It was Sixtus who set in motion the greatest achievement of Renaissance art; restoring the Sistine Chapel and engaging the first team of painters to create its frescoes. Michelangelo placed the gem in the project’s crown when he began work on the chapel’s ceiling in 1508.
But despite papal adulation of humanist ideals, the movement’s emphasis on classical study would shortly contribute to the greatest schism the Church had encountered in its fifteen-hundred-year history. Humanism’s affection for the language and culture of the ancient world brought fresh eyes to the study of the Bible. This in turn led to new ways of contemplating scripture and, indirectly, to the Protestant Reformation.
Of all who contributed to the spread of the translated Bible, one figure more than any other deserves the greatest share of credit. Yet Desiderius Erasmus, the Dutch ‘Prince of the Humanists’, was far more than just a translator. The illegitimate son of a priest and a doctor’s daughter, Erasmus was orphaned at an early age and spent most of his life travelling as an itinerant, albeit highly respected, scholar. His profound intellect and international reputation made it relatively easy for him to find patrons to support his studies and fund his travels. But his intellect demanded he tread his own path. He was an ordained priest but did not sit easily within the Catholic Church; a man with humanist leanings, but not infected with a reformer’s zeal. Intellectually, Erasmus sat somewhere between Catholicism and Protestantism. He was his own man.
Erasmus believed that the Bible was the most profound of all texts and that the way to fully understand it was by making use of the tools and techniques first used by classical authors. Their exploitation and manipulation of language was the key to human understanding. The classical languages, Latin and Greek, were the tongues which underpinned all of Christian Europe’s culture. To attain clarity of thought and expression one required a thorough understanding of the literature, culture and linguistic techniques of the classical, Greek and Roman world.39
Erasmus published his own edition of the Latin New Testament. Believing that the Vulgate had become corrupted by scribal error, he scoured as many reliable Greek manuscripts as he could find, reconstructed what he believed to be the authentic original text, and published it alongside both the Vulgate and his own Latin translation, complete with notes. His Greek reconstruction came in for criticism, largely because the manuscripts he used were nowhere near as reliable as he had imagined, but that wasn’t really the point. Erasmus enabled readers of the Bible not only to access a revised and improved Latin text, but to compare it with the Greek and the Vulgate. Erasmus’s version made it possible for those who so wished to draw their own conclusions about the Bible’s meaning and interpretation.
But to fully engage with the Bible demanded more than a knowledge of Latin and Greek or an understanding of the classical world. A true appreciation of Scripture demanded familiarity with the tongue in which the earliest books of the Bible had been composed. And so it was that, centuries after Jerome and Origen, Hebrew began to re-emerge as an object of study. As is the way with these things, the charge was led at first by just a handful of enthusiasts, but the popularity of Hebrew study rapidly gathered pace. Eventually, Hebrew became an accepted part of the curriculum in universities across Europe.
Among the first Christian Hebraists, as these new enthusiasts were called, was a young Italian count, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Pico lived a short, but action-packed life. An Italian count, he was one of Italy’s wealthiest men. He lived in Florence, where he kept up a correspondence and friendship with the ruler of Florence, Lorenzo de’ Medici. His Oration on the Dignity of Man is considered one of the most important philosophical texts of the Renaissance.40
Pico developed a profound interest in Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical system which at the time was gaining currency in Italy.41 He became convinced that beneath all the world’s different esoteric and philosophical systems lay a common, unified undercurrent of knowledge, the core wisdom of humanity. Drawing together threads from these different systems, Pico composed his Conclusiones, a treatise containing 900 assertions that he claimed would harmonize all known religious, mystical and theological schools into one single doctrine. He intended to present his work to the Pope and the College of Cardinals, who, he imagined, would gather round to debate his ideas. But the Pope was not as compliant as Pico had hoped. He investigated the work and demanded that Pico retract thirteen of his assertions. Pico assented but concomitantly made things worse for himself by publishing an apology defending the retracted statements. The Pope responded by declaring the entire work heretical and ordered Pico’s arrest.
