Battle of the Bibles - Present Truth

friends rallied around him and within six months he was able to set out on his second
and successful attempt to visit Italy.
After a laborious trip across the Alps (for the saddle was the means of transport
then), Erasmus arrived in Turin, Northern Italy. There he remained for several weeks,
during which time the prestigious University conferred on him the degree of Doctor of
Divinity. Next, he visited Florence and Bologna. While in Bologna, Erasmus became
friendly with a "public Professor of Greek" engaged by the Bologna University. This
friendship with Paul Bombasius was later to prove invaluable to Erasmus while
translating his New Testament. By that time, Bombasius had been made secretary to
Cardinal Pucci, who gladly assisted Erasmus by providing him with readings from the
Codex Vaticanus.
His visit to Rome in 1507 appears to have been relatively short, yet he was able
to make the acquaintance of Cardinal de Medici who was so sympathetic with Erasmus's
ambitions for a Greek New Testament that later, when he became Pope Leo X, Erasmus
dedicated it to him.
Erasmus's visit to Italy must have lived up to his expectations. There he had not
only taken the opportunity to examine rare and valuable manuscripts but he had
engaged the minds of scholars who had helped settle in his mind the line of manuscripts
which he should use in his planned forthcoming Greek translation of the New Testament.
Now he would return to England as a Doctor of Divinity with an invitation from none other
than King Henry VIII.
With such illustrious credentials, and back now among his friends of Oxonian
days, it is not surprising that he was appointed Greek Professor at Cambridge, a position
which he was to hold from 1510 to 1514. And now Erasmus was to find among his
English pupils a student of Greek who was destined to leave an indelible mark on
English literature and society. He was William Tyndale.
The Pupils of Erasmus were fully aware of his desire to produce a Greek New
Testament which scholars of all nations could use to translate into their own language.
There can be little doubt that Tyndale there gained a desire to give the English People a
Bible of their own. But it would not be a translation of the Roman Catholic Vulgate as
was the Bible of Wycliffe, for Erasmus had shown him that the Latin Vulgate swarmed
with errors" (D'Aubigne's "History of the Reformation", Book 1, Chap. VIII).
It was during the month of April, 1515, that Erasmus was to receive word from a
friend in Basle that a famous German printer by the name of Froben wanted to print his
New Testament. Here was wonderful news for Erasmus. By this time, his many
dissertations on the state of the church had spread his fame abroad.
Now Erasmus could fulfil his pledge to Colet in a way that could not be compared
to his previous writings. With his proposed New Testament, he would not only realise
Colet's ambition to draw men away from the prevailing scholastic theology, but he would,
“place before them, in all the freshness of the original" a new translation of the "living
picture of Christ and His Apostles contained in the New Testament" ("The Era of the
Protestant Revolution", p 92).
It should be realised that, at this time, the Latin New Testament in use by the
church was substantially that of Jerome's late fourth century translation. Along with the
Old Testament and the Apocrypha, it constituted the Bible shortly to be re-affirmed and
authorised by the Council of Trent (15451563). Drummond's comments are instructive:
"To the monks and theologians of that day it was the Bible as much as if no
originals had existed, or as if Hebrew Prophets and Galilean Apostles had written in
Latin" ("Erasmus", p 309).
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