, could be confined to its Classical, pagan expression. Greek had become a world language when it broke out of the confines of Attica and the Peloponnesus and when, through the historic achievements of Alexander the Great and of the Egyptian city that took his name, “Hellenism” became “Hellenistic.” For “Hellenism, which is a genuine Greek word for Greek culture (Hellênismos), represented language, thought, mythology, and images that constituted an extraordinarily flexible medium of both cultural and religious expression,”³² including not only the Septuagint, the writings of Philo Judaeus (ca. 13 bce-ca. 45 ce), and the Greek New Testament, but the vast corpus of Greek patristic literature. Qualitatively similar, but quantitatively even more extensive because the missionary activity of the Western church eventually carried Latin to all parts of the earth whereas Eastern missions translated the Byzantine liturgy from Greek into such languages as Old Church Slavonic, was the Nachleben of the language of pagan Rome in the Vulgate and the Mass and in the still vaster corpus of Latin patristic literature, as “the new philological methods of editing and commenting which the humanists had developed in their studies of the ancient authors were also applied to the Latin Church Fathers.”³³ Archaism and snobbery led some of the Renaissance humanists to a “reproduction of antiquity,” which slavishly copied the Latinity of Cicero and Pliny.³⁴ The end result of this process was what one study has called a “maniacal Ciceronianism,” which absolutized the Latin of Cicero, its constructions and even its vocabulary, as the norm for correct language.³⁵ Nevertheless, the books of the Greek and Latin church fathers, many of the former having become accessible for the first time in the West, were accorded the same editorial care and typographical embellishment as were their non-Christian antecedents. The sheer statistics in the history of editing and publishing patristic works continue to be massively convincing,³⁶ but some of the individual editions make the point even more effectively. Among these, the editio princeps of Augustine's The City of God, produced at Subiaco in 1467 and lavishly embellished in the Bridwell and Yale copies, yields to none of the editions of the Greek and Latin Classics as a masterpiece of early printing. Such books as this laid the foundations for the publishing of patristic editions in the centuries to follow.³⁷

“A FLOOD OF BIBLES”

Nevertheless, the crowning achievements of sacred philology in the age of the Renaissance, and the ones most important here because of their direct pertinence to the history of the Reformation, were of course its Bibles, so much so that a handbook published in the 1970s refers to this phenomenon as “a flood of Bibles.”³⁸ In the West during the Middle Ages, the term Biblia—originally a Greek neuter plural, βιβλία, meaning “little books,” but eventually used as a Latin feminine noun in the singular—had in the first instance referred to one or another Latin version, increasingly to that of Jerome, usually called the Vulgate—thus to a translation rather than to an original version. Even in the Byzantine East, which frequently preened itself on its ability to use the Greek New Testament rather than a translation, the Old Testament was likewise a translation, the Septuagint. Thus through most of the history of the church, most Christian thinkers have been obliged to base their biblical interpretation and theology, in whole or in part, on translations of Sacred Scripture! The history of the Bible in the age of Renaissance and Reformation, therefore, must include attention to these translations, the Septuagint and the Vulgate, both of which, and especially the Latin Vulgate, shaped the development of biblical study and of biblical publishing. For even as they were criticizing the Vulgate, the scholars of the Renaissance saw themselves as the legitimate heirs of Jerome, emulating his scholarship to do what he had done while coming to different results.³⁹ Manuscripts of the Vulgate were among the most precious elements in the medieval patrimony to which the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries fell heir, and any European library with a claim to comprehensiveness had to own one or more of these.

Already in the Middle Ages, however, widespread critical attention had been paid to variations and corruptions in the text of the Vulgate, which evoked repeated programs of revision. The researches of Hans Glunz have called attention to the successive forms that such revision took in medieval biblical scholarship, particularly in the twelfth century.⁴⁰ His schematic diagram of the evolution of the Latin texts of the Bible during the Middle Ages, as recast by Raphael Loewe, graphically charts those successive texts, identified by Loewe as “1. Mixed vulgate and pre-Jerome Texts; 2. Texts essentially representative of Jerome; 3. Late and Neutral Texts.”⁴¹ A fascinating instance of the evolution of the text of the Latin Bible after Jerome, and one with intriguing connections to the history of Mariological devotion and speculation, is the protevangelium of Genesis 3:15. The New Jerusalem Bible translates it: “I shall put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; it will bruise your head, and you will strike its heel.” But in a footnote the njb explains: “The Greek version has a masculine pronoun (‘he,’ not ‘it’ will bruise …), thus ascribing the victory not to the woman's descendants in general but to one of her sons in particular, and thus providing the basis for the messianic interpretation given by many of the Fathers. The Latin version has a feminine pronoun (‘she’ will bruise …) and since, in the messianic interpretation of our text, the Messiah and his mother appear together, the pronoun has been taken to refer to Mary.”

It was evidently the rendering of the Septuagint, α[UNK]τόs sου τηρ[UNK]sει κεφαλ[UNK]ν, that underlay one of the earliest Christian applications of the text to Jesus as Messiah, that of Irenaeus of Lyons (even though we now have this only in the Latin translation of Irenaeus, the Greek original having been lost).⁴² From such evidence as (1) a relatively early manuscript of Jerome's translation, the Ottobonianus, (2) his own earlier comments in the Quaestiones Hebraicae in Genesin, and (3) references to his translation by Pope Leo I (ca. 400-461), scholars have concluded that Jerome did render the text in Latin with the masculine pronoun: “ipse conteret caput tuum” (emphasis added). But soon thereafter the feminine pronoun, “ipsa conteret,” began to appear, requiring a more subtle messianic interpretation.⁴³ Such early medieval interpreters as Bede and Ambrosius Autpertus took the feminine pronoun to refer to the church, but Isidore of Seville and others applied it to the Virgin.⁴⁴ By the High Middle Ages, so influential an interpreter as Bernard of Clairvaux could comment: “To whom is this victory to be attributed, if not to Mary? Without a doubt it was she who crushed the venomous head.”⁴⁵ It was, fittingly, into the mouth of Bernard of Clairvaux that Dante, in the final canto of the Divine Comedy, placed a hymn in praise of the Virgin Mary.

THE TEXT OF THE VULGATE

Especially important in the history of the textual criticism of the Vulgate had been the revisions and corrections developed by the Dominican and Franciscan scholars of the thirteenth century.⁴⁶ But at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century the philological enterprise of textual criticism was given a new impetus by the need to establish the correct text for the printed editions of the Latin Bible that were beginning to appear.⁴⁷ The “42-line” Latin Bible of Johannes Gutenberg (ca. 1397-1468),⁴⁸ which was the first major book to be printed from movable metal type, appears to have been published between 1452 and 1455. Jeremiah 31:33 is a text that already in the New Testament (Heb 8:10) had been taken as a prophecy of the new revelation in Christ: “Post dies illos dicit dominus dabo legem meam in visceribus eorum: et in corde eorum scribam eam: et ero eis in deum, et ipsi erunt michi in populum.” By the end of that decade and the beginning of the next, other Latin Bibles were being released, including the “36-line” Bible, which may also have been by Gutenberg, and the Biblia Latina published in Mainz by Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer, dated 14 August 1462. The period of the Renaissance and Reformation, which on one hand gave new impetus both to the study of the Hebrew and Greek originals and to the production of vernacular versions of Holy Scripture, nevertheless continued on the other hand the pressure for the clarification and purification of the text of the Latin Vulgate. Robert Estienne, or “Stephanus” (1503-59), was a leading figure in this enterprise, as well as in the editing of the Greek texts of both Testaments.⁴⁹ His masterpiece edition of the Vulgate, the Biblia in two parts, first appeared in Paris during 1527-28.

The state of the Vulgate text was a matter of special concern to the assembled council fathers at the Council of Trent, showing just how much “the Reformation of the Bible” was a part of the Catholic Reformation and not only of the Protestant Reformation. For at their fourth session, on 8 April 1546, they decreed that “from all the Latin editions of the sacred books which are in circulation” the edition that was to be regarded as “authentic” was “the old well known Latin Vulgate edition [haec ipsa vetus et vulgata editio] which has been tested in the church by long use over so many centuries”. This official approval of the Vulgate could be, and was, construed by some as a declaration of its infallibility.⁵⁰ But the same session of the Council of Trent went on almost immediately to “decree and determine that hereafter the holy scriptures, particularly this ancient Vulgate edition, shall be printed after a thorough revision [quam emendatissime].”⁵¹ That call for a thorough revision of the received text of the Latin Vulgate was taken up in earnest by Pope Sixtus V exactly forty years later, in 1586, with the appointment of a commission for the preparation of an authentic edition; it produced a printed version in 1590, which, however, proved to be so defective that it was withdrawn. Under the leadership of Pope Clement VIII, the work of the commission was continued and drastically revised, with the Jesuit scholar Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621) bringing to the task his lifelong research on the Vulgate text.⁵² The outcome was the Clementine or Sixto-Clementine edition of 1592-93, Biblia Sacra Vulgatae Editionis Sixti Quinti Pont. Max. jussu recognita atque edita, which acquired normative status.⁵³ In modern times, a major contribution to the textual criticism of the Vulgate New Testament came from John Wordsworth (1843-1911), Anglican bishop of Salisbury, and Henry Julian White (1859-1934), whose edition was published between 1889 and 1954 and is conveniently available in an “editio minor,” Nouum Testamentum Latine, prepared by White and issued by Clarendon Press at Oxford in 1911, with a corrected edition in 1920. But calls for further revision and correction have continued also within Roman Catholicism, especially in the wake of the biblical encyclical of Pope Pius XII, Divino afflante Spiritu of 30 September 1943, which insisted that the Tridentine decree pertained “exclusively to the Western church [latinam solummodo respicit Ecclesiam],” within which the Vulgate possessed a “juridical authority [authentia iuridica],” but not a “critical authority.”⁵⁴ The Second Vatican Council affirmed that the church “keeps in honour [semper in honore habet]” both the Latin Vulgate and the Greek Septuagint; but the council vigorously promoted vernacular Scriptures, as well as vernacular liturgies, and, quoting verbatim from Divino afflante Spiritu, urged that such translations of the Scriptures into vernacular languages be derived “especially from the original texts of the sacred books [praesertim ex primigenis sacrorum librorum textibus]” rather than from either the Vulgate or the Septuagint.⁵⁵

That twentieth-century affirmation of the prime authority of “the original texts of the sacred books” by Pope Pius XII and then by the Second Vatican Council may be seen as an ultimate vindication, more than four centuries later, of the sacred philology of the Renaissance and the Reformation. For although the humanists did urge that the corruptions of the Vulgate text, which had occurred through its transmission from one medieval copyist to another, made the production of a critical edition of the Latin text mandatory, their chief criticism was directed against the inadequacies, indeed the inaccuracies, of the Vulgate as such, which no collation of Latin manuscripts, however thorough, could be expected to set straight. In his Collatio Novi Testamenti of 1444, the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla, “the first critic among humanistic historians,”⁵⁶ identified many of these inadequacies and inaccuracies.⁵⁷ Valla is probably best remembered in the history of scholarship for his critical examination of the Donation of Constantine, which he produced four years earlier than the Collatio Novi Testamenti but which was first published in 1506 and then again in a more widely circulated edition by Luther's humanistic supporter Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523). This medieval document had represented itself as the act of a grateful Emperor Constantine (†337), granting to Pope Sylvester I (†335) authority over “the four principal sees, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Jerusalem,” as well as over Rome, thus over all five of the patriarchal centers of the church, and over the Roman Empire.⁵⁸ In his De Monarchia Dante had challenged the legal right of the emperor to make any such grant.⁵⁹ Others, including Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64), as reprinted in Hutten's edition of Valla, and Bishop Reginald Pecock (ca. 1393-1461), had attacked its authenticity. But it fell to Valla to apply the philological method of Renaissance humanism to the critical examination of the Donation, identifying anachronisms in its terminology and in its use of geographical nomenclature and thereby demonstrating that it could not be what it purported to be.⁶⁰ But what modifications, if any, were called for in this philological method when it was applied to the biblical text if, as Valla was contending, it was necessary to turn from the Latin Vulgate to the Greek original of the New Testament?

THE GREEK NEW TESTAMENT

Valla's Collatio Novi Testamenti of 1444 was not published in his lifetime but lay in the library of a Belgian monastery. There it was found, and printed at Paris in 1505 with the title Annotationes in latinam Novi Testamenti interpretationem, at the behest of Desiderius Erasmus, for whom this was “probably the most crucial book he ever read.”⁶¹ Just over a decade later there appeared the most crucial book Erasmus ever published, the Novum instrumentum omne of 1516, the first of the five succeeding editions of the Greek New Testament produced by him over the next two decades, the first two of which are included in the Catalog.⁶² In April 1515 Johann Froben of Basel wrote to Erasmus, urging him to produce his long-contemplated edition of the New Testament in Greek. Basing his work only on the four Greek manuscripts available to him in Basel,⁶³ the earliest of these dating only to the twelfth century, Erasmus produced an edition that was, he acknowledged, “more accurately called ‘rushed’ than ‘edited’ [praecipitatum verius quam editum].” Nevertheless, this volume of 1516 was the first edition ever published—though not, technically speaking, the first ever printed⁶⁴—of the Greek text of the New Testament, together with a Latin translation. This translation was not, however, an edition of the Vulgate, even of the Vulgate with textual emendations, but a new translation into Classical, Ciceronian Latin by Erasmus himself, which he appears to have completed even before editing the Greek. In addition, Erasmus included some Annotationes on several passages, which were an anticipation in miniature of the far more extensive annotations and paraphrases on various books of the New Testament that he was to go on publishing for the next two decades until his death in 1536. The edition of 1518-19, now called more conventionally Novum Testamentum, was likewise published in Basel by Johann Froben. It was a great improvement over the first, having the benefit both of additional (and better) manuscripts and of more time for its preparation.⁶⁵ In the subsequent history of the New Testament text, as Bo Reicke has said, “Erasmus would probably have enjoyed the ironic turn of fate if he had known that his edition of the text would have inspired first biblical orthodoxy and afterwards biblical philology in such diverse ways.”⁶⁶

In importance and influence second only to Erasmus as an editor of the Greek New Testament was Robert Estienne, mentioned earlier for his 1527-28 edition of the Vulgate. His first Greek Bible, the Novum Testamentum Graece published at Paris in 1546, was in many ways a great improvement over the editions of Erasmus; but it was his Novum Testamentum Graece of 1550, which included the Johannine comma (1 Jn 5:7), that formed the basis of the Greek Textus Receptus for, among other translations, the Authorized Version of the English Bible (see Chapter 3), which therefore included this controversial variant.

THE CHRISTIAN RECOVERY OF THE “AUTHENTIC” OLD TESTAMENT

The application of the humanistic canons of sacred philology to the earlier and larger section of the Christian Bible entailed complexities that were in some significant respects much greater than those connected with the New Testament. For although there existed far fewer manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible and although these displayed far fewer textual variants, this relative simplification of the task of textual criticism was more than compensated for by several special characteristics and problems in what Christians called the Old Testament and what Jerome had called Hebraica veritas. At least three of these deserve special identification because of the importance they assumed in the Renaissance and the Reformation: the study of Hebrew, the status of the Septuagint, and the Old Testament canon.