Pico fled to France, where he was thrown into jail. It fell to Lorenzo de’ Medici to negotiate his release. Pico’s credit must have been running high in the Florentine court; it was only a year since he had caused a scandal in the city by running off with Margherita de’ Medici, the wife of Lorenzo’s cousin.
Pico laid the foundations of Christian Kabbalah by commissioning Latin translations of Hebrew Kabbalistic documents. He allied himself to the tyrannical preacher Savonarola who, it is reported, preached a sermon in 1494 of such apocalyptic proportions that it made Pico’s hair stand on edge and Michelangelo flee the city in panic.42 Encouraged by Savonarola to renounce all his earthly possessions, Pico gave away the entire fortune he had inherited, partly to his nephew but mostly to the church.43 Pico died, possibly poisoned, on the day that the republic of Florence finally fell to the armies of the French king, Charles VIII. Savonarola preached at his funeral. Pico was only thirty years old.
Pico learned Hebrew and Aramaic under the tutelage of Elijah del Medigo, a Jewish scholar who taught Kabbalah and the Aristotelian philosophy of Averroes to wealthy students in Padua and Venice. He also spent time with another Jew, Flavius Mithridates, with whom he studied Hebrew and who translated Kabbalistic tracts for him into Latin. But his indirect contribution to the history of Bible translations came not through his Jewish connections but through his influence on Johann Reuchlin, a judge in the Supreme Court of the German city of Speyer.
Reuchlin, rather unfairly, is best known for his lengthy dispute with Johannes Pfefferkorn. Pfefferkorn, a convert from Judaism, had instigated a campaign to have all Jewish books destroyed. A commission of enquiry was set up to investigate Pfefferkorn’s proposal, to which Reuchlin was appointed. When the enquiry reported it transpired that all the commissioners had agreed that the Jewish Talmud and other works should be banned. The only commissioner who disagreed was Reuchlin, who insisted that, although they were products of a false religion, the Jewish books contained valuable legal information and theological arguments that deserved to be preserved. The proposed ban was also wrong, he argued, from a humanitarian point of view. The Jews had as much right to their books as anyone else.
Pfefferkorn took exception to Reuchlin’s stance and a virulent war of words broke out between the two men. Pfefferkorn had Reuchlin arraigned on a charge of supporting the Jews. The case bounced from one appeal to another around the inquisitorial and papal courts until finally Reuchlin lost and was left bankrupted.44 The Pfefferkorn affair had taken over his life. But Reuchlin’s stature far surpassed the grubby accusations he was forced to defend.
Reuchlin met Pico in 1490 when he travelled on a diplomatic mission to Florence.45 Reuchlin had already begun to learn Hebrew but Pico’s infectious enthusiasm both for the language and for Kabbalah inspired him. On his return to Germany he engaged a Jewish tutor to help him improve his Hebrew. He later returned to Italy to study under the great Jewish biblical commentator, Ovadiah Sforno.
Reuchlin’s significance to the history of the translated Bible is in the foundations that he laid for future translations from Hebrew. He didn’t translate the Bible himself, other than the seven penitential psalms.46 But he made Bible translations from Hebrew possible, both by promoting it as a scholarly language, and by providing the tools necessary to learn it. Conscious that there was a paucity of study aids for those who wanted to delve into the language, he published
a Hebrew grammar, a lexicon and a Hebrew-Latin dictionary. His enthusiasm for the language was such that, even in the middle of his dispute with Pfefferkorn, he proposed that every university in Germany should engage two professors dedicated to promoting the study of Hebrew.47
Reuchlin’s most important work was De Arte Cabalistica; a fictional account of a meeting between a Muslim, a Pythagorean and a Jewish Kabbalist. They converse successively on Messianism, numerology and the practical value of Kabbalah to Christianity. Of course the work was an anathema to Pfefferkorn and the Dominicans but was roundly approved by Humanists across Europe. One man in particular appreciated the value of Reuchlin’s promotion of Hebrew, and the reasons for it. Commenting on ‘the innocent and learned’ Reuchlin’s struggle against Pfefferkorn, Martin Luther wrote, ‘You know that I greatly esteem and like the man, and perhaps my judgment will therefore be suspected, but my opinion is that in all his writings there is absolutely nothing dangerous.’48 Luther’s appreciation of Reuchlin, the Hebrew skills that Reuchlin made accessible, and his own study of the language would prove immensely significant for the future of the translated Bible.
