ABSTRACT

Erasmus' biblical scholarship owed much to the example of Lorenzo Valla. The most obvious debt was incurred in the preparation of the New Testament published in 1516. This Novum instrumentum, Erasmus' most original and influential contribution to biblical scholarship, consisted of the first-ever printed Greek text, accompanied by a controversial new Latin translation and by Erasmus' notes, the Annotationes, in which he justified departures from the canonical text based on St Jerome's version. Erasmus' labours had been greatly eased by the pioneering work of Valla's Collatio novi testamenti, which Erasmus published in 1505 as Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum. In his New Testament, a landmark in the evolution of biblical scholarship, and of particular interest to English scholars as a major textual source of the King James Bible, we see Erasmus at the height of his powers as textual scholar and theologian. While these qualities also play a role in his treatment of the Book of Psalms, they often take second place to another aspect of Erasmus' spiritual programme in whose development Lorenzo Valla again played a role. Erasmus profited from his own edition of Valla's Elegantiae to place humanist eloquence at the service of piety and reform.