The Study of Hebrew. The most evident problem was, of course, the Hebrew language. Although the Greek of the New Testament was not identical with the Attic Greek cultivated by the humanists, nor yet with the Byzantine Greek of their refugee mentors, anyone who had learned to read Plato or Sophocles could, with some adjustments to such lexicographical peculiarities as its Hebraisms and to such grammatical idiosyncrasies as the relative absence of the optative, handle the language of the apostle Paul or the Gospels (although the reverse was not the case, as has repeatedly been discovered by those who have fallen victim to the deplorable modern tendency in schools of theology to study only the Greek of the New Testament). But no similar prehistory or context was available to them for coping with Hebrew. The study of Hebrew by the humanists and the Reformers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was in fact less of an innovation than is sometimes supposed. As Beryl Smalley has pointed out in discussing the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, “Hebrew, in fact, absorbed and must to some extent have distracted Bacon's contemporaries from the study of Greek.”⁶⁷ For their knowledge of Hebrew and of rabbinic exegesis, medieval Christian scholars had been obliged to learn from Jewish scholars, as had Origen and Jerome before them.⁶⁸ The same was true now of Renaissance humanists, among whom the first important scholar of Hebrew was Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522). His handbook of Hebrew study is entitled to the honor of being the first significant such work by a Christian scholar, despite the book, two or three years earlier, by the ex-Franciscan Konrad Pellikan (1478-1556), with whom Luther was to correspond while he was working on Psalm 22.⁶⁹ Reuchlin's De rudimentis hebraicis appeared at Pforzheim in 1506, presenting the Hebrew alphabet with approximate Latin equivalents, including instructions about pronunciation, for example of the l: “Sibilus thau lingua inter superiores & inferiores dentes inserta & ore bleso”; it also included a Hebrew-Latin lexicon and a grammar of Hebrew, which “adopted the system of the Classical languages as a basis for the study of Hebrew.”⁷⁰ It is a pleasant conceit of this pioneering manual that its pages are numbered in reverse, that is, from right to left à la a book in Hebrew. But with their Hebrew learning, Reuchlin and other Christian Hebraists also acquired from their rabbinical mentors an acquaintance with the mysteries of the Kabbalah, which through them “found its way into the Christian world as a ‘philosophy’ [and] was highly appreciated both as a style of speculation and as a repository of extremely important hermeneutics.”⁷¹ In his De arte cabalistica of 1517, dedicated to Pope Leo X (1475-1521), Reuchlin strove to make this mysticism of the Hebrew language—thus “sacred philology” in a special sense—palatable to Christian readers, for example by explaining the mysterious meaning of the divine name (Ex 3:14): [ĕhyĕh äshĕr ĕhyĕh]. The study of Hebrew proved to be a double-edged sword in its implications for Jewish-Christian relations, however; for it provided some Christian humanists with yet another instrument in the long and painful history of intolerance and anti-Semitism, as Christians could now claim superiority to Jews even in this previously arcane knowledge.⁷² An important achievement in this recovery of Hebrew was the Biblia Hebraica of Sebastian Münster (1488-1552), which also played a significant role in the history of translation. The Christian use of Hebrew to replace the mistakes of the Vulgate was not confined to Protestants and their vernacular versions, for Santi Pagnini (1470-1541), an Italian Dominican, produced the first printed translation of the Bible into Latin from Hebrew and Greek; it was itself impeccably orthodox, but it was to play a significant part in the Bible translation of the celebrated Protestant heretic Michael Servetus (1509/11-53).

The Status of the Septuagint. A second problem was the status of the Septuagint translation, which, in a measure not matched even by the authority that would be assigned to the Vulgate by the decree of the fourth session of the Council of Trent, possessed what Ludwig Diestel terms “an unwarranted esteem” in the church.⁷³ Indeed, it could lay claim to divine inspiration, on the basis of the Jewish legend, narrated in the Letter of Aristeas and repeated by some of the church fathers, about its miraculous composition;⁷⁴ the first printed text of the Letter of Aristeas was incorporated into the Sweynheym-Pannartz Bible of 1471, the first Bible ever printed in Italy. In addition, it was the Greek Septuagint, not the Hebrew Bible in the original, that was the Bible of most of the New Testament writers, including the apostle Paul.⁷⁵ They had based their arguments on its translations—and even its mistranslations (for example, Mt 1:23 from Is 7:14 LXX, παρθ[UNK]νοs; Heb 1:7 from Ps 104:4 LXX, [UNK] ποι[UNK]ν τό[UNK]s [UNK]γγ[UNK]λουs α[UNK]το[UNK] πνεύματα). A comparison of the Septuagint with the Hebrew shows that in some passages the Greek translators must have had a different tradition of the vocalization of the consonants or even a different consonantal text, so that it is possible to make emendations in the Hebrew on the basis of the Greek, albeit with great circumspection.⁷⁶ For example, at Psalm 110:3, the received Masoretic text of the Hebrew reads [ämsḥä], “thy people,” but the Septuagint translates μετ[UNK] sο[UNK], “with thee,” which is also followed by the Vulgate's “tecum,” evidently reflecting a vocalization of the Hebrew consonants as [ämsḥä]. In a distinct category were those readings in the Septuagint, such as Psalm 22:16, which Christian exegesis had been using for its special purposes from earliest times as proof for the Crucifixion of Christ, while accusing Jewish scribes of having expunged from their text the evidence that was so supportive of Christian claims.⁷⁷ Like the Greek text of the New Testament, to which it was often joined in the manuscript tradition, the Greek text of the Septuagint had acquired many hundreds of textual variants, and it, too, was in desperate need of critical editing. Although it was in the Eastern rather than in the Western church that the Septuagint had canonical status, it was in the West that the philological study of the Septuagint moved forward. In the first Sixtine Edition of the Septuagint, Vetus Testamentum Iuxta Septuaginta, which was published in Rome by Francisco Zannetti in 1587, the preface of Pope Sixtus solemnly declared: “Volumus, & sancimus ad Dei gloriam, & Ecclesiae vtilitatem, vt Vetus Graecum Testamentum iuxtà Septuaginta, ita recognitum & expolitum, ab omnibus recipiatur, ac retineatur, quo potissimum ad Latinae vulgatae editionis, & veterum Sanctorum Patrum intelligentiam vtantur”.

To meet those several needs as they were perceived already in the third century, Origen of Alexandria had compiled the massive Hexapla, which in six columns contained the Hebrew text, a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew text, and four Greek translations: that of Aquila, the Septuagint, that of Symmachus, and that of Theodotion.⁷⁸ Although this monument had long since been lost except for fragments, it served as a model that became more practicable with the invention of printing, leading to one of the towering achievements of biblical scholarship and sacred philology in the Spanish Renaissance: the Complutensian Polyglot, Biblia Polyglotta, edited by Cardinal Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros (1436-1517) and printed in Alcalá by the University of Complutum between 1514 and 1517.⁷⁹ Its fifth volume contained the Greek New Testament and, having come off the presses in 1514, must be accorded chronological priority; but because Erasmus had an exclusive license, his Novum instrumentum omne of 1516 was the first published, though not the first printed, the Complutensian volume not having been distributed until 1522 or so. It is interesting that at Psalm 22:16 [21:17 LXX], where the Septuagint has [UNK]ρυξαν χε[UNK]ρ[UNK]s μου κα[UNK] πόδαs μου, and the Vulgate “foderunt manus meas et pedes meos” (reflected in the AV's “they pierced my hands and my feet”), the reading of the Complutensian Hebrew text corresponds to the Christian, which read the text as [kä'ärōō] (“they have pierced”) rather than [kä'ärēē] (“like a lion”), as the rabbinic tradition preferred. In his explanation of this word, John Calvin noted that “today all the Hebrew books agree on this reading” of [kä'ärēē], but he set it forth as “a probable conjecture that this passage was fraudulently corrupted by the Jews,” and he quoted the Septuagint as proof for this emendation of the Hebrew.⁸⁰ The format of the polyglot Bible continued to hold an appeal, and in whole or in part went on being published: the Psalterium published at Genoa by Pietro Paolo Porro in 1516 is a fine example. As a critical edition of the several texts in several languages, the most highly esteemed of the polyglot compilations is the London Polyglot of 1657, which included the Ethiopic and Persian texts.⁸¹

The Old Testament Canon. A third difficulty, which became obvious from even a superficial comparison of the Septuagint with the Hebrew, was the very scope of the biblical canon; for the Septuagint contained several books—Apocryphal as Protestants have tended to call them, or Deuterocanonical as Roman Catholics have tended to call them—that were absent from the Hebrew. Being a scholar of the Hebrew, Jerome had denied them equal status; this was, as Patrick Skehan has noted, “the one point on which the Church has not followed the formal teaching of her greatest Scriptural Doctor.”⁸² Augustine, by contrast, had accepted their authority, acknowledging that they were “regarded as canonical, not by the Jews, but by the church.”⁸³ Throughout the Middle Ages these conflicting tables of contents had coexisted and interacted, but the Christian rediscovery of the “original” Old Testament in Hebrew and the printing of the Hebrew Bible made the issue more acute in the age of the Reformation. On both philological and theological grounds, Protestants characterized the Apocrypha as, in Luther's phrase, “not to be equated with Holy Scripture and yet useful and good to read”. Also at stake was the question of the authority of the church to fix the canon of Scripture, with the Roman Catholic defenders of that authority charging that the principle of sola Scriptura was an argument in a circle because it depended on a prior definition of the canon by the church, and the Protestant critics of that authority maintaining that it had elevated the human opinions of bishops and councils to a level with the infallible word of God. In addition, the disputed books provided some of the best proof texts in support of such practices as the invocation of the saints and prayers for the dead, which tended to confirm the opinion of both sides about them.⁸⁴ Neither in the Augsburg Confession of 1530 nor even in the Formula of Concord of 1577 did the Lutheran Reformers go on record with a stated list of canonical books, although their position was clear from their introductions to the Bible and from their commentaries (not, however, altogether from their preaching, because they did go on basing occasional sermons on the Apocrypha, which they also went on printing, though as a separate section, in their Bibles). But at its fourth session, the Council of Trent listed all the books of the canon individually, including the Deuterocanonical ones, identifying “as sacred and canonical these entire books and all their parts as they have, by established custom, been read in the catholic church, and as contained in the old Latin Vulgate edition.”⁸⁵ Partly in response to Trent but also in keeping with their own definition of authority, confessions of faith in the Reformed and Calvinist tradition—which, for this purpose, must include Article 6 of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican Church—rejected the canonicity of the disputed books and listed the narrower, “Palestinian” canon as containing “those Canonical bookes of the olde and newe Testament, of whose aucthooritie was neuer any doubt in the Churche.”⁸⁶ Once again, the argument proceeded on grounds of theology, of Jewish usage, and of sacred philology—all at the same time—and thus it can be said to have led not only to the “Reformation of the Bible,” but to its re-formation as well.

EXEGESIS AND HERMENEUTICS

Sacred philology was not an end in itself, not even for the most bookish and pedantic of Renaissance humanists, much less for Reformation theologians. “Te totum applica ad textum, rem totam applica ad te [Apply yourself totally to the text, apply its content totally to yourself]!”: this winged word from the preface to the critical edition of the Greek New Testament by Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687-1752), an heir both of Reformation theology and of Renaissance sacred philology, has long served as the epigraph for the widely used Nestle edition of the Greek New Testament published by the Privilegierte Württembergische Bibelanstalt in Stuttgart. Whatever new insights into Hebrew grammar or Greek lexicography may have come from the scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, their biblical scholarship had as its goal to derive meaning from the text—indeed, the meaning of the text, which each of them believed could be found, and had been found by him—and to communicate that meaning both to other scholars and theologians and to the church.⁸⁷

What the Reformers claimed to have discovered in their study of the Bible, therefore, was not a philological insight as such, nor a historical fact as such (although it was also, to be sure, both of these), but the meaning of the Christian gospel; for it was their conviction that “the authority of a text … is identical with the understanding of the text,” and that it could not exist apart from that understanding.⁸⁸ “Hoc est Christum cognoscere, beneficia eius cognoscere [To know Christ is to know his benefits]” was the admonition of the humanist-cum-Reformer Philipp Melanchthon, in the first systematic theology of the Reformation, his Loci communes of 1521,⁸⁹ which was derived from his lectures on the Epistle to the Romans, eventually published in 1522. Similarly, as one of the wisest interpreters of another humanist-cum-Reformer, John Calvin, has summarized, “Calvin's great resource was his familiarity with the Bible and mastery of its contents. … His talents, training, and religious feeling for the meaning of Scripture were such that much of his interpretation defies the acids of modern critical research.”⁹⁰ Meanwhile, the Radical Reformation, as its most influential interpreter has noted, “stood for the most part with the classical Magisterial Reformation and was indeed largely dependent upon it in the recovery of the Bible and in the rejection of the medieval synthesis of Scripture, Tradition, and papal authority.”⁹¹ And the leading Thomist in the sixteenth century, who had negotiated with Luther in 1518, the Dominican Cardinal Cajetan—Tommaso de Vio (1469-1534)—had already expressed his long-standing scholarly and theological interest in biblical exegesis in his Jentacula novi testamenti of 1525. The fourth chapter of this collection of exegetical disquisitions had, for example, examined the Vulgate of the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount in the light of the standard medieval explanation of them as “counsels of perfection,” not to be attained fully until the life to come, suggesting that “the perfections that are set forth as ‘beatitudes’ function in the present life as objectives [perfectiones iste que vt beatitudines proponuntur sunt in presenti vita vt fines]”. In his later years Cajetan developed many exegetical opinions that brought upon him the criticism of the traditionalists for being closer to the views of the Protestant Reformers than to those of the medieval scholastics.⁹² Thus each major branch of the Reformation was, in one sense or another, what we are calling here a Reformation of the Bible, and whatever else the Reformation (or these several Reformations) may be said to have been, it was a major event in the history of the interpretation of the Bible, and it needs to be studied that way.⁹³ Reformation expositions of Scripture fall into several categories: learned expositions using Greek and Hebrew, annotated Bibles, sermonic expositions of individual passages or of entire sections or books of Scripture, and Bible histories and “biblical theologies.”

SCRIPTURE AND TRADITION

When a medieval theologian approached the Sacred Page, he did so with the consciousness that he was only the latest in a long series of biblical expositors from previous centuries in the history of the church; thus the earliest Latin Bible printed with glosses included the Glossa ordinaria of a ninth-century commentary on the words of Christ to Peter (Mt 16:18-20): “Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Therefore the recipient of the medieval academic degree of Magister in Sacra Pagina (Master of the Sacred Page), which, for example, was conferred on Thomas Aquinas in 1256, carried on an activity “which, by definition, had only a measure of originality,” as Père Chenu has described it, but which in Thomas's case “must certainly have extended over the whole of his teaching career since commenting on the Bible was the prime task of the master in theology.”⁹⁴ Out of his many sets of exegetical works, the most influential was the Catena Aurea super quattuor evangelistas—or, as he himself called it, Expositio continua in Matthaeum, Marcum, Lucam et Johannem, which dates from 1262-64; our examples, all from the “cradle of printing,” document its popularity in the Renaissance. The “measure of originality” in this work was, at one level, absolutely nil, for the book consisted entirely of Thomas's compilation of quotations from patristic and other sources in explanation of the text of the four Gospels. But there was a significant element of originality nevertheless; for those patristic sources extended beyond the customary dependence on Augustine and other Latin fathers to include newly available writings of the Greek church fathers, who were assuming a new importance because of the efforts connected with the upcoming Council of Lyons in 1274 to repair the schism between East and West. “That this commentary may be more complete and have more continuity,” Aquinas explained in the dedication of the second part, “I have had many works of the Greek doctors translated into Latin, and I have added extracts of them to the commentaries of the Latins, being careful to place the names of the authors before their testimonies.”⁹⁵ It is instructive and striking to compare the exegetical method at work in the Catena Aurea super quattuor evangelistas of Thomas Aquinas with that of a Reformation commentary which initially appears to be somewhat similar, but which on closer inspection proves to be dramatically different: the Harmonia ex tribus Evangelistis composita, Matthaeo, Marco et Luca: adiuncto seorsum Iohanne, quod pauca cum aliis communia habeat / cum Iohannis Calvini Commentariis. Both Thomas and Calvin were convinced that the accounts in the several Gospels do not contradict each other, and in this sense they were following one whom each of them, albeit for rather divergent reasons, claimed as his master, Augustine, who had written “the first comprehensive treatment of this problem,” De consensu Evangelistarum libri IV.⁹⁶ But that is essentially where the similarity ends. For example, in explaining the statement of Christ to Peter, Aquinas in the Catena Aurea, on the basis of Augustine,⁹⁷ conceded that “Peter” could be a figurative name for the church, or that “the rock was Christ, whom Peter confessed”. But for Calvin this concession took the polemical turn that because “non alibi posse fundari Ecclesiam quam in Christo solo,” it followed that “non sine sacrilega blasphemia aliud fundamentum Papa commentus est. Et certe quantopere vel vno hoc nomine tyrannidem Papatus detestari nos deceat, nullis verbis exprimi satis potest, quod in eius gratiam sublatum fuerit Ecclesiae fundamentum, vt apertus inferni gurges miseras animas absorbeat”.⁹⁸

