Greek New Testament

The first printed Greek New Testament was produced in 1516 by Erasmus, a Dutch scholar. This groundbreaking work was based on the Byzantine text type, primarily using manuscripts from around the 12th century. Erasmus completed this task hurriedly in just a few months, and his second edition, published in 1519 with corrections, became the foundation for important translations, including Luther's German translation and Tyndale's English translation. This achievement was made possible by the invention of printing around 1450, which significantly expanded the potential for distributing the Scriptures.

That paragraph tells the bare facts. This page tells why they mattered. When the Reformation broke out, it did not begin with a new idea. It began with an old book, read again in the language in which God first gave it. The Greek New Testament did not make the Reformers, and it did not save anyone. But in the providence of God it was the spark. It put the apostles’ own words in front of Luther, Zwingli, and Tyndale, and those words would not let them go.

Back to the Sources: The Book of 1516

“Ad fontes!” — back to the sources — was the motto of the humanist scholars of the Renaissance. Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam applied it to the one source that mattered most. In 1516 the press of Johann Froben at Basel issued his Novum Instrumentum: the Greek text of the New Testament in one column, his own fresh Latin translation in the other, with annotations behind.¹

It was hurried. Racing a rival edition to press, Erasmus later admitted that the first edition was “precipitated rather than edited.”² Yet Merle d’Aubigné does not exaggerate the effect. The Greek text, he wrote, had been “as little known in the West as if it never had existed,” and now theologians were “able to read the word of God in the original tongues.” The monks protested that Erasmus was “trying to correct the Holy Spirit.” It made no difference: “The new Testament of Erasmus sent forth a living light.”³

Erasmus wanted more than a scholar’s book. In his preface he wrote:

Would that these were translated into each and every language.… Would that the farmer might sing snatches of Scripture at his plough, that the weaver might hum phrases of Scripture to the tune of his shuttle. Desiderius ErasmusParaclesis, preface to the New Testament (1516)

He did not do it himself. Others would.⁴

The Gap Between the Latin and the Greek

For a thousand years the Western church had read the New Testament in Jerome’s Latin. Much of the medieval system of grace had been built on the Latin words. Once the Greek was in print beside a new Latin rendering, readers could see the gap for themselves.

The most famous case is the word on Jesus’ lips in Matthew 4:17. The Vulgate reads poenitentiam agite, “do penance,” and the church heard in it the sacrament of penance: confession to a priest, absolution, and works of satisfaction. Timothy George explains that the humanist Lorenzo Valla had already pointed out that the Greek word metanoia “really meant ‘repentance’; it referred to a genuine change of mind and heart, not to the ritual performance required by the sacrament of penance.” Erasmus took Valla’s point into his 1516 edition. “In turn,” George writes, “Luther found in this fresh reading of the original text a basis for his frontal assault on the practice of indulgences.”⁵

Luther: “Repent,” Not “Do Penance”

Martin Luther was lecturing on Romans at Wittenberg when Erasmus’s volume appeared. Roland Bainton records that it “reached Wittenberg as Luther was lecturing on the ninth chapter of Romans, and thereafter became his working tool.”⁶ George’s summary is careful and fair: “Luther developed his insight into Pauline theology while using Erasmus’s edition of the Greek New Testament.”⁷

The first of the Ninety-five Theses, posted on October 31, 1517, turns on the very word Erasmus had corrected: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’ [Matt. 4:17], he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”⁸ The next year Luther explained his reasoning to Johann von Staupitz in the dedication of his Resolutions:

Fortified with this passage, I venture to say they are wrong who make more of the act in Latin than of the change of heart in Greek. Martin Lutherto Staupitz, 1518

Bainton calls it a discovery Luther himself described as “glowing.” A sacrament of the church had been found resting on a mistranslation.⁹

Luther never forgot what the languages had done for him:¹⁰

If the languages had not made me positive as to the true meaning of the word, I might have still remained a chained monk, engaged in quietly preaching Romish errors in the obscurity of a cloister; the pope, the sophists, and their anti-Christian empire would have remained unshaken. Martin Lutheras quoted by John Piper

Hidden in the Wartburg castle after the Diet of Worms, Luther translated the New Testament into German in about three months. He worked from Erasmus’s second edition of 1519, and the book came off the press in September 1522.¹¹ He spent the rest of his life revising it. In his 1524 appeal to the city councils of Germany to found Christian schools, he pleaded for the study of Greek and Hebrew in words every preacher should hear:¹²

Without languages we could not have received the gospel. Languages are the scabbard that contains the sword of the Spirit; they are the casket which contains the priceless jewels of antique thought; they are the vessel that holds the wine. Martin LutherTo the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany (1524)

Luther’s contemporaries had a saying for all this: Erasmus “laid the egg that Luther hatched.”¹³ It is half true. Erasmus supplied the text. Only Luther, under the hand of God, found the gospel in it and would not let it go.

