Erasmus
It is customary today with those who are bitter against the
pure teachings of the Received Text to sneer at Erasmus. No
perversion of the facts is too great to belittle his work. As is
usual for these folk, they can’t impeach the work of Erasmus
so they tack on a label of “Liberal Roman Catholic”
with the inference that this tag destroys any possibility of God
preserving His Word by use of this man. If one is honest in his
scholarship, and good scholarship demands honesty, he would soon
see that the Erasmus text is none other than the same text as
that of the Antiochian sources such as the Itala of 150 A.D. and
the Syriac Peshitto of approximately the same date. The text of
Erasmus has such an out-standing history in the Greek and Syrian
as well as the Waldensian churches, that it has constituted an
irresistible argument for the proof of God’s providence. It
should be noted that many skeptics who claim that “oldest is
best” refer to the Vatican and Sinai manuscripts which date
from the 4th Century A.D. However, even Dr. Hort, who stated this
as his position admitted that the Received Text had a pedigree
that stretches back to the remotest antiquity and is at least as
old and possibly older that either the Sinai or Vatican
manuscripts.
~ Glen Carlson
It is a historical fact that Erasmus was strong and public in his
condemnation of Catholic heresies, and “these attacks were
made at a time when they might well have cost him his life. They
did, in fact, result in the Roman Catholic church branding him as
an “impious heretic” and the Pope forbade Catholics to
read his works.”
“Men are threatened or tempted into vows of celibacy. They
can have license to go with harlots, but they must not marry
wives.”
~ Erasmus
“I believe there are many not absolved by the priest, not
having taken the Eucharist, not having been anointed, not having
received Christian burial who rest in peace, while many who have
had all the rites of the Church and have been buried next to the
altar have gone to hell.”
~ Erasmus
The term “humanist” has changed meaning. The term meant
something entirely different in the sixteenth century than it
means today. In December 1984 I wrote to Andrew Brown, at that
time the Editorial Secretary of the Trinitarian Bible Society,
and asked about the charge of Erasmus being a humanist.
Brown’s reply was most enlightening:
“Erasmus was a thorough going ‘Christian humanist’
from his youth to his death. The use of the word
‘humanist’ in the Renaissance and Reformation period
does not in any way share the atheistic connotations which that
word now has in popular usage. A ‘humanist’ in that
period was simply someone who was interested in classical
literature, culture and education, as a means of attaining a
higher standard of civilized life. Stephanus, Calvin and Beza
were all humanists in this sense, and it is these
‘humanist’ ideals which have largely shaped Western
culture in the succeeding centuries, blended with the teachings
of the Christian Gospel.
“Erasmus was both a Catholic and a Reformer at the same
time. He criticized many of the worst abuses and corruptions of
the Catholic church, but he thought that the church should be
reformed from within and that it was wrong to separate from
it.”
We read that “in 1535, he [Erasmus] again returned to Basel
and died there the following year in the midst of his Protestant
friends, without relations of any sort, so far as known, with the
Roman Catholic Church.”
The Greek editors who revised Erasmus’ text were
unquestionably Bible-believing.
It is important to note that the men who followed Erasmus in the
work of producing editions of the Greek New Testament and from
whose editions most of the translations of the Protestant
Reformation were made, were strong Bible-believing men. It must
be kept in the mind that it was through the work of these men, of
whom there can be no doubt that they were separated, persecuted
Protestants, that the Textus Receptus was perfected. It is upon
their Greek texts, and not directly upon that of Erasmus that the
KJV was based.
O Timothy Vol. 10, No.5