In addition to the legacy of the church fathers, however, other exegetical traditions were at work already in the Middle Ages, which then in the age of the Reformation would supply some of the context for the interpretation of the Bible. Among these, none is more intriguing than the rabbinic tradition.⁹⁹ As noted in Chapter 1, Jerome and Origen had been instructed by rabbis. For Reformation exegesis, however, the most important source of information about the rabbinic tradition was the Franciscan Nicholas of Lyra (ca. 1270-1349), who has been characterized by a modern reference book as nothing short of “the best-equipped Biblical scholar of the Middle Ages”¹⁰⁰ and who was also useful in the Reformation's turn to the literal sense of Scripture. Between 1350 and 1450 seven hundred manuscripts of his Postilla litteralis were produced, in whole or in part, and it was the first commentary on the Bible to be printed, at Rome in 1471-72 and several times soon thereafter. Because of his ample citations from rabbinic exegetes, notably from Rashi—Rabbi Salomo ben Isaac (1040-1105)—as a result of which he came to be called (unfairly) “Rashi's ape,”¹⁰¹ Nicholas of Lyra became a valuable resource in the Reformation's study of the Hebrew Bible, to, for example, Martin Luther. During the editing of the eight volumes of the English translation of Luther's Lectures on Genesis from 1535 to 1545 in the American Edition of Luther's Works, consequently, it was necessary to keep Lyra continually at hand, in order to identify not only the many explicit references to Lyra but the unacknowledged borrowings by Luther—or perhaps by the compilers of Luther's Lectures on Genesis¹⁰²—from this source. Thus it would seem to have been from Lyra's account of “the many ways in which the Jews attempt to subvert the interpretation” of Genesis 49:10 as a prophecy of the coming of Christ (as well as from other sources) that Luther learned about the rabbinic exegesis that he refuted in his account of this verse.¹⁰³ Nevertheless, this process of editing the Lectures on Genesis in English translation has also confirmed how much of an exaggeration, indeed a dicton absurde,¹⁰⁴ it is to say, in the doggerel verse of Luther's detractors, that “Si Lyra non lyrasset, Lutherus non saltasset [If Lyra had not played his lyre, Luther would not have danced]”; for the most impressive feature of Luther's exposition of Genesis, whether it be construed as a strength or a weakness, is its originality in comparison with patristic and medieval exegetes, including Nicholas of Lyra, not its dependence on any of them.¹⁰⁵ A vast amount of learning and lore from this tradition was collected and printed in the Magna Biblia Rabbinica first published at Venice by Daniel Bomberg in 1516-17, which contained the Bible in pointed Hebrew but the rabbinic materials in unpointed text.

Both the patristic tradition and the rabbinic tradition, as mediated also through medieval thought, thus made their mark on the Reformation interpretation of the Bible. But it is a commonplace of the theological and historical literature, going back to the Protestant Reformers themselves, that the sole authority of Scripture, sola Scriptura, was one of the fundamental principles of Reformation theology, to which the authority of tradition had to yield, and that therefore the Reformers no longer regarded Scripture and tradition as two sources of divine revelation, nor even as a single source in two modalities.¹⁰⁶ The confusions at work in this conventional wisdom have received helpful clarification through Heiko Oberman's distinction between “two concepts of Tradition. … We call the single-source or exegetical tradition held together with its interpretation ‘Tradition I’ and the two-sources theory which allows for an extra-biblical oral tradition ‘Tradition II.’”¹⁰⁷ With the implications of this issue of Scripture and tradition for the doctrine of authority and for the defense of the catholicity of the church in Reformation teaching we cannot be concerned directly here,¹⁰⁸ but only with its bearing on the theory and practice of biblical exegesis. As the earlier comparison between Aquinas and Calvin in the exegesis of the Gospels suggests, it truly was the case, according to Luther and Calvin, that compiling or counting votes from the church fathers did not decide the meaning of a passage of Scripture contrary to its clear grammatical and literal sense, and therefore that even Tradition I had a limited claim of authority, while Tradition II was a presumptuous arrogation of the authority of the Bible to fallible human beings, “teaching for doctrines the commandments of men,” as stated in a passage from the Gospels and originally from the prophets (Mt 15:9; Is 29:13 LXX) that Calvin and the other Reformers quoted against such presumption.¹⁰⁹ Thus at the Leipzig Debate of 1519, Luther's opponent Johann Eck (1486-1543) marshaled some of the same evidence of tradition from the church fathers and the canonists that appears in the Catena Aurea to support his interpretation that Matthew 16:18 pertained to the Church of Rome, but Luther refused to be bound by that exegetical tradition.¹¹⁰ Similarly, Heinrich Bullinger of Zurich (1504-75), in the seventy-fourth of his Hvndred Sermons vpon the Apocalips of Jesu Christe, which was translated from German into English during his lifetime and published at London in 1561, defied the entire medieval exegetical tradition to identify the Whore of Babylon in chapter 17 of the Book of Revelation as “the very citie of Rome, and euen the popish and Romish church, and the pope himself with all his creatures and chapplaynes”.

THE REPUDIATION OF ALLEGORISM

In 1512 Martin Luther, monk of the Augustinian Order of Hermits, received the degree of Doctor in Biblia, in obedience to his religious superiors.¹¹¹ This degree provided him with the academic credentials, but the oath he took upon receiving the degree also imposed on him the official responsibility, to engage in the exposition of Scripture as a professor at the recently established University of Wittenberg. Years later, he would invoke that official responsibility as the moral obligation that had made him a reformer of the church. In his Commentary on Psalm 82 of 1530, for instance, posing the question being raised by his opponents, “Why do you, by your books, teach throughout the world, when you are only preacher in Wittenberg?” he replied: “I have never wanted to do it and do not want to do it now. I was forced and driven into this position in the first place when I had to become Doctor of Holy Scripture against my will. Then, as a doctor in a general free university, I began, at the command of pope and emperor, to do what such a doctor is sworn to do, expounding the Scriptures for all the world and teaching everybody. Once in this position, I have had to stay in it, and I cannot give it up or leave it yet with a good conscience.”¹¹²

Clearly, one of the major differences between being a Magister in Sacra Pagina in the medieval context and being a Doctor in Biblia in the Reformation context was a changed definition of hermeneutics, the art and science of interpretation. Gerald L. Bruns has formulated that difference sharply in Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern:

If one were to look for a symbolic moment of transition between ancient and modern hermeneutics, one might choose the winter semester of 1513-14, when Martin Luther began preparing his first lectures as professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg. He was to lecture on the Psalms and wanted each of his students to have a copy of the scriptural text to consult. Luther therefore instructed Johann Grunenberg, the printer for the university, to produce an edition of the Psalter with wide margins and lots of white space between the lines. Here the students would reproduce Luther's own glosses and commentary, and perhaps (who knows?) they would have room for their own exegetical reflections as well. At all events Luther produced for his students something like a modern, as opposed to a medieval, text of the Bible—its modernity consisting precisely in the white space around the text. In a stroke Luther wiped the Sacred Page clean as if to begin the history of interpretation over again, this time to get it right.¹¹³

Fortunately, this Copernican revolution in hermeneutics brought about by Luther and the Reformation was able, as Karl Holl has said, to find “in the second generation a successor who managed to grasp by intuition what [Luther] in his genius had achieved and to work it up into a technical methodology of interpretation,”¹¹⁴ Matija Vlačić-Ilirik, or as he was usually known by his Latinized name, Matthias Flacius Illyricus (1520-75).¹¹⁵ This “technical methodology of interpretation” he systematized in his masterful, if nearly impenetrable, work, Clavis scripturae sacrae seu de sermone sacrarum literarum, first published in 1567 in two massive volumes.¹¹⁶ Medieval hermeneutics was dominated by a reliance on, and a quest for, the multiple sense of Scripture. Eventually the theory of the many senses was codified in the concept of the fourfold sense; its development has been definitively studied by Henri de Lubac, who quotes a Latin verse that summarizes the fundamental assumption of the “mystical” sense:

Hujus festi sacramentum
Licet per integumentum
Et figurae velamentum
Sparism vetus Testamentum
          Mystice significat.(117)

Or, in the standard verse formula, elaborating all four senses,

Littera gesta docet. quid credat allegoria.
Moralis quid agat. quo tendat anagogia.

Thus, in the example usually given, the name “Jerusalem” referred in the literal sense to the physical “metropolis in the kingdom of Judea,” in the moral sense to “the faithful soul,” in the allegorical sense to “the church militant,” and in the anagogical sense to “the church triumphant.” By breaking with this fourfold sense in order “this time to get it right,” the Reformers strove to come up with an interpretation that was (to cite some of the various ways it could be designated) grammatical, literal, and historical, but not—or at least not necessarily and not usually—allegorical.

The Grammatical Sense. In the hermeneutics and exegesis of the Reformation, the sacred philology of the Renaissance became part of the standard equipment of the theologian and even of the parish pastor and preacher. As reformers of education no less than reformers of the church, such figures as Melanchthon (to whom the title Preceptor of Germany was soon applied), Calvin, and Calvin's colleague and Academy successor, Théodore de Bèze (1519-1605), recast the curriculum of the secondary schools along humanistic lines, requiring not only Latin but also Greek and Hebrew and requiring them, moreover, not only of future clergy but of laymen. Students were, therefore, expected to come to the study of theology and specifically to the exegesis of Scripture with the requisite philological and grammatical preparation for the responsible scrutiny of the Bible in its original languages. The annotations attached to the Testamentum Novvm of Bèze, which was published at Geneva by Henri Estienne in 1565 and then in 1589, were in the first instance grammatical and lexicographical, as was the entire first volume of the Clavis of Flacius. For example, as Lorenzo Valla had already pointed out, the Pauline characterization of matrimony by the Greek word μυsτήριον (Eph 5:32)—the term employed in the Greek Orthodox tradition for “sacrament”—did not, as the Vulgate translation “Sacramentum hoc magnum est” implied, rank it with Baptism, the Eucharist, and the other sacraments of the church (whichever and howsoever many these may have been), even though matrimony was in fact the only one of the seven to be explicitly so designated in the New Testament.¹¹⁸ Hence Flacius concluded on the basis of these words from Ephesians: “Nowhere in Holy Writ is this word ‘sacrament’ employed in the strict sense in which it is now used, to refer to the sacred ritual of Baptism and the Eucharist.” This was, therefore, a qualified answer of yes to the question cited in Chapter 1 from such humanists as Valla as to whether the explication of the biblical text was governed by the same philological principles as that of any other text. For whatever else the explication of the biblical text had to be in addition—above all of course the Christianized explication of the biblical text of the Hebrew Bible, which Jewish exegesis was explaining in a radically different fashion—it could not be less than grammatical.

The Literal Sense. In Reformation exegesis the terms “grammatical sense” and “literal sense” sometimes appeared to be virtually interchangeable, especially when it was disengaging itself from medieval allegorical exegesis or associating itself with the increased emphasis on the literal sense practiced by Nicholas of Lyra and his Postilla litteralis. But the adherence of the Reformers to the literal sense was never as simple as that. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, therefore, Calvin attacked medieval exegesis (as well as the kind of Protestant exegesis that appeared to him to be slavishly following medieval exegesis), not this time for its allegorism but for its excessive literalism in the interpretation of the words of institution of the Eucharist, “This is my body.”¹¹⁹ Conversely, Luther, who was at least the indirect target of this criticism—the direct target being the Lutheran polemicist Joachim Westphal (1510-74)—attacked his opponents, Roman Catholic and especially Protestant, for being excessively literal in their exegesis of the biblical term “the right hand of God,” which, he insisted, must be freed of its literal and spatial connotations, not to mention its anthropomorphic ones.¹²⁰ An additional stipulation to the term “literal sense” pertained especially to the exegesis of the Old Testament and is summarized in Luther's concept of the literal-prophetic sense.¹²¹ Thus in an exegesis of the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah that its English translator, Leroy Nixon, has aptly entitled The Gospel According to Isaiah, Calvin simply took it for granted that “the Prophet speaks in the same manner as Saint Paul spoke from him” and that the only acceptable exegetical method was to “join what is proposed in Saint Matthew with what the Prophet Isaiah wished to affirm.”¹²² He defended the thesis that when the New Testament applied these verses to an event that occurred many centuries after the verses were written by Isaiah, that is, to the suffering and death of Christ (Mt 8:17; Acts 8:26-35; 1 Pt 2:21-25), this meant that “the prophet, in His Name, speaks of the total situation of our Lord Jesus Christ.”¹²³ This was not a figurative use, much less an allegorical interpretation, but was in fact “the intention of the Prophet [l'intention du Prophete]”¹²⁴ and the meaning of these verses all along, hence the only way they could be taken. Similarly, because Christ on the cross had quoted from Psalm 22:1, albeit in Aramaic or “Chaldaean” (Mt 27:46; Mk 15:34), that—and only that—was, in Luther's phrase, the “literal prophetic meaning” of that psalm, which implied (in relation to the example cited in Chapter 1) that the Hebrew of Psalm 22:16, as a reference to the history of the Crucifixion, should read [kä'ärōō], not [kä'ärēē].

The Historical Sense. But could this also be termed the “historical sense” of Psalm 22, and did the Hebrew text of the Bible possess any meaning within its own historical context, a meaning that the contemporaries of the psalmists and the prophets could understandably and legitimately have attributed to it, prior to and apart from its christological interpretation? Despite the great preponderance of the messianic interpretation, there are occasional hints in Reformation exegesis of an identification of this kind of “historical sense,” as for example in Luther's interpretation of Psalm 111.¹²⁵ More usually, however, the historical sense referred to what I have elsewhere called the Reformers' interest in “the history of the people of God.”¹²⁶ According to the chronologies compiled by the Reformers, the history narrated in the New Testament covered only one century, from the birth of Christ to the death of his “beloved apostle,” Saint John the Divine (identified as the author of the Fourth Gospel, the three Catholic Epistles bearing his name, and the Apocalypse), whereas the history narrated in the Old Testament covered several millennia, from the creation of the world to the last of the prophets:¹²⁷ the “Chronologia Sacra” of the London Polyglot follows the chronology of one of its contributors, Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656), in dating the death of Antiochus Epiphanes (1 Mc 6:16), which took place in 164 bce, at 3940 in the history of the world. Quantitatively at any rate, therefore, the history of the people of God referred above all to the history of the patriarchs and the history of Israel. Although individual commentaries on the historical books of the Old Testament such as Kings and Chronicles were greatly outnumbered by commentaries on Genesis, the Psalms, and the Prophets—just as within the New Testament, for that matter, commentaries on the Book of Acts were far less frequent than commentaries on the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles—the attention to the historical sense led to an effort to do justice to the historical framework of the prophetical books. The typological use of Jonah's three days in the belly of the whale as an event prophetic of the resurrection of Christ, which had the highest possible warrant in Christ's own words in the Gospel (Mt 12:40), was not to be permitted to reduce the rest of the history of Jonah and the city of Nineveh to mere scenery. For the history, according to Luther, “eyn trefflichs / sonderlichs / tröstlichs exempel des glaubens / vnd ein gros mechtigs wunderzeychen gottlicher guete / aller welt fur tregt”;¹²⁸ by contrast, Luther was quite prepared to accept the explanation of the Book of Judith as “kein geschicht / sondern ein geistlich schöne gedicht”.¹²⁹ Calvin's explanation of the harmony of the Gospels, in which several Reformers of the second and third generations followed his example,¹³⁰ reflected this same methodology of taking sacred history seriously and yet critically as history. Therefore it was an “extremely trivial and frivolous argument [nimis leve ac friuolum argumentum]”¹³¹ to take the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 and the Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6 as separate accounts. Christ told parables, not all of which necessarily had to be true stories; but he did not live a parable, because the accounts in the Gospels did have to be true stories.¹³² Similarly, the history of Abraham—his journey to an unknown land, his visions of the Almighty, and above all the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac—carried an impact that had the makings of high drama, as Théodore de Bèze's play of 1550, Abraham Sacrifiant, showed both on the page and on the stage¹³³ (and as, three centuries later, Søren Kierkegaard's “knight of infinite resignation” was to show again). But for Reformation exegesis it was real history before it became drama.¹³⁴

