While traveling widely and reading deeply from pagan and Christian works of the first five centuries, he developed his own prose style, seeking to achieve for himself the eloquence of the great Latin orators of old. When allowed as an adult to study abroad, Erasmus found in Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge fellow spirits who shared his deep distaste for scholasticism and his love for the clarity of thought he found in the writers of the Early Church. Schenck after Hans Holbein painting, about 1536. The Church would be reformed and society remade by people of goodwill following the teachings of Christ and his apostles. The goal of Christian piety, he believed, was to draw close to its source in God through disciplined Bible study and a simple devotion to Christ and his teachings. He was drawn instead to the new learning associated with the Renaissance rediscovery of the Classical world and its virtues of simplicity, morality, and prudent reason.

He was repelled by the worldliness and wealth of the great princes of the Church and never drawn to the abstract theology of the schoolmen, monastic asceticism, or veneration of relics that so dominated popular piety in the autumn of the Middle Ages. The Church had reared the Rotterdam native-he was educated in several superior monastic schools in the Netherlands, was received as a member of the Augustinian order (1486), and ordained a priest (1492)-but he was not at home in it.

The foundational document of the Christian Church at last was available to the public in a single volume-and in a readable format with a Latin translation and detailed explanatory notes.įor Erasmus, providing a printed Greek text to scholars and the Church was one of many critical tools the Church needed if it was to reform itself-a cause to which he had long devoted his keen intellect, tart prose, extensive Classical erudition, and sharp wit. A decade of research and nearly a year of hard labor had produced the first printed edition of the New Testament in its original language. It was, he later admitted, “more thrown together than edited,” but even so he had a right to be pleased. 1469–1536)-Renaissance humanist, Catholic reformer, and Dutch educator-wrote to a friend with great relief from Basel, Switzerland, that the printing of his Greek New Testament was at last complete. On March 7, 1516, Desiderius Erasmus (ca.

Greek New Testament by Anonymous