Martin Luther’s German Translation
Humanism itself was no threat to the Church, although the attitudes of some humanist thinkers towards theology and scripture most certainly were. For the first time there was an interest in the sources and original language of scripture, the genesis and veracity of belief. Some were even challenging accepted dogmas and time-honoured certainties.49 And while this activity could have comfortably remained within academic and scholarly circles, it was thrust into the world of action by a ramping up of popular, anti-clerical sentiment, resentment at the power and wealth of the Church, which Wycliffe and his supporters had identified two centuries earlier. To cap it all, the new technology of printing was making it so much easier to disseminate ideas and influence thinking.
One week after Christopher Columbus set sail for America, Rodrigo Borgia bribed his way to the papal throne in Rome, where he took the name Alexander VI.Good looking, charming, witty and manipulative, Rodrigo is considered to have been the most corrupt pope in history, keeping a string of mistresses and bestowing wealth, favours and titles on his illegitimate children. He granted Pico della Mirandola a pardon from the charges of heresy hanging over him and provoked a dispute with the pious but tyrannical friar Savonarola,50 who was imposing his own uncompromising brand of religious asceticism upon the city of Florence. Savonarola’s days were numbered – he would shortly be defrocked, hanged and his body cast to the flames. The philandering Pope was just the most important of his many enemies. But the preacher’s call for a renewal of Christianity, and his success in turning the faithful of Florence against the religious establishment in Rome, was a portent; a sign of things to come.
Venality was hardly less rife in the monasteries and abbeys, where trade in the sale of indulgences for the forgiveness of sin was brisk. Indulgences, which for a fee would ease the conscience of the wayward, had been introduced during the Crusades. By the beginning of the sixteenth century they had become an indispensable way of raising money, both for those who sold them and for the church at large. In 1507 their proceeds were earmarked to finance the building of the new St Peter’s Church in Rome. Six years later they funded a dodgy deal between Pope Leo X and the twenty-four-year-old Prince Albert of Brandenburg, whereby the young Prince could add a third archbishopric to his string of titles.51
Just as ethically dubious as indulgences were dispensations. A priest under a vow of celibacy could, upon the payment of a sufficiently large sum of money, obtain a dispensation to take himself a mistress; or, for a further sum, to divest himself of one paramour and settle down with another. Dispensations could also be purchased for a son born from such a union to enter holy orders.
The papal establishment badly underestimated the scope and severity of the dissent that was taking hold. Few in Germany would have disagreed when Martin Luther declared: ‘Roman avarice is the greatest of robbers that ever walked the earth. All goes into the Roman sack, which has no bottom, and all in the name of God.’52
Luther has gone down in the popular imagination as the man who nailed his ninety-five theses, protesting against the sale of indulgences, to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg. Behind the drama lay a disagreement that extended across the whole of the Christian belief spectrum; Luther quarrelled both theologically and politically with Rome. At the heart of his struggle was the interpretation of the Bible. One of Luther’s most important and enduring acts was to translate the scriptures into German.
The long-held view of the Catholic Church was that the Bible could only be understood through interpretation. Only the Pope, who had been divinely ordained as the sole, unerring interpreter, could explain Scripture’s meaning correctly. Luther strongly disagreed. He argued that there would be no point to having a Bible if it could only be understood through the medium of the Popes. ‘Why not burn it all and content ourselves with these unlearned lords at Rome, who have the Holy Ghost within them . . .?’53 he asked. On the contrary, argued Luther, human beings, even popes, cardinals and councils, can err. The only authority which could be relied upon was the unmediated word of God. And this was to be found in one place alone: in the Bible. This principle, of inexorable faith in the word of the Bible, became known as sola scriptura, ‘only by scripture’. It was a key foundation of the Reformation.