A Limited but Legitimate Allegorical Sense. Yet the Bible itself said about that history of Abraham, in its only use of the technical term, “which things are an allegory [[UNK]τιν[UNK] [UNK]sτιν [UNK]λληγορούμενα]” (Gal 4:24). It said this, moreover, not in some obscure passage but in the Reformers' own beloved Epistle to the Galatians.¹³⁵ For a long time in the history of Christian exegesis, indeed even in the exegetical practice of Judaism before the rise of Christianity, the crucial test case for this issue of allegorical interpretation had been not the history of Abraham but the Song of Songs. This was not a question of imposing an allegory on a primary sense of the sacred text that was literal or historical; but, as Ann Matter has put it, “the inclusion of the Song of Songs in the [Jewish] canon of Scripture was based on the assumption of a recognized and accepted allegorical reading,” and it was already as an allegory that it came from the Jewish canon into the Christian canon of Scripture, and as an allegory that it had been consistently read in Christian exegesis.¹³⁶ An exegesis that was consistently and rigorously “grammatical, literal, and historical” would have to read the erotic language of this poem, with its highly explicit attention to sexual love, as the celebration of the physical union between a man and a woman. In the history of monastic exegesis, the Song, read of course as an allegory, had been “the book which was most read, and most frequently commented in the medieval cloister,” as Dom Leclercq has said.¹³⁷ But a close reading of medieval exegesis of the Song, for example that of Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), has demonstrated that, contrary to the Reformers' disparagement of allegory as arbitrary and subjectivist, it proceeded by explicit rules, which did significantly limit what the exegete could or could not do with the text. When the Reformers turned to the Song, even they could not have interpreted it literally and yet have been able to justify its retention in the biblical canon; and when Sebastian Castellio (1515-63) did take it literally, that was one of the grounds for Calvin's attack. With the exception of the Mariological interpretation that had become quite popular in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,¹³⁸ each of the possible variations on the theme of its allegorical application found resonance somewhere in Reformation exegesis:¹³⁹

(a) the interpretation of the Song as a loving exchange in which, as the heading of the first chapter in the King James Version explains, “the Church and Christ congratulate one another,” an interpretation that is reflected in the illustration and description provided by Corrozet's verses in Icones historiarum Veteris Testamenti, where the theme of the Song is said to be

Salomon Roy au liure des Cantiques
Propos d'amy uers une amie expose,
L'amour couurant soubz parolles mystiques
De Christ enuers l'Eglise son espouse;

(b) the mystical reading of it as the dialogue of the soul with Christ, which had been “a secondary possibility for the text throughout the long tradition of ecclesiological exegesis” in the Middle Ages but “came into its own in the twelfth century,”¹⁴⁰ and which then found an echo in Reformation hymnody and devotional literature, for example in the well-loved eucharistic hymn “Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele,” which has been characterized as “perhaps the finest of all German hymns for the Holy Communion,”¹⁴¹ and in the Bach cantata “Wachet auf” (BWV 140), the major portion of which, apart from the chorale, consists of a loving exchange between Christ as Bridegroom and the soul as bride;¹⁴²

(c) the transfer of the venue of the Song to the covenantal relation between God and Israel, as “a song in which Solomon … gives [God] thanks for his divinely established and confirmed kingdom and government,” an exegesis that can perhaps be seen as expressing the determination that, if there had to be an allegorical exegesis, it nevertheless would be just as historical as possible.¹⁴³

Distinguishing between typology and allegory, Flacius systematized the Reformation approach to allegory by identifying three reasons that could prompt the necessity of invoking it: “when the Scriptures present a falsity unless you accept the presence of a trope”; “when the words of Scripture taken in the grammatical sense produce an absurdity”; “when the grammatical sense conflicts with sound doctrine or is opposed to proper morality”.

THE ANALOGY OF FAITH

That third stipulation of sound doctrine or proper morality by Flacius indicates that although the Reformers rejected simultaneously both the binding authority of tradition and the validity of unbridled allegorization, this was significantly qualified, above all in their exegetical practice but even in their hermeneutical theory, by another principle: analogia fidei, the analogy of faith. The original provenance of this phrase was biblical, in the prescription of the apostle Paul that prophesying be κατ[UNK] τ[UNK]ν [UNK]ναλογίαν τ[UNK]s πίsτεωs (Rom 12:6). This is the only passage of the New Testament to employ the Greek word [UNK]ναλογία, “analogy” or “proportion,” which by its appearance (in the adverbial form [UNK]ναλόγωs) in such an influential passage of the Apocrypha as Wisdom 13:5 had provided part of the biblical justification for natural theology in patristic thought.¹⁴⁴ But no less crucial in determining the meaning of this prescription is the other Greek word, [UNK] πίsτιs, “faith” or “the faith” with a definite article. Does it apply here to the act or state of believing, the subjective fides qua creditur as the heirs of the Reformation would call it, as it apparently does in Romans 10:17, the passage that was the origin of the Reformation emphasis on fides ex auditu?¹⁴⁵ Or does it apply to the object of faith and the content of the act of believing, the objective fides quae creditur, as Jude 3 speaks of it when referring to “the faith once delivered to the saints [τ[UNK] [UNK]παξ παραδοθείs[UNK] το[UNK]s [UNK]γίοιs πίsτει]”?

The very translation of κατ[UNK] τ[UNK]ν [UNK]ναλογίαν τ[UNK]s πίsτεωs in the Vulgate, in Reformation Bibles, and in later versions documents just how multi-layered its meaning could be: Vulgate, “secundum rationem fidei”; Tyndale and the Great Bible, “that it be agreynge unto the fayth”; Geneva Bible and King James, “according to the proportion of faith”; Bishops' Bible, “after the measure of faith”; Rheims, “according to the rule of faith”; Revised Version, “according to the proportion of our faith”; Revised Standard Version, “in proportion to our faith.”¹⁴⁶ The New Jerusalem Bible renders it “We should prophesy as much as our faith tells us,” but then it supplies “another translation, less likely,” in a footnote: “‘according to the rule of faith,’ that is, the common teaching of the Church, as in 1 Cor 12:3, where the ‘confession of faith’ is the criterion of ‘authentic gifts of the Spirit.’” The history of its use in Christian theology and exegesis, and even in Reformation theology and exegesis, however, has been less equivocal. Thus Melanchthon in his Annotationes of 1522 on Romans took this to mean that prophecy, “whether it be that by which future events are predicted or that by which the Scriptures are expounded [siue qua futura praedicantur, siue qua exponuntur scripturae],” in either case “should not depend upon human conjectures, human wisdom, or human judgment, but on the judgment of faith [non debet pendere ex humanis coniecturis, humana sapientia, humano iudicio, sed iudicio fidei]”.¹⁴⁷ John Calvin, in the preface to his Institutes, addressed to Francis I (1494-1547), the king of France, equated “the analogy of faith” with “the rule of faith.”¹⁴⁸ In keeping with that equation, the Calvinist theologian William Bucanus (fl. 1591-1603) gave the following definition of analogia fidei, with which Flacius's definition agrees almost verbatim: “the constant and perpetual sense of Scripture expounded in the manifest places of Scripture and agreeable to the Apostles' Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the general sentences and axioms of every main point of divinity.”¹⁴⁹ It was on the assumption of the presence of such a constant and perpetual sense of Scripture that Augustine in his trinitarian hermeneutics had repeatedly invoked what he called the canonica regula as an exclusionary rule, to reject as unacceptable any exegesis of a particular passage, above all of such sayings of Christ as “the Father is greater than I” (Jn 14:28), that might have seemed to be valid according to the grammar but that led to error in dogma.¹⁵⁰

In their systematic theologies, beginning with the Loci communes of Melanchthon from 1521 through its successive and expanded editions, and then with the Institutes of the Christian Religion of Calvin from 1536 through its successive and expanded editions, the heaping up of proof texts became the standard method of verifying the scriptural character of a teaching about doctrine or life. In some of the Reformed confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example in the Scottish Confession of 1560¹⁵¹ and perhaps above all in the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647,¹⁵² this method of prooftexting often took the form of citing chapter (and verse) numbers in notes rather than of quoting the passages themselves in the body of the articles of the confession, with the collation and doctrinal application of the texts left to the treatises of the theologians. Although the method at work in the biblical commentaries of the Reformed and Lutheran theologians who wrote the confessions and the dogmatics shows some of the same tendency, the format of a consecutive explication de texte seems to have dictated a closer attention to the passage at hand and the use of parallel passages—and, in the case of the New Testament, the use of the Old Testament passages being quoted by the New Testament at this particular place—as a key to the exposition. In his Annotationes of 1589 on John 5:39, “Search the Scriptures,” Bèze took the Greek verb [UNK]ρευν[UNK]τε as an indicative, not an imperative as “many” had interpreted it, but went on to denounce those “who approach the reading of Scripture, not with an interest in seeking the truth that is there, but with prejudged opinions or something even worse; therefore they do not see when they see, nor hear when they hear, nor learn when they read [qui ad scripturarum lectionem, non veritatis inde inquirendae studium, sed praeiudicatas opiniones aut aliquid etiam deterius adferunt: ideoque nec videndo vident, nec audiendo audiunt, nec legendo discunt]”. It definitely was not to be thought of as such a “prejudged opinion” when the analogy of faith played a decisive role in this searching of the Scriptures, though often as an invisible hand, directing the choice from among parallel passages and (as in the case of κατ[UNK] τ[UNK]ν [UNK]ναλоγíαν τ[UNK]s πίsτεωs in Romans 12:6 itself) from among alternative meanings of a Greek or Hebrew vocable. Ironically, therefore, the resultant Protestant “biblical theology” often bore a striking family resemblance to the Catholic tradition of creed and dogma whose formal authority as norma normata (the norm that is itself subject to another norm) Reformation polemics had subordinated to that of Scripture alone as norma normans (the norm that regulates all other norms).

COMMENTARY AND CONTROVERSY

That irony or inconsistency in the Magisterial Reformation was not lost either on the Roman Catholic “defenders of the faith” (which was the title, Defensor Fidei, that Pope Leo X conferred on King Henry VIII of England in 1521 for his vindication of Roman Catholic teaching against Luther) or on the thinkers of the Radical Reformation, especially the opponents of the orthodox Nicene doctrine of the Trinity. The exegesis and hermeneutics of the Reformation must, then, be viewed in the light not only of commentaries based on the Bible as a source but of controversies in which the Bible was, essentially, a weapon of defense and of attack. From the point of view of those wielding the weapon, this did not represent a distortion of the biblical message at all but was to be seen as a clarification of insight that had been made necessary by the false teachers, in obedience to the admonition “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you” (1 Pet 3:15)—an admonition that meant to Luther that “wenn man dich angreyfft vnd fragt / wie eyn ketzer / warumb du glewbist / das du durch den glawben selig werdest / da antwort / Da hab ich Gottis wort vnd klare sprüche der schrifft.” Many of the church fathers of both East and West, for example Gregory of Nazianzus and Augustine of Hippo, had freely admitted that the rise of controversy had sometimes compelled the church to clarify the meaning of passages of Scripture that had previously been obscure or neglected, on such central teachings as the doctrine of the Holy Spirit and the doctrine of Original Sin.¹⁵³ In such cases—whatever the validity of the theological explanation that the doctrine had been implicit all along but had eventually been made explicit¹⁵⁴—the historical explanation suggests that there has been a dialectical relation between commentary and controversy, with each evoking and defining the other at various stages.

Although the several fronts of the controversies over the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist are in many ways the most productive case study for an examination of this dialectical relation between commentary and controversy in the age of the Reformation,¹⁵⁵ the related issue of Christology is no less interesting. It may be even more pertinent to the various concerns of Reformation exegesis and hermeneutics, because this issue presents itself as a problem in the exegesis of many times more passages than does the eucharistic issue, and because the dogma of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 performed an explicit function as an accepted traditional norm for most of the parties.¹⁵⁶ On every page of the Gospels it was necessary, for the lay reader no less than for the professional clergyman and theologian, to ask how the text was related to that Chalcedonian doctrine of Christ as both totally divine and totally human. “Is the Divine that has appeared on earth and that has reunited men with God identical with the Supreme Divine that rules heaven and earth, or is it a demigod?” had been, in the succinct summarization of Adolf von Harnack, the decisive question in the Arian controversy of the fourth century.¹⁵⁷ In various permutations this continued to be a decisive question for the Reformation. Should the One in whom “dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Col 2:9) be called “God” in an unequivocal or even a metaphysical sense—and did the New Testament ever call him that? The exegetical and even the textual answer to that second question is far from unambiguous; for it is striking, although on further thought not entirely surprising, to note how many of the standard proof texts concerned with this issue are textually doubtful: Matthew 24:36 (nrv), “About that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (emphasis added), where “nor the Son” is omitted by the Vulgate, as well as by the Textus Receptus (and therefore by the av); John 1:18, which usually appears as “the only begotten Son” but which has enough manuscript evidence for “the only begotten God [μоνογεν[UNK]s θεós]” to appear that way in modern critical editions of the Greek New Testament and in footnotes to some modern translations (for example, rsv); Acts 20:28, “to feed the church of God, which he has purchased with his own blood,” where many manuscripts avoid attributing “blood” to “God” by reading κυρίου rather than θεο[UNK]; 1 Timothy 3:16, where [UNK]s may also be θεόs; and the most celebrated of all, the Johannine Comma of 1 John 5:7,¹⁵⁸ “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one,” which Erasmus omitted from his first two editions of the Greek New Testament and then, responding to criticism, added in later editions, so that Estienne included it in what eventually became the Textus Receptus.

But it is instructive to consult the treatment of such passages in two of the Bibles of the Radical Reformation, that of Michael Servetus published in 1542 and that of Sebastian Castellio in 1551, which followed the translation of the Italian Dominican Santi Pagnini. These opponents of the dogma of the Trinity set forth what George Williams has called a “reasoned intrascriptural construct evolved largely in freedom from the constraints and the conventions interwoven in Tradition I, that is, the exegetical and hermeneutical tradition from patristic times of interpreting Scripture from within itself, but not each exegete wholly on his own but by building on antecedent commentary and discussion.”¹⁵⁹ Nevertheless, Acts 20:28 is translated “ad regendum ecclesiam dei quam acquisiuit sanguine suo” in Servetus and “ut dei pascatis ecclesiam, quam ipse suo sanguine comparauit” in Castellio (emphasis added); and most surprising of all, considering its sixteenth-century history, the Johannine Comma appears in both. For these antitrinitarian biblicists, the first of whom was executed for his heresy, the rules of sacred philology were clearly too authoritative to be violated in a translation if that was the way the texts read; and it was up to exegesis rather than translation—not to mention textual conjecture—to repair the damage of preceding centuries and to explain the real meaning of the text, “as if to begin the history of interpretation over again, this time to get it right.”¹⁶⁰

BIBLES FOR THE PEOPLE

The most challenging assignment faced by the Reformation interpreters of the Bible was not exegesis but translation, as it would in turn become their most enduring monument. Biblical exegetes could, and often did, elide their way around obscure or difficult passages, but biblical translators could not get away with that: they were expected to do it all, word by word and phrase by phrase. A translator faithful to the principles of the Reformation had to be an exegete first, using the tools of sacred philology in Hebrew and Greek to discover the correct reading of the text and then its correct meaning. After that, he had to become a philologist of the vernacular, probing the strengths and weaknesses of the language of the common people as a medium for articulating biblical truths that for centuries had been most familiar in their Latin formulations and that had now become accessible in the sacred languages of their originals. Just over two centuries before the Reformation, the defense of the vernacular as a fitting vehicle for expressing ideas and sentiments that had been reserved to the Classical languages had received its most eloquent statement ever, which, significantly, had itself to be written in Latin:¹⁶¹ the treatise De vulgari eloquentia, published by Dante Alighieri probably in 1303-4. “It may be fairly said,” Thomas Bergin has written of it, “that no comparable study of language and ‘eloquence’ had preceded Dante's work. Certainly no vernacular had been given the ‘scholarly’ treatment implied in Dante's deliberate choice of Latin for his essay.”¹⁶² And despite some inconsistencies he put his poem where his treatise was: having considered the use of Latin for the writing of the Divine Comedy, he went on to compose and complete it in Italian,¹⁶³ thereby effectively codifying the Italian language and virtually creating Italian literature.