Zwingli: The Epistles in His Own Hand

In Switzerland the same book did the same work, apparently without help from Wittenberg. Ulrich Zwingli, already a trained humanist, was “profoundly impressed by the fusion of scholarship and piety he discovered in Erasmus.” “More important still,” George writes, “was the 1516 edition of Erasmus’s Greek New Testament.” At Glarus and at Einsiedeln “he immersed himself in the text of Holy Writ,” and that his friend Heinrich Bullinger “reported that Zwingli memorized in Greek all of the Pauline Epistles, having copied them down word for word.”¹⁴

D’Aubigné tells why he copied them. The only printed editions were large folios, and he wanted a Paul he could carry. “As in old time the kings of Israel wrote the law of God with their own hand, so Zuinglius with his copied the Epistles of St. Paul.”¹⁵ Bainton adds that Zwingli later “affirmed in consequence that Luther had been able to teach him nothing about the understanding of Paul.”¹⁶

Zwingli himself dated his turn to 1516, when “led by the Word and Spirit of God I saw the need to set aside all these [human teachings] and to learn the doctrine of God direct from his own Word.”¹⁷ Called to the Great Minster in Zurich, he set aside the appointed lectionary readings and announced a different kind of ministry:

The life of Jesus has been too long hidden from the people. I will preach on the whole gospel of St. Matthew, chapter by chapter, following the mind of the Holy Spirit, drawing only at the well-springs of Scripture. Ulrich Zwinglito the chapter of the Great Minster

He began on January 1, 1519, and by 1525 he had preached through the New Testament.¹⁸ The Zurich Reformation followed. At the First Zurich Disputation on January 29, 1523, Zwingli and his colleagues came “carrying their folio volumes of the Greek New Testament, Hebrew Old Testament, and the Latin Vulgate.” He “urged that every priest buy and read his own copy of the Greek New Testament,” and if a priest were too poor, some pious citizen should buy it for him.¹⁹

Tyndale: From the Greek to the Plowboy

In England the new book found readers at once. At Oxford, d’Aubigné writes, young men gathered around William Tyndale “and read with him the Greek and Latin gospels of Erasmus.”²⁰ At Cambridge, Thomas Bilney bought the volume for its elegant Latin and, George writes, “upon first opening the book,” came to 1 Timothy 1:15: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.” Bilney later recalled:

This one sentence did so exhilarate my heart, being before wounded with the guilt of my sins, and being almost in despair, that even immediately I seemed unto myself inwardly to feel such a comfort and quietness, insomuch “that my bruised bones leaped for joy.” Thomas Bilneyas quoted by Timothy George

Bilney would go on to influence Hugh Latimer, and on August 19, 1531, he died at the stake in Norwich.²¹

Tyndale set himself to give England what Erasmus had only wished for. Unlike Wycliffe, who had worked from the Latin, he translated from the Greek. John Eadie, examining the text, concludes that Tyndale “translated directly from the Greek text, using the second and the third editions of Erasmus, published in 1519 and 1522.”²² The result, printed at Worms in 1526, was the first New Testament translated from Greek into English, and the Greek decided the words that most offended the bishops. Tyndale wrote “repent” for “do penance,” “congregation” for “church,” and “elder” for “priest.”²³ Each change took a sacramental prop from under Rome.

Tyndale knew exactly what the clergy had done with the Word, and what the plain text would do:

The scribes and Pharisees had thrust up the sword of the word of God in a scabbard or sheath of glosses, and therein had knit it fast, so that it could neither stick nor cut. William Tyndaleas quoted by Merle d’Aubigné

His New Testament drew the sword. The story of that book, its smuggling, its burning, and its translator’s death, is told on the page for Tyndale’s New Testament.²⁴

The Book and the Gospel

Three men in three countries read one book and came to the same conclusions. None of them received the gospel from another man. Luther found it in Paul at Wittenberg, Zwingli in the epistles he had copied out by hand, and Tyndale and Bilney in the Greek and Latin of Erasmus at Oxford and Cambridge. What united them was not a teacher or a party. It was the text. This is the Reformation’s sola Scriptura as it happened: Scripture judging the church, rather than the church guarding Scripture from the people.

Erasmus himself never followed. He remained in the Roman communion and backed away when the church began to divide. “I am not so mad,” he wrote to Leo X, “as to fly in the face of the Vicar of Christ.”²⁵ George’s judgment is just: the humanists, “Erasmus chief among them, never attained either the sense of the gravity of the human condition or of the triumph of divine grace that marked the theology of the reformers.”²⁶ A Greek text could correct a Latin word. It took the Spirit of God, speaking in that text, to show a man his sin and his Savior.

The lesson remains. The church has never been reformed by better arguments alone, but by the Word of God, read plainly and preached faithfully. Luther warned that if the languages are neglected, the gospel will be lost. The Reformation itself is the proof that when they are recovered, the gospel is found.

A Note on the Text

Honesty about the 1516 edition strengthens the story rather than weakens it. Erasmus worked quickly from a handful of late manuscripts. For the last six verses of Revelation he had no Greek copy and translated the Latin back into Greek.²⁷ He added the disputed words of 1 John 5:7 (the Comma Johanneum) only in his third edition of 1522, after a promise to his critics, and with a note voicing his own suspicions about the one manuscript that contained them.²⁸ Later scholars, with far older manuscripts, have improved the text at such points. None of the Reformers’ doctrines rested on them. Repentance, justification by faith, and the sufficiency of Scripture stood on texts that are not in doubt.

One detail in the summary at the top of this page needs a small qualification. Luther did translate from Erasmus’s second edition (1519). Tyndale used both the second and the third (1522), and he usually followed the third.²⁹

Bible Next: Tyndale’s New Testament