Sola scriptura implies that the Bible needs to be taught based on an understanding of its original languages, whether Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek. Relying on a translation requires a trust in the translator’s skill and choice of words; as such, translations cannot be considered to be sola scriptura. Luther appreciated the importance to sola scriptura of understanding the Hebrew language. But there was an implicit danger in promoting Hebrew education. The Jews had been analysing and interpreting the Old Testament for centuries, based on a thorough comprehension of Hebrew grammar. If Luther encouraged people to do what the Jews did, there was a very real risk that they would end up believing what the Jews believed. He couldn’t have that; it would be worse in his eyes even than assenting to Catholic doctrine. Luther needed to find a different methodology that would help people to understand the sense of the Hebrew text.
Luther created an artificial distinction between grammatical and spiritual Hebrew. Grammatical Hebrew was what the Jews and their rabbis made use of; but in relying on it they missed the spiritual connotations of the language. Sola scriptura notwithstanding, in Luther’s eyes Hebrew could only be a tool for understanding the original sense of the Bible if one transcended the simple grammatical meaning of the language and understood the spiritual context. The rabbis had failed to do this, as Luther explained, in as abusive a manner as he could. He declared ‘that is a great benefit that we have received the language from them but we must be aware of the dung of the rabbis, who have made of Holy Scripture a sort of privy into which they have deposited their foulness and their exceeding foolish opinions’.54
Four years after he circulated his ninety-five theses Luther was put on trial for heresy at the Diet of Worms, Emperor Charles V’s court. It was clear from the outset that he would not be acquitted unless he recanted, which he was not prepared to do. Rather than wait for the verdict to be pronounced, he took flight. As he fled through the forest he was ambushed; kidnapped by his friends as part of an elaborate plot to stage his disappearance. By the time the court delivered its edict proclaiming him a heretic, he was long gone. He went into hiding under a false identity in Wartburg Castle. It was there that he began to undertake his translation of the Bible into German.
Luther’s wasn’t the first German Bible; sections of the book of Psalms had been translated as early as the eighth century, and by 1518 eighteen German translations had been published.55 Luther even made use of some, particularly an Anabaptist translation of the books of the Prophets which had appeared in 1527.56 But Luther’s Bible was different; not only because it became far more popular
than any other, but because it was the first translation to have been made with an ideological agenda.
Luther established a collegium biblicum, or biblical college, with his colleagues Matthew Aurogallus and Philip Melanchthon (an enthusiast for Greek who, born as Philip Schwarzerd, had even translated his own name). They began with the New Testament, using the new critical Greek text that the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus had compiled. They completed the entire work within eleven weeks; it went on sale on 25 September 1522.57
Luther harnessed his translation of the Bible to reinforce his theological outlook. He changed the order of the books in the New Testament, broadly following the sequence which Erasmus had established but relegating to the end those which he believed were not written by apostles and did not follow the views of Paul.58 Crucially, he added just one word59 to lay down a direct challenge to the doctrines of Rome. The Catholic Church held the view professed in the Epistle of James that salvation could be achieved equally through faith or through correct deeds. Luther maintained that it could be attained through faith alone. This single, one-word addition went to the heart of his theological dispute with Rome.
The additional word also emphasized the distinction between Protestantism and the faith of the Jews. The Jews had always stressed the indispensability of actions as a testimony to faith. Luther would have none of it. He was insistent that faith alone was all that was needed. Deeds, whether they were the observance of the Old Testament’s laws or the purchase of indulgences, could never in his view be a route to salvation. As for the text in James which formed the basis of the Catholic position, Luther scathingly dismissed the book as an ‘epistle of straw’.60
Although the New Testament only took a few weeks to translate, the Old Testament proved not to be so easy. It took Luther another ten years until his translation of it was complete. In part this was due to ill health. But the delay was also the result of Luther’s need to reconcile the translation he was producing to his negative attitude towards the Jews and their interpretation of the Bible. The Old Testament, he believed, was a Christian text which anticipated the Trinity. The Jews however, whom he vigorously denounced with ‘a scatological rhetoric mirroring the worst of medieval anti-Semitism’,61 had, in his view, refused to believe in the fulfilment of its promise.62 Translating the Jewish Bible to accord with his reforming outlook was a complex task.
The Murderous History of Bible Translations Page 11