REFORMATION THEORY AND PRACTICE OF BIBLICAL TRANSLATION

It is an almost irresistible contrast with Roman Catholic Italy to point out that in the German, English, and Czech homelands of the Protestant Reformation that honor of having effectively codified the vernacular language must be awarded, in significant measure, to Reformation translations of the Bible, namely in those three cases, Luther's German Bible, the Authorized or King James Version of the English Bible, and the six-volume Bible of Kralice of the Hussite Unitas Fratrum. And in those Reformation lands, accordingly, the nearest equivalents to Dante's De vulgari eloquentia were the defenses of the vernacular not as the language of poetry but as the language of biblical faith. Among the most influential of these defenses were Luther's Sendbrief von Dolmetschen, published at Wittenberg and elsewhere in 1530;¹⁶⁴ followed by his Summarien über die Psalmen und Ursachen des Dolmetschens of 1531-33;¹⁶⁵ and the prefaces to English translations of the Bible, beginning with Tyndale's and climaxing in the classic “The Translators to the Reader” of the King James Bible in 1611.

That preface of 1611 spoke for all the Reformers when it declared: “But how shall men meditate in that, which they cannot vnderstand? How shall they vnderstand that which is kept close in an vnknowen tongue? as it is written, ‘Except I know the power of the voyce I shall be to him that speaketh, a Barbarian, and he that speaketh, shalbe a Barbarian to me.’ The Apostle excepteth no tongue; not Hebrewe the ancientest, not Greeke the most copious, not Latine the finest”. Characteristically, Luther articulated the theoretical principles underlying his practice of biblical translation in detail only a posteriori, when he felt provoked and compelled to do so by the attacks from the critics of his translations of the Bible, the “know-it-alls [klüglinge]” as he dubbed them, who delighted in a nitpicking criticism over one missing or misinterpreted word. “For who,” he asked, “will be so bold as to claim that he has not missed a single word, as though he were Christ and the Holy Spirit himself?”¹⁶⁶ Luther's response to these know-it-alls concentrated on two issues, corresponding to the themes of our first two chapters, “Sacred Philology” and “Exegesis and Hermeneutics,” as those issues affected concrete decisions in translating the Hebrew and Greek of the Bible. The first of these themes involved the effort to understand the difficult vocabulary and grammar of the original text. For example, like earlier translators of the Book of Job, Luther compared the difficulties of its language to the sufferings of Job, declaring with typical hyperbole that he and his colleagues had “during four days barely been able to complete three lines.”¹⁶⁷ But once the biblical scholar had accomplished the task of applying sacred philology to the Hebrew or Greek and had “understood” the original text, there arose the perennial dilemma faced by any translator from any language into any language in any age, the dilemma of literalism versus license:¹⁶⁸ “The rule is that we have sometimes adhered strictly to the words and at other times have given only the sense.”¹⁶⁹ Or, more fully: “Where the words can permit it and provide a better understanding, we have not allowed ourselves to be constrained by the grammatical rules of the rabbis to provide a lesser or a different understanding; for as all the schoolmasters teach, meaning is not to serve and follow the words, but the words are to serve and follow the meaning.” The question a translator had to ask, he continued, was, “How does a German speak in such a case?”¹⁷⁰ Needless to say, this was at the same time also a question of “How does a Christian speak in such a case?” because, for example, the “mountain” in Psalm 68:15-16 referred to “Christendom, which is the mountain of God.”¹⁷¹ Following the example of Augustine and other early Christian writers,¹⁷² therefore, Luther quoted the words of Paul (2 Cor 3:15), “Even unto this day, when Moses is read, the vaile is upon their hearts,” to prove that the Jews understood the prophets “only a little and very seldom,” in spite of all their technical grasp of Hebrew philology.¹⁷³ What they were missing was the “literal-prophetic sense” as this referred to the coming of Jesus as the Messiah.

In keeping with this conception of the prerequisites for understanding and therefore translating a biblical text, Luther took the distinction between the law and the gospel to be the key to the understanding of Scripture, not only for the exposition of the Epistles of Paul, from which the distinction had come, but for the explanation of, for example, the Gospel for the Third Sunday in Advent (Mt 11:2-10). “Any law, and especially the divine law,” he said in providing that explanation, “is a word of wrath, the power of sin, the law of death,” whereas the gospel “is a word of grace, life, and salvation, a word of righteousness and peace, altogether contrary to the law, and nevertheless completely in agreement with it at the same time”. Therefore Luther brought his own understanding of a text to bear on his own translations, and in the Sendbrief von Dolmetschen he presented an apologia for the boldest—or, in the eyes of his opponents, the most flagrant—instance of this principle of biblical translation, his rendering of Romans 3:28 in the September Testament of 1522: “So halten wyrs nu / das der mensch gerechtfertiget werde / on zu thun der werck des gesetzs / alleyn durch den glawben [Therefore we maintain that man is justified without doing the works of the law, through faith alone]” (emphasis added).¹⁷⁴ For, as his critics gleefully reminded him, the Greek instrumental dative πίsτει had nothing in it corresponding to his “alleyn,” which was then an unwarranted interposition of the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone (sola fide) into the German translation of the New Testament. In his polemical response Luther challenged his adversaries: “Ich kan Psalmen vnd Propheten auslegen / Das können sie nicht. Ich kan dolmetschen / Das können sie nicht. Ich kan die heiligen schrifft lesen / Das können sie nicht. [I know how to expound Psalms and Prophets, they do not. I know how to translate, they do not. I know how to read Holy Scripture, they do not]”. And if it came to that, he even knew their dialectical technique and their beloved Aristotle better than they!¹⁷⁵ Therefore he did not need them to inform him that “alleyn” or “the four letters ‘sola’” were not in the original Greek text. But in keeping with the question “How does a German speak in such a case?” he insisted that it was the German way of speaking to add the word “alleyn” when one thing was being affirmed and the other negated, as, for example, “The peasant brings grain alone, and no money.” William Tyndale was more circumspect about substituting eisegesis for exegesis, regarding it “better to put a declaration in the margin, than to run too far from the text.”¹⁷⁶ At Romans 3:28, therefore, he translated, “We suppose that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law,” and in the margin he added, “Faith justifieth,” and even there without any “alone”; in the 1537 edition, the phrase “faith alone” did appear in the marginal note.¹⁷⁷ Melanchthon, already in his commentary of 1521, published in 1522, interpreted these words to be saying, quite unambiguously, “Sola itaque fides saluat, nullorum operum neque bonorum neque malorum respectu”. Cassiodoro de Reina's Spanish translation of 1569, by contrast, deleted the πίsτει from the verse altogether and translated, “Determinamos ser el hombre justificado sin las obras de la Ley”.

CHOICES FACING BIBLICAL TRANSLATORS

As George Steiner has said, “much of the Western theory and practice of translation stems immediately from the need to disseminate the Gospels, to speak holy writ in other tongues.”¹⁷⁸ Throughout the history of Bible translation, that need and the search for adequate equivalents have engaged anyone who took up the task. Three illustrations may suffice to identify the nature of the search: vocabulary, grammar, and syntax.¹⁷⁹

The most obvious problem was vocabulary. When missionaries were translating the Bible into a new language, were they to employ the ready-made religious terms that were familiar to their prospective converts on the basis of their pagan tradition, as the translators of the Septuagint had done in rendering [ĕlōhēēm] with [UNK] θεόs (though not with the equivalent plural, ο[UNK] θεοί), thus risking confusion between the old and the new faith (as Sebastian Castellio was accused of having done in his translation)? Or were they to transpose, or even transliterate, the technical terms of the original or of an older version into the new version—as, for example, John Eliot was to do in the century after the Reformation, in the very title of the translation he prepared in the Natick-Algonquin language, Up-Biblum God? Or were they to invent a brand-new set of words and phrases for their new church—as, in a sense, the Vulgate did when it used the neo-Latin “Christus” to translate not only the [UNK] Kριsτόs of the Greek New Testament throughout but also the [mäshēēäḥ] of such passages as Psalm 2:2 (although it did not use the name of the supreme God of the Romans, Jove, to render [YHVH,] despite the deceptive assonance)? An amusing variant was Luther's practice of rendering biblical proper names in German with Latinate endings: “Jesus” as a fourth-declension noun whose dative was “Jesu,” but “Christus” as a second-declension noun with “Christo” as the dative. The history of biblical translation has been marked by each of these several solutions, and by various combinations of them.

Reformation translators, to be sure, were not facing precisely that challenge, for their peoples had been “converted” long since and already had in their own languages words for biblical concepts, some more satisfactory than others. Ever since Valla and Erasmus, scholars and theologians had been aware of the inadequacy of “poenitentiam ago” or “poenitentiam facio,” “I do penance,” as a translation for μετανο[UNK]ω and its cognates. Luther reflected that awareness in the first of his Ninety-Five Theses of 1517: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Poenitentiam agite,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance,” rather than that one must perform individual acts of penance.¹⁸⁰ That distinction in English between “penance” (as the Roman Catholic sacrament) and “repentance” or “penitence” (as the Protestant summons to a break with the past and a new beginning) carried over, though not with complete consistency, into biblical translations.¹⁸¹ Thus Luther in the September Testament had John the Baptist (Mt 3:2) call out: “Bessert euch.” In his “prologe to the reader” Miles Coverdale explained the “maner haue I used in my translacyon, callyng it in some place pennaunce, that in another place I call repentaunce, and that not onely because the interpreters haue done so before me, but that the aduersaries of the trueth maye se, how that we abhorre not this word penaunce”. For some biblical terms, however, English vocabulary possessed impressive advantages. The outstanding example was the word “gospel” as a native term for the Greek ε[UNK]αγγ[UNK]λιον, which in almost every other language was simply transliterated instead of being actually translated as it could be in English and had been at least since the Lindisfarne Gospels.¹⁸² Another was the word “worship,” instead of the variations on the Latin “cultus” or on “divine service” used in other tongues.

A second issue for the translator was grammar. On one important point of grammar, most (though not all) of the vernaculars of the Reformation boasted a feature that was important in Greek but that the Vulgate had notoriously lacked, the definite article.¹⁸³ “Latin has no definite article” is listed as the first of the “Disadvantages of Latin as Compared with Greek” in the modern dictionary of the Vulgate by G. C. Richards.¹⁸⁴ Therefore it is defined in Lascaris's Institutiones as “De Articulo [Pερ[UNK] [UNK]ρθρου]. Articulus est pars orationis declinabilis praeposita declinationi nominum et postposita.” The absence of the definite article in Latin grammar had been a handicap to translators from the Greek since Classical antiquity. For the New Testament, it repeatedly affected Vulgate renderings. In the Latin term “filius Dei,” the Vulgate's rendering of the title for Jesus Christ that a standard modern concordance to the Greek New Testament identifies as “[UNK] ν[UNK]όs (κα[UNK] [UNK]ξοχ[UNK]ν),”¹⁸⁵ there was no way to tell from the Latin whether such a phrase meant “a son of God” among others or “the Son of God” uniquely as the Only-Begotten or [UNK] μονογεν[UNK]s. Augustine had taken great efforts to find a theological compensation for this grammatical disadvantage.¹⁸⁶ Significantly, the Romance languages, which descended from Latin, acquired definite articles, forming them from the Latin demonstrative pronoun “ille,” so that they were in a position to make the distinction. By contrast, the Slavic languages have remained like Latin and used a similar technique in translating the Greek and Hebrew definite article, and the Czech version of 1506 was obliged to say only “syn božij.”

A subtler choice for the translator involved syntax. If, in answer to the question quoted earlier from Luther's Ursachen des Dolmetschens, “How does a German speak in such a case?” the answer was that in rendering the syntax of some passage a German speaker (or a speaker of any other vernacular language) not only would use a native word but would prefer to resort to another part of speech, the next question was whether the translation, instead of rendering a preposition with a preposition, should accommodate itself to this preference of the vernacular. The most arresting illustration of this issue in my recollection appears not in any of our Reformation translations but in a twentieth-century version, the New Testament of the New English Bible, which was published jointly by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press in 1961—and which, incidentally, reveals its venue in a seafaring nation when Jesus commands Peter, “Shoot the net to starboard” (Jn 21:6). A literally faithful translation of the Greek prepositional phrases of Romans 11:36, [UNK]ξ α[UNK]το[UNK] κα[UNK] δ[UNK] α[UNK]το[UNK] κα[UNK] ε[UNK]s α[UNK]τ[UNK]ν τ[UNK] π[UNK]ντα, would be, as the av has it, “For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things,” a translation that is matched by the other Reformation versions being dealt with here. But the neb, presumably on the grounds that, by contrast with Greek prepositions as Lascaris had already described them, English prepositions tend to be somewhat feeble, took the bold step of changing the syntax and of rendering the prepositional phrases with monosyllabic nouns: “Source, Guide, and Goal of all that is.” (In the Revised English Bible, this imaginative translation was retracted in favor of the more cautious and conventional “From him and through him and for him all things exist.”)

THE WORD OF GOD, THE PEOPLE OF GOD—AND THE SEVERAL PEOPLES OF GOD

Two of the most powerful factors at work in promoting Reformation translations of the Bible, one of them theological and the other cultural, were the central Reformation doctrine of the universal priesthood of believers and the coming-of-age of the vernacular languages. The priesthood of believers did not mean, as some of its individualistic interpreters in the nineteenth century maintained, that believers were to be their own priests, as William James in a celebrated definition described religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”¹⁸⁷ Rather, Christian believers were to be one another's priests within community, mediating the word of God and the grace of God to fellow members of the church as the people of God; as Luther explained the key chapter of the New Testament on this concept (1 Pt 2): “Nu ist Christus der hohe vnd vbirster prieste von Gott selbs gesalbet / Hat auch seyn eygenen leyb geopffert fur vns / wilchs das höhiste priester ampt ist / Darnach hat er am Creutz fur vns gebeten / Zum dritten hatt er auch das Euangelion verkundiget / vnd alle menschen geleret / Got vnd sich erkennen. Diese drey ampt hat er auch vns allen geben / Drumb weyl er priester ist / vnd wyr seyne brüder sind / so habens alle Christen macht vnd befelh / vnd müssens thun / das sie predigen vnd fur Gott treten / eyner fur den andern bitte / vnd sich selbs Gotte opffere”.¹⁸⁸

To carry out this spiritual priesthood, lay people who were engaged in workaday vocations—“at the plow,” as was often said, or in the home—needed to be able to read and understand the Scriptures for themselves, without the interposition of clerical authorities. To the lay confessors of the Reformation who at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 presented their Confession in both Latin and German, or to the “consuls and Senate of the celebrated city of Frankfurt” to whom Calvin dedicated (in Latin) his Harmonia,¹⁸⁹ it was necessary to have the word of God in their own language, not least because they could be obliged to place their lives on the line for it. Yet sometimes, ironically, the combination of the principle of sola Scriptura with the insistence on the primary authority of the Hebrew and Greek originals of that Scriptura could put into the hands—or the mouth—of the Protestant minister in the pulpit an authority matching or even exceeding that of the medieval priest. For not only were women to “ask their husbands at home” (1 Cor 14:35) about theological questions; the husbands, too, ultimately had to defer to the superior knowledge of those who could read the Scriptures in the original languages. And when the authority of the Scriptures pertained to civil government and the ordering of society, as it did above all in the Reformed and Calvinist tradition, the outcome could be a theocratic or bibliocratic clericalism, for which, to borrow Perry Miller's phrasing, “religion is revealed in Scripture, but it is proposed to the mind by the ministry.”¹⁹⁰

The trenchant aphorism of Sir Maurice Powicke, “The one definite thing which can be said about the Reformation in England is that it was an act of State,”¹⁹¹ has as its corollary the principle codified (but not invented) by the Religious Peace of Augsburg of 1555: “cuius regio, eius religio.” For in one country after another the Reformation appealed to the rising tide of national consciousness, as when Luther permitted himself to claim the title “the prophet of the Germans.”¹⁹² Nothing, moreover, expressed that national consciousness more effectively than the vernacular language, and nothing more fervently symbolized that attachment to the vernacular than the translation of the Bible into the language of the people. Thus the Danish translation of the Bible commissioned by King Christian III (1503-59) and published in 1550 contained not only his portrait and coat of arms but his official letter of endorsement. When the Reformation came to a new land, for example to King Christian's Denmark, it united itself to the drive for nationhood: the church and clergy were no longer to be answerable to a foreign potentate, the bishop of Rome, but were accountable to their own nation and to its temporal rulers; and the language of the people was to replace a foreign tongue, the Latin of the Mass and of the Vulgate, as the medium both for public worship and for the communication of the word of God. The newly empowered laity of the Reformation churches were able, as they had not been before, to read and interpret the word of God in the Bible. But in an age when the means of communication and of transportation were becoming increasingly international, the replacement of Latin by the several vernaculars could—and did—set up new barriers. It has often been claimed that the Latin Mass made it possible for a traveler to attend worship anywhere in the world, but the waggish observation often accompanying that claim, that such travelers would understand the Mass as little elsewhere as they did at home, reinforces the Reformation case for the “Englishing”¹⁹³ (or “das Verdeutschen”) of both the Bible and the liturgy.

