ABSTRACT
Philip Melanchthon’s passion for Greek, the language of the New Testament and the Gospel, remained unabated. He had taught Greek at Tubingen, and prepared a Greek grammar there, published in 1518. Martin Luther acknowledged how Philip Melanchthon had helped him in his study of the Greek text of the New Testament, particularly St Paul’s epistles, while Philip freely admitted that he had learned the Gospel from Luther. It was Luther’s Reformation discovery, and Melanchthon’s role in it, that made close friends of two men of very different backgrounds, ages and temperaments. Melanchthon and Luther energetically set about reforming the university to improve grammar, languages and rhetoric, and replace the scholastics with the apostles and the church fathers. Luther had to deal with unauthorised outbreaks of iconoclasm in Wittenberg, and it is worth lingering over the incident for a moment, because the subject of images in churches would later become a controversial one among reformers.
