That theological authoritarianism which Erasmus feared

Image: Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536)

Frequently the excuse is made for him [Erasmus] that this skill [editing texts] was unknown in his time, but someone used it in preparing the text of Colines’ Greek New Testament; and the Christian Hebraists of Alcala de Henares prepared after some years of effort the Hebrew text of the Old Testament in the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, which is still of interest to scholars. Erasmus might have created a thirst for better scholarship through the potent attraction of his name and of his edition of the New Testament, so that younger men could have done better what he had done imperfectly, if it had not been for the fact that both Catholics and Protestants, locked in an exhausting and inconclusive struggle to demonstrate each other’s errors, ended by mid-century in that theological authoritarianism which Erasmus feared would develop from Luther’s protest. In this situation there could be little scholarly advance; what was achieved was greater precision but with narrowed insights. The excessive caution shown by Beza in his edition of the text of the Greek New Testament (when he had the Western text before him to show him new possibilities) demonstrates this in the second half of the century.

Basil Hall, Humanists and Protestants (p. 66)