For the history of that process, especially in the Reformation of the sixteenth century and its aftermath, the German Bible and the English Bible have a special significance both intrinsically and statistically, as well as because of their implications for the spread of the Bible in other nations, through such agencies as the British and Foreign Bible Society (whose catalog, by Darlow and Moule, is a fundamental reference tool for any study of the history of the Bible, including this one).

THE GERMAN BIBLE

Partisans of Martin Luther and of his Reformation have sometimes given the impression that the translation of the Bible into German begins with him, an impression that his remark that the Bible had been lying “under the bench [unter der Bank]” before the Reformation seemed to foster. The historical situation is, of course, quite otherwise. Because the entire development of the German Bible before the Reformation is not our subject here, one outstanding example may perhaps suffice: the Biblia Germanica published at Strasbourg in 1466 by Johann Mentelin (ca. 1410-78).¹⁹⁴ This German version was based on the Latin translation rather than on the Hebrew and Greek originals. Nevertheless, it deserves pride of place as the first printing of a Bible in the German language, by contrast with Gutenberg's editions of the Vulgate. It was followed by seventeen other printed High German and Low German Bibles that appeared before Luther's September Testament of 1522.¹⁹⁵

When all of that has been said and duly noted, however, the fact remains that the history of the German Bible and the history of the German Reformation are so intertwined that neither history can be understood without the other.¹⁹⁶ Two centuries after the Reformation, the most celebrated of all German writers, in the most celebrated of his works, could have his protagonist take the Greek New Testament in hand and declare his intention “to translate the sacred original into my beloved German,”¹⁹⁷ which every reader would be sure to recognize as the reenactment of what Luther had done at the Wartburg in 1521. Luther was both a practitioner and an advocate of the sacred philology described in Chapter 1, as he declared unequivocally in 1524, speaking about Hebrew and Greek (as well as Latin) as “the languages” in a special sense: “Although the gospel came and still comes to us through the Holy Spirit alone, we cannot deny that it came through the medium of languages, was spread abroad by that means, and must be preserved by the same means. … In proportion as we value the gospel, let us zealously hold to the languages. For it was not without purpose that God caused his Scriptures to be set down in these two languages alone—the Old Testament in Hebrew, the New in Greek. Now if God did not despise them but chose them above all others for his word, then we too ought to honor them above all others.”¹⁹⁸

Nevertheless, he had simultaneously been engaged in producing, as preliminary samples, individual translations of the Bible, often in conjunction with his printed sermons on a text, such as his translation of Luke 17:11-19, the Gospel lesson for the fourteenth Sunday after Trinity, Euangelium Von den tzehen auzsetzigen, published at Wittenberg by Melchior Lotter in 1521.¹⁹⁹ But later in that same year,²⁰⁰ the second segment of his time of protective custody at the Wartburg in the aftermath of the Diet of Worms enabled him, in a white heat of production that took a mere eleven weeks, to complete Das Newe Testament De[UNK]tzsch, which was published by Melchior Lotter the Younger at Wittenberg in September 1522 and is generally identified as the September Testament. It was based on the 1519 edition of Erasmus's Greek New Testament (which lacked 1 Jn 5:7) and was supplied with prefaces, also to individual books, and with marginal glosses. By December of the same year he was able to put out a revised and corrected version (December Testament) of the New Testament, and for the quarter century until his death in 1546 he never flagged, even amid all the other duties and controversies occupying his attention, in his devotion to the task of translating and retranslating the Bible into German, as a chronology and a complete list of the Bibles issued in whole or in part during that period amply demonstrate.²⁰¹

Even as the September Testament was in the press, therefore, he had been working on the much more daunting task of translating the Hebrew Bible into German, beginning with the Pentateuch: Das Allte Testament deutsch published at Wittenberg by Melchior Lotter in 1523. This was followed early in 1524 by Das Ander teyl des alten testaments, comprising the books from Joshua to Esther, and in October of that year by Das Dritte teyl, containing the Poetical Books. The principle of asking “How does a German speak in such a case?” required him, in translating the roster of the menagerie of unclean animals in Leviticus 11, to inquire of both Jewish and Christian scholars as to the identity of all these creatures and their German names (if any!). That obligation of Luther the translator was not obviated by the insistence of Luther the theologian that these regulations were not binding on Christians, an insistence that he spelled out in a brief but hard-hitting treatise of 1525-26, Eine Unterrichtung, wie sich die Christen in Mose sollen schicken.²⁰² At the same time, the translation of the Decalogue (Ex 20:2-17) in the 1523 rendering of the Pentateuch also served as a trial run for the most influential translation from the Hebrew that Luther ever undertook, in the Small Catechism of 1529,²⁰³ complete with the controversial (and often misleading) numbering of the Ten Commandments according to the Roman Catholic system (with the prohibition of graven images, Ex 20:4-5, being treated not as the Second Commandment but as an appendix to the First Commandment), rather than the Hebrew system (with the entire prohibition of coveting being counted as the Tenth Commandment), which was adopted by most other Protestant groups and by Eastern Orthodoxy.²⁰⁴

These four separate volumes of translations, with further corrections and revisions by Luther in collaboration with his “Sanhedrin” of scholars and colleagues, came together in 1534, with the publication of Biblia / das ist / die gantze Heilige Schrifft Deudsch, issued at Wittenberg by Hans Lufft in 1534 and again in 1535. Luther's process of correction and revision was unceasing; and even after his death on 18 February 1546 its results were visible, with the publication later in that year of a two-volume version into which Luther's collaborator and editor of his lectures, Georg Rörer (1492-1557), incorporated changes that the Reformer had authorized but that could not appear until this posthumous edition.

In a separate category of the history of the Bible in German was Das naw testament, published at Dresden by Wolfgang Stöckel in 1527 and translated by Luther's longtime adversary, Hieronymus Emser (1478-1527).²⁰⁵ The title “translator” was, however, one that Luther was not willing to grant to Emser, whom he accused, with a considerable measure of justification, of having plagiarized his translation—and of having, moreover, botched the plagiarism! The translation was preceded in 1524 by Emser's Annotationes vber Luthers naw Testament gebessert und emendirt.²⁰⁶ As these two titles indicate, Emser's version was intended to correct Luther's mistranslations and to bring the German version of the New Testament into harmony with the teachings of the church.

THE ENGLISH BIBLE

The staggering number of versions of the Bible in English, which continues to grow at the end of the twentieth century, makes the evolution of the English Bible perhaps the most thoroughly studied chapter in the history of biblical translation.²⁰⁷ It is also a major chapter in the history of the Reformation; for despite the English translations of the Bible in whole or in part undertaken during the Middle Ages, notably the Wycliffite New Testament, … with a prologue in English inserted before the opening of the Gospel of Matthew, it is not until the Reformation of the sixteenth century that the history of the English Bible as we know it actually begins.

The New Testament of William Tyndale (ca. 1494-1536), a scholar trained at Oxford who had developed his translating skills by rendering into English the Greek of the Classical orator Isocrates and the Latin of Erasmus's Enchiridion, was a translation directly from the Greek original (with considerable debt to Luther's translation, particularly in the prefaces to the various books of the New Testament) rather than from the Vulgate, as its predecessors had been; it was first published in 1525-26.²⁰⁸ Tyndale followed this with translations from the Hebrew Old Testament—the Pentateuch in 1530, Joshua to 2 Chronicles in 1537 (printed posthumously as part of “Matthew's Bible”), and Jonah probably in 1531.²⁰⁹ He did not finish the entire Bible, not, at any rate, in his own name. But there is much to be said in favor of attributing to Tyndale the folio Bible that appeared at Antwerp in 1537, the year after Tyndale's martyrdom, under the name of Thomas Matthew; that was almost certainly a pseudonym of Tyndale's friend John Rogers (1500-1555), who edited the book, primarily on the basis of Tyndale's work.²¹⁰ Tyndale's modern editor, David Daniell, has noted “that Tyndale, from an intimate and craftsmanly knowledge of all three languages, believed passionately that Hebrew went better into English than into Latin (where, one might say, it had been in hiding for a thousand years)”; and therefore, according to Daniell, Tyndale “has produced a translation that goes some way to rendering in English the rawness of the original.”²¹¹ As for Tyndale's New Testament, Daniell makes the point even more forcefully: “It is commonly said that Luther's 1522 New Testament gave Germany a language: it ought to be said more clearly that Tyndale's 1534 New Testament gave to English its first classic prose. Such flexibility, directness, nobility and rhythmic beauty showed what language could do.”²¹² Or, as Daniell has said elsewhere, “he made a language for England.”²¹³

The translation of Miles Coverdale (1488-1568), published in 1535, although it included the entire Bible, was based on other translations rather than directly on the Greek and Hebrew texts, or, in his own words, “out of five sundry interpreters,” namely, as Mozley has enumerated them, and with illustrative examples: “Vulgate, Pagninus, Luther, the Zurich Bible in the 1531 and 1534 editions, and Tyndale [or perhaps Erasmus's Latin version].”²¹⁴ The translation was dedicated to King Henry VIII, with the reminder that Pope Leo X, without realizing the full implications of what he was doing, had in 1521 designated him “Defendour of the Fayth”, a title whose full implications he was now in a position to exercise. “What is now the cause of all these vntollerable and nomore to be suffred abhominacions?” Coverdale asked in the dedication. “Truely euen the ignoraunce of the scripture of God. For how had it els ben possyble, that such blyndnes shulde haue come in to the worlde, had not the lyghte of Gods worde bene extyncte?”. It is a curiosity in the history of the Englishing of the Bible that the Song of Songs is called in English “The Ballet of Balettes [that is, the ballad of ballads]”²¹⁵ and interpreted allegorically as “a mysticall deuyce of the spirituall and godly loue / betwene Christ the spouse / and the churche or congregacyon his spousesse”.

Circulation of these and other translations of the Scriptures during the sixteenth century caused a demand for a version of the Bible that would have the sanction of ecclesiastical authorities. In response to this demand an official commission prepared the so-called Great Bible of 1539, printed again in 1540, with a preface by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556). It was designed for use on the lecterns of churches, and the leaders of church and state sought to enforce it as the only permissible version of the Scriptures: “The Bible in English, that is to say the content of all the holy scripture, both of the old and new testament, truly translated after the verity of the Hebrew and Greek texts, by the diligent study of diverse excellent learned men, expert in the foresaid tongues.”

Dated “From Geneua. 10. April. 1560”, the Geneva Bible was guided by explicit principles of translation. Its translators, addressing some of the problems of language I outlined earlier, explained, “Now as we haue chiefely obserued the sense, and laboured alwaies to restore it to all integritie: so haue we moste reuerently kept the proprietie of the wordes, considering that the Apostles who spake and wrote to the Gentiles in the Greke tongue, rather constrayned them to the liuely phrase of the Ebrewe, then entreprised farre by mollifying their language to speake as the Gentils did”. At their hands the opening words of Psalm 46 became “God is our hope and strength, & helpe in troubles, readie to be founde”. This Bible features maps, which strove for geographical accuracy and completeness—another implication drawn from the Reformation's emphasis on the historical sense of the Scriptures, as discussed in Chapter 2.

The continuing popularity of this and other versions made some revisions of the Great Bible seem desirable for use in the churches; these were incorporated into the Bishops' Bible, Holie Bible, published at London by R. Jugge in 1568, with the prologue by Thomas Cranmer. The scene in the Garden of Eden shown in the Catalog depicts Adam and Eve at peace in the natural world of hares and horses, with [YHVH,] the Tetragrammaton of the divine name, emblazoned overhead. In the preface the translators presented themselves as following the example of the “olde forefathers that haue ruled in this realme, who in their times, and in diuers ages did their diligence to translate the whole bookes of the scriptures, to the erudition of the laytie, as yet at this day be to be seene diuers bookes translated into the vulgar tongue, some by kynges of the realme, some by bishoppes, some by abbottes, some by other devout godly fathers: so desirous they were of olde tyme to haue the lay sort edified in godlynes by reading in their vulgar tongue”. Even these revisions did not go far enough, and the Bishops' Bible did not succeed in establishing itself among the people or even in the churches. England needed a new translation that would incorporate the best features of earlier translations but recast them.

Such a new translation was provided by the Authorized or King James Version of 1611. Its dedication to King James I (1566-1625) is an acknowledgment of the central role played by the monarch in its preparation, and its “The Translators to the Reader,” quoted earlier in this chapter, was an extensive justification of the principles of translation at work in its composition. Although the Authorized Version has never lacked critics, it has, as I noted in the Preface by means of a quotation from David Lyle Jeffrey, so embedded itself in the religious and literary history of the English-speaking peoples that for most of its history its secure place has been challenged only by revisions of it, not by replacements for it—of both of which there have been, and continue to be, many.

Of the translations of the Bible into English coming out of the Roman Catholic Reformation, the most influential was the Reims-Douai Bible of 1582-1610, more commonly known as the Douai Version. The New Testament was “printed at Rhemes by Iohn Fogny 1582”. In accordance with the decree of the Council of Trent quoted in Chapter 1, it was based on the Vulgate. Picking up on the controversies over the words of Christ to Peter (Mt 16:18), as discussed in the preceding chapter, including the passage from Augustine's Retractations in the Catena Aurea, the annotations to this passage explained, “And though S. Augustine sometimes referre the word (Petra) to Christ in this sentence (which no doubt he did because the terminations in Latin are diuers, and because he examined not the nature of the original wordes which Christ spake, nor of the Greek, and therefore the Aduersaries which otherwise flee to the tongs, should not in this case alleage him) yet he neuer denieth but Peter also is the Rocke and head of the Church”. Twentieth-century studies have demonstrated many instances of the influence of the Douai Version on the Authorized Version.²¹⁶

OTHER PEOPLES, OTHER TONGUES, OTHER BIBLES IN THE REFORMATION

From its very beginnings the Reformation was an international movement. When Luther at the Leipzig Disputation of 1519 declared that some of the teachings for which Jan Hus had been condemned a century earlier had been Christian and Catholic, he received congratulations from the followers of Hus in the Czech lands. First at the University of Wittenberg and a generation later in Geneva, foreign students imbibed Reformation teachings and then returned to their home countries to propagate them. This was true already of the Lutheran Reformation, although it continued to be most heavily represented in German and Scandinavian territories. By contrast, the Calvinist Reformation—or, more precisely, those who defined themselves as “Reformed, in accordance with the word of God [‘Gereformeerden’ or ‘nach Gottes Wort reformiert’]”—spread almost immediately to a truly international venue. The Lutheran confessions in the Book of Concord of 1580 were all German in provenance;²¹⁷ but the confessions that Philip Schaff (1819-93) assembled under the heading “the Evangelical Reformed Churches” came from Switzerland, Germany, France, Belgium, Scotland, England, Ireland, and the Netherlands,²¹⁸ and he could have (or perhaps should have) added confessions from Hungary, Poland, and Bohemia, which have appeared in other collections of Reformed statements of faith. In all those countries, the coming of the Reformation prompted new attention to several aspects of Christian faith and life, such as preaching, vernacular liturgy and hymnody, catechesis, and church discipline—and to the teaching and reading, and hence the translating and publishing, of the Bible. Even beyond all those territories, moreover, the religious impulses set into motion by the Reformation, often in conjunction with the sacred philology of the Renaissance and with the growth of the technology of printing, aroused interest in making vernacular Bibles available to other peoples in their own tongues. What follows is an alphabetical catalog of some of these other peoples, other tongues, and other Bibles in the Reformation.²¹⁹

Arabic. The period of the Reformation in Central Europe was also marked by a heightening awareness of Islam—and with good reason. In 1526, at the Battle of Mohács, Christian Hungary had fallen to the Turkish armies, who went on in 1529 to put Vienna under siege. At the Imperial Diet of Augsburg in 1530, the two major items on the agenda were the Protestant Reformation and the Turkish threat; Luther in turn linked “des Papsts und Türken Mord” as major threats in his hymn “Erhalt uns Herr.”²²⁰ He also wrote Vom Kriege wider die Türken in 1528-29, Eine Heerpredigt wider den Türken in 1529, and Vermahnung zum Gebet wider den Türken in 1541.²²¹ But beyond these political and military responses to the Muslim threat, he undertook in 1542 to publish in German translation the Confutatio Alcorani of the thirteenth-century Dominican, Ricoldo Pennini de Monte Croce (ca. 1243-1320).²²² In addition to such defenses against Islam, Christians were concerned to counterattack by bringing the gospel—and the Gospels—to the Muslim world. Although modern writers sometimes speak about Arabic translations of the Bible before the rise of Islam, no authenticated fragments of these appear to have survived. What we do have are translations from Hebrew, from Greek, from Syriac, from Coptic, and from Latin. The Arabic Evangelium sanctvm domini nostri lesu Christi … was printed at Rome by the de' Medici Press in 1590-91.²²³ It depicts the scene in which Mary Magdalene recognizes the risen Christ but is told “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father,” and is then dispatched to bring the message of the resurrection to “my brethren” (Jn 20:17).

