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Luther’s Marginal Thoughts on Erasmus by Zachary Purvis
in The Netherlands possesses a remarkable book previously owned by Martin Luther: a 1527 edition of the New Testament by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. Erasmus’s New Testament, first published in 1516, contained the Greek text, Erasmus’s own translation into Latin, and his technical commentary, which justified the choices he had made. It was a signal achievement: the first Greek New Testament accessible to many in Western Europe by means of the printing press and a new Latin form to improve on Jerome’s Vulgate. Luther’s general antipathy to Erasmus, the preeminent Renaissance scholar north of the Alps, is well known. Luther would call him “Christ’s chief enemy in a thousand years.” Luther’s book promises more illumination, for he filled it with the distinctive chicken scratches of his marginalia. More than two hundred handwritten notes, in both Latin and German, reveal his opinion on what he read. When Luther acquired it, probably in 1528, he had already engaged in brutal controversy with Erasmus on free will and salvation and the means to reform the church. What drew Luther’s ire was not Erasmus’s humanist scholarship—his interest in languages, rhetoric, history, poetry, and the return to classical texts of ancient Greece and Rome. In fact, Luther himself qualified as a humanist, or at least a great friend of humanists, under any sane definition of the term. He had even used an earlier edition of Erasmus’s work when he made his own translation of the New Testament into German in 1522. Yet he remained forever suspicious that Erasmus hid behind his sophisticated literary abilities to mask a lack of trust in Scripture. Luther was quick to sniff out what he held to be Erasmus’s disingenuousness—sometimes in unusual passages. When Erasmus came to Ephesians 1:23, he pointed out two possible meanings of a Greek verbal form. Luther read this as an attempt not to understand but to undermine the text: the style in which Erasmus wrote seemed to put philology in the service of skepticism. So, Luther jotted down what he took to be Erasmus’s real intent: “And therefore one should not believe anything of Paul and the entire gospel. What else does Epicurus say, who does not know Christ, indeed who considers it a fairy tale?” More striking is the battle waged over 1 Corinthians 7:39: “A wife is bound to her husband as long THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF GRONINGEN
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The first page of the Erasmian New Testament (1516)
