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Erasmus’ Debates with Traditionalists
DOI link for Erasmus’ Debates with Traditionalists
Erasmus’ Debates with Traditionalists book
Erasmus’ Debates with Traditionalists
DOI link for Erasmus’ Debates with Traditionalists
Erasmus’ Debates with Traditionalists book
ABSTRACT
The first intimation of resistance to Desiderius Erasmus' revision of the New Testament, even before its publication, came in an exchange of letters with a rising young Louvain graduate, Maarten Dorp. The second was the effect on the authority of the Vulgate of according primacy to the Greek text of the New Testament. Erasmus' lifelong clashes with the theological establishment were in fact part of a wider tension between a scholasticism wedded to a systematic, philosophically based definition of doctrinal truth and renaissance humanism with its delight in classical literature and cultivation of elegance in Latin. The debate between humanism and scholasticism is discussed at length by Rummel (1995). The points touched on by Dorp were later developed more fully by Jacques Masson in Louvain and Nol Bda in Paris. Masson's work also laid bare a fundamental incompatibility between scholasticism and Erasmus' philosophy of Christ. Finally, Erasmus' approach raised a fundamental question about the nature of authority itself.