Czech. Of the vernacular Bibles in this list, only the 1506 Czech Bible antedates the outbreak of the Reformation as we usually speak of it, because the Czech Reformation also antedates the outbreak of the Reformation as we usually speak of it. Without settling the mooted question of how much originality to attribute to Jan Hus in relation to John Wycliffe,²²⁴ it does have to be conceded that Hus's movement did—and that Wycliffe's movement did not—found a church, in fact, more than one. That implied, among other things, that the Hussites produced hymnals (in both Czech and German) and catechisms, as well as translations of the Bible.²²⁵ The most successful of these, the Bible of Kralice, which owed much of its initiative to “the humanistic Renaissance in the Unity of Czech Brethren” led by Jan Blahoslav (1523-71),²²⁶ came at the end of the sixteenth century, with its large-format six-volume edition appearing in 1579-93/94, and the final revised version of its New Testament in 1613, at almost exactly the same time as the Authorized Version in English. This was the Bible that refugees after the Battle of White Mountain (1620) took with them into exile. But among its predecessors, the edition of the Czech Bible published in Venice in 1506, Biblii Cžeská, may claim a special place.²²⁷ It includes a Czech translation of the letter of Paulinus to Jerome, which appeared at the beginning of many editions of the Vulgate, but which (in accordance with the position of Jerome identified earlier) is being used here to justify a vernacular version: “Žádosti weliké byl nieyaký Paulin. kniez pocztiwý aby mohl rozumieti pijsmuom swatým. a od tohoto se swieta odtrhnúti. Y psal k swatému Jeronýmowi”.

Danish. The Danish Reformation was in considerable measure prepared for by the work of biblical humanists, among whom the most significant was Hans Tausen (1494-1561), “the Danish Luther,” who had studied in Wittenberg in 1523-24 and who in 1526 took the lead of the Reformation movement at Viborg, in the territory of Jutland. In 1529 he was appointed to the Church of Saint Nicholas in Copenhagen. King Christian II (1481-1559) had himself visited Wittenberg in 1524 and had become a Lutheran, as a result of which he could not return to Denmark. (He later turned back to Roman Catholicism.) The new king, Frederick I (1471-1533), eventually granted freedom to the Reformation party, in his oft-quoted statement of 1527 to the Roman Catholic bishops: “The Christian faith is free. None of you desires to be forced to renounce his faith, but you must also understand that those who are devoted to the Holy Scriptures, or to the Lutheran doctrine as it is called, will no more be forced to renounce their faith. … Therefore shall every man conduct himself in a way which he can justify before Almighty God on the Day of Judgment, until a final decision is made for all Christendom.” With the death of Frederick I in 1533 and after an interregnum, Christian III became king. It was at his initiative that Luther's colleague and pastor, Johannes Bugenhagen “Pommeranus” (1485-1558), was summoned to Denmark to reform the church; during Bugenhagen's absence from the pulpit in Wittenberg, Luther preached the sermons that became his Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount.²²⁸ The Danish scholar N. K. Andersen, on whose succinct narrative of the Danish Reformation this account is largely based, concludes it with this assessment: “The most important and permanent heritage which the Reformation left for posterity was the simple Danish service and the uncomplicated Christianity of the catechism on which the coming generations were raised. For its most significant monument we have the great Christian III's Bible of 1550, the first Danish translation of the Bible in its entirety.”²²⁹ And that “most significant monument” is likewise what we have here: Biblia / Det er den gantske Hellige Scrifft, issued at Copenhagen by Ludwig Dietz in 1550. …

Dutch. The eventual outcome of the Reformation in the Netherlands was one of the most pluralistic in Europe—including Roman Catholics, Orthodox Calvinists adhering to the Synod of Dort, Arminians, and Anabaptists—but initially its most distinctive expressions were part of the Radical Reformation. “In the Netherlands,” George Huntston Williams has said, “Anabaptism was the first major onslaught of organized popular reformation. It preceded revolutionary-nationalist Calvinism by more than a generation.”²³⁰ Menno Simons (1469-1561) was a Roman Catholic priest from 1524 to 1536, when, by accepting believers' baptism and severing his ties to Roman Catholicism, he assumed leadership of the Dutch Anabaptist community that eventually came to be named for him. Because Emperor Charles V (1500-1558), as heir of Burgundy, had been nominal ruler of the Netherlands since 1506 and remained so until 1555, opposition to him and to the House of Habsburg became the political and military focus of the Reformation in the Netherlands, for which therefore the Dutch language assumed a position of major importance, even among those who remained true to Roman Catholicism. In his enumeration of the several “Dutch versions” of the Bible printed in the sixteenth century,²³¹ S. Van der Woude cites, in a footnote: “Another translation of the New Testament based on Erasmus appeared in 1524 at Delft, printed by C. H. Lettersnyder. It was often reprinted.” That is the translation … Dat Niewe Testament. It contains the Johannine Comma: “Getuych geuen wten hemel / de vader / twoert / end die heylige geest / end dese drie zijn een”.

French. More perhaps in France than in any other country of Europe, there is a direct line from biblical humanism to the vernacular Bible. For “in the history of the French Bible,” as R. A. Sayce has pointed out, “there is no Authorized Version, no Luther, no translation which has achieved anything like the universal authority of the standard versions in England and Germany.”²³² In France itself, the Reformation party, the Huguenots, were a minority, and often a persecuted minority, and the principal strongholds of French-speaking Protestantism were Strasbourg and then Geneva. But unlike the Reformer of Wittenberg, the Reformer of Geneva, although he was in many ways better trained as a humanistic scholar than Luther, did not manage to impose his French translation of Holy Scripture on succeeding generations as a model both for the language of faith and for the language of poetry.²³³ If, accepting the validity of Sayce's generalization, one had nevertheless to select the one French translation that approaches most nearly to that universal authority although falling far short of it, it would have to be the Neuchâtel Bible of 1535: La Bible Qui est toute la Saincte escripture. En lanquelle sont contenus, le Vieil Testament [et] le Nouueau, translatez en Francoys. It was the work of John Calvin's cousin, Pierre Robert, who came to be called Robert Olivétan (ca. 1506-38) and who in his brief life worked in Strasbourg, in Piedmont, and in Geneva. His translation of the New Testament and the Apocrypha leaned heavily on the work of the French humanist Jacobus Faber Stapulensis, or Jacques Lefèvre d'Etaples (ca. 1455-1536), but his translation of the Old Testament was far more his own work.²³⁴ The history of its subsequent editions and revisions, some of which were by Calvin himself, is the mainstream of the career of the French Bible in the sixteenth century. Another chapter in the history of the French Bible is provided by the French Psalter by Clément Marot (ca. 1496-1544) and Bèze, Les Psaumes de David, mis en rime françoise, which, as an important document in the history of the “poetry of the Bible,” will be discussed in the next chapter.

Italian. Italy, the home of the Renaissance Papacy, was also the home of Renaissance humanism, and the early history of the Bible in Italian was caught between these two forces. Antonio Brucioli (ca. 1495-1566) published an Italian New Testament at Venice in 1530, and an entire Bible two years later; it was indebted to the Latin translation of Santi Pagnini, especially for its rendering of the Hebrew. In 1562 Brucioli's translation of the Old Testament was combined with the Italian New Testament of Massimo Teofilo, the sometime Benedictine from Florence, and published under Protestant auspices in Geneva. But the most important figure in the history of the Italian Bible was the Calvinist theologian and scholar of Hebrew, Giovanni Diodati (1576-1649), who was born in Geneva of Protestant parents and who taught Old Testament there, becoming the successor of Théodore de Bèze in 1609 and continuing as professor of theology for the next forty years. The editio princeps of Diodati's Italian Bible was published at Geneva in 1607: La Bibbia.

Natick-Algonquin. The age of the Reformation was also the age of exploration and then of conquest and colonization, above all in the Western hemisphere. One of the justifications—or, perhaps, rationalizations—for this expansion of European hegemony, adduced by both Roman Catholics and Protestants, was the intention to Christianize the heathen peoples. Jesuits and Franciscan missionaries brought Christian Latin to their converts, among them Native Americans across the new continent from Quebec to California. But for Protestants, the program of conversion necessitated the translation of the Bible into native tongues, which often required the creation of an alphabet and a written language. The first Bible printed in North America was the translation into the Natick-Algonquin language of Native Americans in Massachusetts by John Eliot (1604-90), often identified as “Apostle to the Indians”; the New Testament was first published in 1661, the Old Testament in 1663.

Portuguese. Concerning the place of Portugal in the age of the Reformation, every schoolchild knows—or at any rate used to know, when geography and history were required subjects—about the Papal Line of Demarcation of 1493 as a result of which Brazil became Portuguese-speaking, about Portuguese voyages to East Asia under royal patronage, and about the Portuguese colony in Goa. As for religious history, the Portuguese navigators, traders, and soldiers were followed by missionaries, above all the members of the newly formed Society of Jesus; for ecclesiastical history, these achievements were consolidated with the establishment of the archbishopric of Goa in 1557-58 and the coming of the Inquisition. The principal connection of Portugal with the Protestant Reformation was brought about through the work of Damião de Goes (1502-74), the author of the Chrónica do felicíssimo rei Dom Manuel. In 1536, it was he who cradled the head of the dying Erasmus in his arms. During those years Damião de Goes was in contact not only with various humanists but with Protestant Reformers in Wittenberg and elsewhere, as a result of which he was accused of Lutheranism and arrested. There had been interest in a Portuguese Bible already at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and various portions of the New Testament did appear. But the prohibition of vernacular Bibles by the Inquisition in both Portugal and Spain meant that such translations could not be published there. The translation of the New Testament into Portuguese was carried out by João Ferreira d'Almeida, and its first edition appeared at Amsterdam in 1681. This edition, O Novo Testamento, was published at Batavia by João de Vries in 1693. It was based on a form of the Greek text that incorporated the Johannine Comma (1 Jn 5:7): “Porque tres sam os que testificam 'no ceo, o Pae, a Palavra, e o Espirito Sancto: e estes tres saõ hum”.

Spanish. Sixteenth-century Spain is known as the land of the Inquisition, not of the Reformation; but what is less well known is that one of the most magnificent monuments of biblical scholarship and publication in the entire age of the Reformation, the Complutensian Polyglot, owed its existence to the Grand Inquisitor of Spain, Cardinal Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros. As the home base of Emperor Charles V, before whose imperial diets Luther was summoned in 1521 and the Augsburg Confession was presented in 1530, Spain symbolized Roman Catholic opposition to the Reformation movement. Indeed, its most important contribution to the Reformation—and eventually to biblical study—was almost certainly the rise of the Society of Jesus, which cultivated biblical “lectures” that consisted, as John W. O'Malley's fine study of Jesuit beginnings has put it, of “a loose concatenation of philological information, patristic commentary, medieval spiritual teachings, scholastic divisions of materials, digressions, and sage reflections into which were injected specific and practical applications to different groups of people that might be in the audience.”²³⁵ But, for those very reasons, Spain was repeatedly the object of Protestant agitation and infiltration, part of which was the production of a Spanish Bible by Cassiodoro de Reina (ca. 1520-94) and then by Cyprian de Valera (1532-1602): La Biblia, which was issued not in Spain but in Switzerland, at Basel, by Thomas Guarin in 1569. The translators explicitly differentiated it, therefore, from Roman Catholic translations based on the Vulgate: “Primeramente declaramos no auer seguido en esta Translacion en todo y portodo la vieja Translacion Latina, que está en el comun vso: porque anque su autoridad por la antiguedad sea grande, ni lo vno ni lo otro le escusan los muchos yerros que tiene, apartandose del todo innumerables vezes de la verdad del texto Hebraico”. Therefore the title page contains, in unpointed Hebrew (Is 40:8), [dsvär ĕlōhānōō yäkoom lsōläm], “La Palabra del Dios nuestro permanece para siempre.”

Notes

1. Kristeller 1961, 79.

2. Grafton et al. 1993, 10-11.

3. Luther to Nikolaus Hausmann, 25.vi.1530, WA Br 5:385; WA 50:440-60.

4. An instructive recent examination of the problematics of these issues that transcends the partisanship is the introduction to Brady, Oberman, and Tracy 1994, 1:xiii-xxiv, esp. xiii-xvi.

5. Burckhardt [1929] 1958, 1:175.

6. Among the exceptions to this are Spitz 1963 and Rice 1985.

7. In Kavka 1964, 44-76.

8. On the relation between the two universities see the comments of Oberman 1977, 72-81.

9. Schwiebert 1950, 275-302.

10. Pelikan 1971-89, 4:143.

11. Farner 1946, 152-72: “Der Erasmianer.”

12. Brown 1967, 36; also 271-73.

13. Pelikan 1974, 315-36.

14. Bergin 1965, 60-61.

15. OCD 226.

16. Klibansky 1939 laid the foundations for modern study of the question.

17. In Bishop 1966, 153-54.

18. See Allgeier 1943, 275-76 and 279-88, on the quality of medieval translations from Greek into Latin.

19. Lubac 1959-64, 2/1:238-62: “L'hébreu, le grec et saint Jérôme.”

20. Augustine De civitate Dei XVIII.43.

21. Didymus De Spiritu Sancto (PG 39:1031-86).

22. Boethius De Trinitate pr.: “an ex beati Augustini scriptis semina rationum aliquos in nos venientia fructus extulerint.”

23. Boethius De consolatione philosophiae III.m9, based on Plato Timaeus 27C-42D.

24. Schubert 1921, 467.

25. Durantel 1919, 49-59: “Traductions et commentaires.”

26. A brief summary of his work, with extensive bibliography, is in Chenu 1964, 215-19.

27. Oberman 1977, 75.

28. There is a large amount of biographical and bibliographical information about this development in Stinger 1977, 83-166: “The Renaissance of Patristic Studies.”

29. Geanakoplos 1962.

30. Babcock and Sosower 1994, 44-45.

31. OCD 850.

32. Bowersock 1993, 7.

33. Kristeller 1961, 81.

34. Burckhardt [1929] 1958, 1:236-46.

35. James Hankins in Grafton et al. 1993, 73.

36. “Nineteen editions of De civitate Dei, seventeen in the original Latin, were printed in the fifteenth century. Sixteen of the Latin incunable editions are owned by Bridwell Library.” Weinstein and Hotchkiss 1994, 22.

