Holy Scripture Speaks: The Production and Reception of Erasmus' «Paraphrases on the New Testament»

Jay Newman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. His
most recently published works include Biblical Religion and Family
Values: A Problem in the Philosophy of Culture, Competition in Religious
Life, Religion vs. Television: Competitors

Erasmus is the most important thinker of the Northern Renaissance, a key
contributor to the philosophical liberalization of religion, and someone
with much of value to say to readers of our own age, so that one may
well be willing to countenance the enormous sum of taxpayers’ money
sunk over the years into the University of Toronto Press’s Erasmus
projects. This hefty volume includes essays that originated as papers at
a 1999 Toronto symposium on Erasmus’ Paraphrases in Novum Testamentum.
In these paraphrases, the eloquent Humanist proponent of “the
philosophy of Christ” articulates and explicates New Testament
teaching so as to emphasize its relevance to concrete moral and cultural
issues of his own day.

The collection contains 12 studies on the production, dissemination,
and reception of the Paraphrases, and all the contributors are
established scholars who go about their work in accordance with high
academic standards. The volume also includes indexes, a bibliography,
and related scholarly paraphernalia. Several contributors have been
associated with Canadian universities, including historian Erika Rummel,
classicist Mechtilde O’Mara, and coeditors Hilmar M. Pabel and Mark
Vessey. The latter has contributed an introduction as well as an essay.
The essays are too technical for general readers and even for scholars
not already familiar with a great deal of primary and secondary
literature on Renaissance Humanism. Representative titles are
O’Mara’s “Triumphs, Trophies, and Spoils: Roman History in Some
Paraphrases on Paul by Erasmus” and Rummel’s “Why Noлl Béda Did
Not Like Erasmus’ Paraphrases.”

Readers with even a rudimentary familiarity with Erasmus’ The Praise
of Folly and Colloquia will note with amusement that the high
scholarship of the essays in this collection is of a kind that Erasmus
took delight in ridiculing. Most of the material in this volume is
exceedingly dry, but every so often Erasmus’ theological subtlety is
impressively underscored, as in observations on Erasmus’ ability to
speak in the distinctive voice of a particular evangelist, his
unattractive depiction of the human Jesus’ family life, and the
complexity of his own attitudes toward New Testament teaching on
celibacy and marriage.