ABSTRACT
The Dominican theologian and cardinal Tommaso de Vio (1469-1534), known as Cajetan after Gaeta, his birthplace, is best remembered for his encounter with Martin Luther in October 1518. On that occasion, Cajetan sought to persuade Luther to withdraw a number of theological opinions on account of their alleged unorthodoxy. Several years later, Cajetan was involved, albeit peripherally, with the Roman commission that drew up the formal condemnation of Luther's teaching. It is widely and plausibly assumed that the rest of Cajetan's work is to be understood in this light, especially his commentaries on biblical texts, which he worked on from 1524 until his death in 1534. Jerry Bentley's remarks in the Oxford Companion to the Bible sum up the conventional view: 'In long commentaries on the Gospels and the Pauline letters, Cajetan depended upon the methods of humanist scholarship to argue that the New Testament proved the truth of Roman Catholic doctrine and confuted the Protestant alternative.'1 This view, promoted in T.H.L. Parker's recent study of sixteenth-century commentaries on Romans, can be traced back at least to Richard Simon (1638-1712), the French biblical scholar and historian of biblical criticism.2 Nor is it totally wrong. In the 1520s, there were writers who approached scriptural exegesis with precisely this aim in mind and there is some justification
Error and heresy in Cajetan's biblical commentaries
There are about two dozen mentions of unspecified 'heretics' in the biblical commentaries. Many of these are general comments about the heretics' selective use of Scripture6 and their moral turpitude,' or arguments that heresy is the work of the devil,B and that heretics, like the Samaritans before them, are often hated more than pagans.9 Cajetan gives some indication of the kinds of false teachers he has in mind. They are the sort who deny divine providence or the immortality of the soul.