37. Jacob 1939, 191-96, illustrates the influence of such early editions by examining the publishing history of the Historia tripartita.

38. Tony Lane in Dowley et al. 1977, 366.

39. Rice 1985 is a brilliant examination of the reception of Jerome in the Renaissance.

40. Glunz 1933, 197-258.

41. Raphael Loewe in Lampe 1969, 103-5; Glunz 1930, 117.

42. Irenaeus Adversus haereses V.xi.1-2.

43. Drewniak 1934.

44. Pelikan 1971-89, 3:70-71.

45. Pelikan 1971-89, 3:166-68.

46. Denifle 1888, 471-601.

47. Metzger 1968, 95-106.

48. See the handsome volume by Ruppel 1967.

49. Armstrong 1954.

50. Kneller 1928, 202-24, on the canonical standing of the bull “Aeternus ille” of Pope Sixtus V; in general, see also Jedin 1961, 92-98.

51. Tanner 2:664-65.

52. Le Bachelet 1911, 107-25, reprints Bellarmine's dissertation of 1586-91, “De editione Latina vulgata,” and discusses it, 13-34.

53. Baroni 1986, 216-22.

54. Pius XII, “Divino afflante Spiritu,” Denzinger 754.

55. Second Vatican Council, Session VIII (18 November 1965), “Dei Verbum,” Chapter 6, paragraph 22, Tanner 2:979.

56. Fueter 1911, 112.

57. See Gaeta 1955, 77-126: “La nuova filologia e il suo significato.”

58. In Mirbt 1924, 110.

59. Bergin 1965, 192.

60. See the Introduction and Notes to Coleman 1922.

61. Louis Bouyer in Lampe 1969, 494; a brief summary of Erasmus's preface to it is in Bainton 1969, 65.

62. A brief and useful overview is that of Basil Hall in Greenslade 1963, 59-61.

63. Tarelli 1943, 155-62.

64. On the New Testament text in volume 5 of the Complutensian Polyglot, which was printed in 1514 but not released until later, see Catalog Item 1.25.

65. There is a succinct and helpful summary in Bedouelle and Roussel 1989, 74-77.

66. Reicke 1966, 262.

67. Smalley 1964, 338.

68. Kelly 1975, 78, 150-51.

69. Luther to Konrad Pellikan, ii. 1521, WA Br 2:273-74.

70. Kukenheim 1951, 109.

71. Idel 1988, 263.

72. Oberman 1992, 19-34.

73. Diestel 1869, 93; also 26.

74. See, for example, Augustine De civitate Dei XVIII.43, but also XV.11-13.

75. Michel 1972, 55-68.

76. Ziegler 1971, 590-614, is a learned summary of the author's lifetime of Septuagint research.

77. Pelikan 1971-89, 1:19-20.

78. Field 1875.

79. On the Complutensian Polyglot see Lyell 1917, 24-52.

80. CR 9:228.

81. Let me add a personal note here: the first Septuagint and the first Vulgate I ever owned (both of them, to be sure, sans Apocrypha) were part of the Polyglottenbibel zum praktischen Handgebrauch, edited in five volumes between 1871 and 1894 by R. Stier and K. G. W. Theile, and given to me by my father when I entered seminary in 1942.

82. Skehan 1952, 259.

83. Augustine De civitate Dei XVIII.36.

84. Pelikan 1971-89, 4:209-10, 261, 263-67, 275-76.

85. Tanner 2:663-64.

86. Schaff 3:489-90.

87. Shuger 1994, 18-29, on “philological exegesis.”

88. Grane 1975, 64.

89. CR 21:85.

90. McNeill 1954, 213.

91. Williams 1992, 1242.

92. PRE³ 3:632-34.

93. Holl [1920] 1948, 544-82, and Ebeling 1942 are two of the most fundamental such studies, to which Pelikan 1959 is deeply indebted.

94. Chenu 1964, 243; the entire section “Magister in Sacra Pagina,” 242-49, is very helpful.

95. Translation from Chenu 1964, 249.

96. Merkel 1971, 218.

97. Augustine Retractationes 51.

98. CR 45:476.

99. Smalley 1964, 149-72, is basic.

100. ODCC 972; see the trenchant account of Lubac 1959-64, 2/2:344-67.

101. Hailperin 1963, 145.

102. Meinhold 1936 is the most complete investigation of the question; but see Pelikan 1959, 90-91.

103. WA 44:753-59; LW 8:238-45.

104. Smalley 1964, xvi.

105. Pelikan 1959, 89-108; see 89, n 1.

106. Holl [1920] 1948, 558-63; Pelikan 1959, 71-88—both with representative quotations from Luther.

107. Oberman 1963, 371; also 390-93.

108. Pelikan 1971-89, 4:262-74.

109. Calvin Institutes IV.10.23-24 (CR 2:884-86; McNeill 2:1201-3).

110. WA 2:272, 286-87.

111. Steinlein 1912, especially 22-33.

112. WA 31/1:212; LW 13:66.

113. Bruns 1992, 139-40.

114. Holl [1920] 1948, 578.

115. Mirković 1980, 2:160-63, on his “independent contribution to linguistics [samostalni Vlačićev prinos lingvistici].”

116. Moldaenke 1936 is still the most authoritative study of Flacius and of the Clavis, but recent attention to hermeneutics, also among literary scholars, would suggest the need for further investigation.

117. Lubac 1959-64, 2/2:208.

118. Pelikan 1971-89, 4:308-9, 257, 295; 3:209-14.

119. Calvin Institutes IV.xvii.23 (CR 2:1021-22; McNeill 2:1388-90).

120. Pelikan 1959, 148-51.

121. Bornkamm 1969, 87-101.

122. CR 35:672, 629-30; Nixon 1953, 112, 57.

123. CR 35:617; Nixon 1953, 41.

124. CR 35:631; Nixon 1953, 59.

125. See my introductory comments, LW 15:xii.

126. Pelikan 1959, 89-108.

127. WA 53:22-184.

128. WA 19:186; LW 19:36.

129. WA DB 12:4-6; LW 35:338-39.

130. Theodor Zahn in PRE³ 5:653-61.

131. CR 45:160.

132. Köhler 1917 is a delightful collection of quotations on this subject.

133. Shuger 1994, 160-62; see also Jeffrey 1992, 380 (Camille R. LaBossière).

134. Lerch 1950, 156-202; see especially 158-63 on “das Einmalige” in the narrative.

135. See Luther's attempt to deal with this by reducing it to “a kind of illumination of an oration or of a case that has already been established on other grounds” (WA 40/1:657; LW 26:433-34).

136. Matter 1990, 51.

137. Leclercq 1962, 90.

138. Astell 1990, 48-50.

139. Pope 1977, 89-229, “Interpretations of the Sublime Song,” is a historical account rich in detail.

140. Matter 1990, 123.

141. Julian [1907] 1957, 1014.

142. It has been closely analyzed by Jost Casper in Petzoldt 1985, 49-76.

143. WA 31/2:586-769; LW 15:189-264.

144. Pelikan 1993, 1, 71, 213.

145. Bizer 1958.

146. Weigle 1961, 902-3.

147. CR 15:708 (wording somewhat different).

148. CR 2:12-13; McNeill 1:12-13.

149. Quoted in McNeill 1:12-13 n, in explanation of Calvin's use of the phrase.

150. Pelikan 1990b, 329-43.

151. Schaff 3:437-79.

152. Schaff 3:598-673.

153. Gregory of Nazianzus Orationes XXXI.27; Augustine De praedestinatione sanctorum xiv.27; De dono perseverantiae ii.4.

154. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica I.Q.36.A.2 ad 2.

155. Pelikan 1959, 137-254.

156. Pelikan 1971-89, 4:158-61, 350-62.

157. Harnack 1905, 192.

158. See ODCC 741.

159. Williams 1992, 1165-66.

160. Bruns 1992, 140.

161. Shapiro 1990, 8, 92.

162. Bergin 1965, 154.

163. See the familiar explanation by Boccaccio of why Dante wrote the Divine Comedy in Italian rather than Latin, in Toynbee 1965, 212.

164. WA 30/2:632-46; LW 35:181-202.

165. WA 38:8-69; LW 35:209-23.

166. WA 38:16; LW 35:221.

167. Sendbrief WA 30/2:636; LW 35:188.

168. Barnstone 1993, 25-27; because Barnstone's discussion throughout this provocative book concentrates on the Bible as the primary exemplar of the problems of translation, it bears on the discussion in this chapter at many points, even where his approach and mine are diametrically opposed.

169. WA 38:17; LW 35:222.

170. WA 38:11; LW 35:213-14.

171. WA 38:12; LW 35:214.

172. Augustine De civitate Dei XVII.7.

173. WA 38:11; LW 35:213.

174. See Bluhm 1984, 106-10.

175. WA 30/2:635; LW 35:186.

176. “W. T. unto the Reader,” Daniell 1989, 3.

177. Daniell 1989, 228.

178. Steiner 1992, 257.

179. It will be evident that throughout this section I have benefited from the essays in Brower 1959, especially from that of Eugene A. Nida, “Principles of Translation as Exemplified by Bible Translating,” 11-31, and the brief comments of Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” 232-39.

180. WA 1:233; LW 31:25.

181. OED P:642-43; P:632-33; R:464-65.

182. OED G:308-9.

183. Kukenheim 1932, 115-24.

184. Richards 1934, vi-vii.

185. Schmoller 1949, 493.

186. Pelikan 1990b.

187. James [1902] 1990, 36.

188. WA 12:307-8; LW 30:53-54.

189. CR 15:710-12.

190. Miller 1961, 1:68.

191. Powicke 1961, 1.

192. Pauck 1939, 297.

193. OED E:180, where the first instance of this as a verb is from Wycliffe.

194. On Mentelin and this Bible see Schorbach 1932, 176-80 and Plate VIIIb.

195. Listing in Reinitzer 1983, 85.

196. Reu 1934 remains a useful compilation in English of the state of research at that time, but the most thorough and up-to-date such compilation is now to be found in the material of the several historical introductions to the Die Deutsche Bibel volumes of the Weimar Edition of Luthers Werke, much of which has been brought together in the elegant and useful volume of Reinitzer 1983, prepared for the five hundredth anniversary of Luther's birth.

197. Goethe Faust 1217-23.

198. WA 15:37; LW 45:358-59.

199. WA 8:340-97.

200. See Luther's letter to Johann Lang, 18.xii.1521 (WA Br 2:413; LW 48:356-57).

201. Reinitzer 1983, 114-25.

202. WA 16:363-93; LW 35:161-74.

203. WA 30/1:243-47.

204. PRE³ 4:561.

205. Strand 1982, 6-7, 13-30, plates 1-98, gives a good view of Emser's translation.

206. See Reinitzer 1983, 195-99 (nos. 110-13).

207. Of the many histories of the English Bible that have been and continue to be published in the twentieth century, the increase in which likewise shows no sign of abating, Greenslade 1963, 141-74, is outstanding; also of great value are Bruce 1978 and Metzger et al. 1991.

208. This is available to modern readers in Daniell 1989.

209. Such is the table of contents of the edition in Daniell 1992. On “the historical books from Joshua to 2 Chronicles,” Daniell 1994, 334, comments that they “seem to have come from nowhere; except that in the treatment of both Hebrew and English, they match exactly the methods of Tyndale in the Pentateuch,” from which Daniell concludes that it is “almost completely certain that the historical books in ‘Matthew's Bible’ are by Tyndale.”

210. The chapter “Matthew's Bible,” Daniell 1994, 333-57, is a weighing of the evidence; see also Greenslade 1963, 150-52.

211. Daniell 1992, xiv-xv.

212. Daniell 1989, xxx.

213. Daniell 1994, 3.

214. Mozley 1953, 78-109.

215. OED B:639.

216. Carleton 1902, 84-250, is a careful tabulation of that influence.

217. Schaff 3:1-189.

218. Schaff 3:191-704.

219. The book-length collection of individual articles under the heading “Bibelübersetzungen,” PRE³ 3:1-179, a number of them by the eminent New Testament textual scholar Eberhard Nestle, can still be used with profit.

220. WA 35:467; LW 53:304-5.

221. WA 30/2:107-48 (LW 46:161-205); 30/2:160-97; 51:585-625.

222. WA 53:272-396.

223. D&M 1637.

224. Spinka 1941 strives to be a balanced assessment.

225. Segert 1994, 131-38, is a discussion by a distinguished Czech scholar of Semitic languages; Pelikan 1946 includes a review of earlier translations as background for the Bible of Kralice.

226. Jakubec 1929-34, 1:666-76.

227. D&M 2180.

228. WA 32:299-544; LW 21:3-294. On Bugenhagen's trip to Denmark see my introduction, LW 21:xix-xxi, with quotations from Luther's letters.

229. In Elton 1962, 142.

230. Williams 1992, 527.

231. S. Van der Woude in Greenslade 1963, 122-25.

232. In Greenslade 1963, 113.

233. See the discussion “Jean Calvin et la Bible,” in Bedouelle and Roussel 1989, 240-45, and the bibliography, 776-78.

234. On Lefèvre d'Etaples and Olivétan see R. A. Sayce in Greenslade 1963, 116-20.

235. O'Malley 1993, 109; on Jesuit attitudes toward the Bible see also 256-59.

Abbreviations

Adams: Catalogue of Books Printed on the Continent of Europe, 1501-1600 in Cambridge Libraries. 1967. Compiled by H. M. Adams. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

B: Benzing, Josef, and Helmut Claus. 1989. Lutherbibliographie. 2d ed. Baden-Baden: Koerner.

BMC: Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century Now in the British Museum. 1963-71. 10 vols. London: British Museum.

CR: Corpus Reformatorum. Edited by Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider. 1834-. Berlin and Leipzig.

Denzinger: Denzinger, Henricus, ed. 1976. Enchiridion symbolorum definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum. 36th ed. Edited by Adolf Schönmetzer. Freiburg: Herder.

D&M: Darlow, T. H., and H. F. Moule, eds. 1963. Historical Catalogue of the Printed Editions of Holy Scripture in the Library of the British and Foreign Bible Society. 2 vols. Reprint, New York: Kraus.

Goff: Goff, Frederick R., comp. and ed. [1964] 1973. Incunabula in American Libraries: A Third Census of Fifteenth-Century Books Recorded in North American Collections. Reprint, New York: Kraus.

GW: Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke. 1968-. 2d ed. Stuttgart: Hiersemann.

IA: Index Aureliensis. 1965-. Baden-Baden: Koerner.

LW: Luther's Works: The American Edition. 1955-1986. Edited by Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut Lehmann. 55 vols. Saint Louis and Philadelphia: Concordia Publishing House and Fortress Press.

McNeill: McNeill, John Thomas, ed. 1960. John Calvin. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Translated by Ford Lewis Battles. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.

OCD: The Oxford Classical Dictionary. 1970. 2d ed. Edited by N. G. L. Hammond and H. H. Scullard. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

ODCC: The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. 1983. 2d ed. Edited by F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

OED: A New [Oxford] English Dictionary on Historical Principles. 1884-1986. Edited by J. A. H. Murray et al. 10 vols. and Supplements. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PG: Migne, J. P., ed. 1857-66. Patrologia Graeca. Paris.

PL: Migne, J. P., ed. 1878-90. Patrologia Latina. Paris.

PRE: Hauck, Albert, ed. 1898-1908. Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche. 3d ed. 21 vols. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung.

Schaff: Schaff, Philip, ed. 1990. The Creeds of Christendom. 6th ed. 3 vols. Reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House.

STC (2d ed.): A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475-1640. 1986-91. Compiled by A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave. 2d ed. begun by W. A. Jackson and F. S. Ferguson and completed by Katherine F. Pantzer. 3 vols. London: Bibliographical Society.

STC (Wing): Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1640-1700. 1972-88. Compiled by Donald Wing. 2d ed. 3 vols. New York: Modern Language Association of America.

Tanner: Tanner, Norman P., ed. 1990. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. 2 vols. London and Washington: Sheed and Ward and Georgetown University Press.

VD16: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, and Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, ed. 1883-. Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des XVI. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Hiersemann.

WA: Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. 1983. Weimar: Böhlau.

Br: Briefwechsel

DB: Die deutsche Bibel

TR: Die Tischreden

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