The first attempts at modern New Testament scholarship

Image: Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536)

Breaking with the medieval tradition, failing to anticipate the Reformation style, the humanists exhibited continuity instead with the modern world with respect to New Testament scholarship. Humanist philology came to dominate New Testament study and created a new brand of scholarship that has worked a profound influence on modern culture. Humanist philology not only made possible a more accurate understanding of the New Testament, but also led to a new vision of Christian antiquity itself. With the humanists works, the New Testament world began to retreat into history, and the Christian scriptures would figure in later centuries less as the arbiter of doctrine, more as the object of professional philological and historical analysis. By no means do I wish by this interpretation to try to restore currency to the old, discredited notion that the Renaissance humanists posed a secular or anti-religious alternative to a supposedly spiritual, Christian worldview developed in the Middle Ages. The fundamentally Christian character of the humanists’ thought is now well established. Far from weakening the Christian tradition, the humanists took philological studies as a new way to express their devotion to that tradition. One can only take at face value the refrain Erasmus often repeated in his prefatory and apologetic works, that he undertook his scholarly labors not in order to harm religion, but rather to provide purer texts and an improved understanding of the New Testament.

Yet one must also recognize in the humanists’ works the first attempts to apply philological criteria in establishing accurate texts, producing sensitive translations, and providing sound, historical explanations of the New Testament. That is to say, in their efforts one finds the first attempts at modern New Testament scholarship.

Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance  (pp. 218-19)