Theopedia

Erasmus

Overview

Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) was a Dutch humanist scholar and Roman Catholic priest whose 1516 edition of the Greek New Testament became, through later editors, the basis of the Textus Receptus,1 and whose 1524 defense of free will provoked Martin Luther’s The Bondage of the Will.2 Erasmus never left the Roman Catholic Church himself.

Life and Ministry

Erasmus was born at Rotterdam and ordained a Roman Catholic priest. At the invitation of the Basel printer Johann Froben, Erasmus, then in England working on a revised Latin translation of the New Testament, went to Basel in 1515 to prepare a Greek edition of the New Testament for print.3 He completed the entire volume, Greek text, his own Latin translation, and annotations, in under six months, racing to publish before a rival edition already in preparation in Spain.3

Theological Contribution

The Greek New Testament and the Textus Receptus

Erasmus’s first edition of the Greek New Testament appeared in 1516, followed by four further editions in 1519, 1522, 1527, and 1535, each with corrections; the fifth differs only slightly from the fourth and became the basis of “the common text now in use.”4 His critical apparatus was thin. He worked mainly from manuscripts he could find at Basel, and for the book of Revelation he had only a single manuscript, itself defective at the end, so that he supplied its missing final verses by translating back into Greek from the Latin Vulgate.4 Later editors built directly on his work: Robert Stephens’s influential third edition (1550) was “almost identical with that of Erasmus’ fifth edition,” and Theodore Beza’s editions relied chiefly on Stephens.4 The 1624 Elzevir edition, copied mainly from Beza, became known as the Textus Receptus, prompting Bishop Marsh’s summary of the whole line of descent: “the text, in daily use, resolves itself at last into the Complutensian and the Erasmian editions.”1

One disputed decision in Erasmus’s editorial work concerned 1 John 5:7, the “three heavenly witnesses” passage.5 John Gill observed that “there never was any dispute about it, until Erasmus left it out in the first edition of his translation of the New Testament,” and that Erasmus himself later “put it into another edition of his translation” on the strength of a British manuscript he had been shown after the fact.5

The controversy with Luther over free will

In 1524 Erasmus published De Libero Arbitrio (“On Free Will”), arguing for a limited human capacity to cooperate with grace, against what he regarded as Luther’s overstatement of the will’s bondage to sin. Luther answered in 1525 with De Servo Arbitrio (“On the Bondage of the Will”), a title chosen to mirror and directly oppose Erasmus’s own.2 Hodge frames what was really at stake in the exchange: “the controversy between Luther and Erasmus was really about ability, nominally it was about free-will,” since the terms of the debate traced back to Augustine’s dispute with Pelagius over whether fallen man retains any natural power to turn to God, apart from the separate question of whether the will, however constrained, remains formally free to choose among the options available to it.2 Boettner notes that Luther’s polemic against Erasmus was written in language even harsher than Calvin’s, “the mark and weakness of theological controversy in that age.”6

Historical Significance

Erasmus’s Greek text, transmitted through Stephens, Beza, and the Elzevir printers, remained the basis of “almost all subsequent editions” of the printed Greek New Testament for more than a century.1 The distinction between liberty and ability that Hodge draws out of the Luther-Erasmus dispute “pervades all the symbols of the Reformation, and was followed by the theologians of the sixteenth century,” who “ascribe free agency to man in the true sense of the words” while denying him “freedom of will” in the sense Erasmus had defended.7 The same distinction runs through the later disputes between monergism and synergism, and between Reformed and Arminian theology, over the human will’s part in coming to faith.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), chap. 26, “The New Testament Text and Its History,” 390. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), chap. 9, “Free Agency,” 289: “The controversy between Luther and Erasmus was really about ability, nominally it was about free-will. Luther’s book is entitled ‘De Servo Arbitrio,’ that of Erasmus, ‘De Libero Arbitrio.’” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Barrows, Companion to the Bible, 388. ↩ ↩2

  4. Barrows, Companion to the Bible, 389. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book I, chap. 27, “Of a Plurality in the Godhead, or a Trinity of Persons in the Unity of the Divine Essence.” ↩ ↩2

  6. Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1932), 292. ↩

  7. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:289-290. ↩