In Defense of Erasmus’ Critics

Abstract

The article confirms Andrew J. Brown’s thesis that despite carrying colophons with dates in the first decade of the sixteenth century, the four sumptuous manuscripts of Erasmus’ translation of the New Testament produced by the scribe Pieter Meghen could not have been finished until the 1520s and in fact preserve a version of Erasmus’ translation not available until the 1520s. Nonetheless, the article goes on to prove that Erasmus was working on a translation of the New Testament already at the time of the colophons in the Meghen manuscripts. Erasmus’ translation was part of his large-scale culture war against medieval scholasticism that he embarked upon at the end of the fifteenth century and continued until his death in 1536. The world around Erasmus changed radically, however, in those four decades, in significant measure because of his own scholarship and writings, but Erasmus himself changed amazingly little in his basic attitudes. The result was that by the end his critics from the Protestant as much as from the Catholic side were rightly frustrated by his incoherent reaction to the changed situation. Emblematic of his inability to face up to the transformed reality is his annotation to I Timothy1:6, which became an unconscious parody of his incoherent stance on religious doctrine and which is translated in an appendix to the article.