Novum Instrumentum Omne, later titled Novum Testamentum Omne, was a series of bilingual Latin-Greek New Testaments with substantial scholarly annotations, and the first printed New Testament of the Greek to be published. They were prepared by Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) in consultation with leading scholars, and printed by Johann Froben (1460–1527) of Basel. All five editions included Erasmus' collated and corrected Vulgate Latin version side-by-side with the Greek version, and the fourth edition also included his de novo rendition of the Greek into more refined Latin to bring out the similarities and difference from the Vulgate, for scholars not expert in Greek.
An estimate of up to 300,000 copies were printed in Erasmus' lifetime. After Erasmus' death, his New Testament work was republished and revised notably by Robert Stephanus: the corrected Latin Vulgate, shorn of mentions of Erasmus, soon became a reference text for the Leuven Vulgate which was ultimately the basis of the official Catholic Sixto-Clementine Vulgate Bible and subsequent Catholic vernacular translations; the Greek text was the basis for the majority of Protestant Textus Receptus translations of the New Testament in the 16th–19th centuries, including those of Martin Luther, William Tyndale and the King James Version.
Contemporary efforts
By the early 16th century, the advent of the printing press and the new mass market for printed books had fundamentally changed the practicalities and usefulness of scholarly publishing, new editions and new translations.
Giannozzo Manetti translated the New Testament from the Greek, and the Psalms from the Hebrew, at the court of Pope Nicholas V, around 1455. The manuscripts still exist, but Manetti's version was not printed until 2014. Greek fragments began to be printed as Greek fonts were cut: the Aldine Press published the first six chapters of John's Gospel in 1505.
The early 1500s saw several authorized efforts to create and print scholarly polyglot and Greek editions of Bible texts:
In 1512, French priest Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples published his revised version of the Vulgate's epistles of St Paul, corrected against Greek texts, as well as a four-translation edition of the Psalms, sponsored by Cardinal Briçonnet.
In 1502 in Spain, Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros put together a team of Spanish translators to create a compilation of the Bible in four languages: Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Latin. Translators from Greek were commissioned from Greece itself and worked closely with Latinists. Cardinal Cisneros's team completed and printed the full New Testament, including the Greek version, in 1514. To do so they developed specific types to print Greek. Cisneros informed Erasmus of the work going on in Spain and may have sent a printed version of the New Testament to him; he invited Erasmus to participate.Otto Danwerth.Erasmus, christlicher Humanismus und Spiritualität in Spanien und Neu-Spanien (16. Jahrhundert). Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte. Working Paper Series.No. 2020-01.urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-465241 Although the first printed Greek New Testament was the Complutensian Polyglot (1514), Erasmus' was published first (1516). The Complutensian Polyglot edition was approved for publication by the Pope in 1520; however, it was not released until 1522 due to the team's insistence on reviewing and editing.Bruce M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament, Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 338. In 1516, Dominican monk and friend of Erasmus and More, Agostino Giustiniani released his polyglot psalter Psalterium Hebraeum, Graecum, Arabicum, et Chaldaicum, which included new Latin translations of the Septuagint and of the Aramaic. This was intended to be part of a larger polyglot bible, but did not find a market. In 1516 the Novum Instrumentum omne was dedicated to Pope Leo X. Erasmus obtained four-year "Publication Privileges" (a regional copyright) for the New Testament to attempt to ensure that his work would not be copied by other printers. He obtained also obtained one from Emperor Maximilian I. The edition was rushed to printing and with proofreading left to others, perhaps in commercial fear of the Complutensian being publishing first."Epistle 694" in Collected Works of Erasmus Volume 5, 167. Erasmus said it was precipitated rather than edited: the Latin is prœcipitatum fuit verius quam editum. The result was a large number of translation mistakes, transcription errors, and typos, that required further editions to be printed (see "Second Edition"). Erasmus made use of the Complutensian Polyglot in subsequent editions. In 1518, Erasmus' Italian publisher the Aldine Press published the first complete printed Greek bible, the Aldine Bible, pairing the Complutensian Septuagint Old Testament with Erasmus' initial New Testament. In 1522, Andreas Osiander published his own corrected Vulgate, and in 1527 a Gospel harmony. In 1527, Italian converso friar Santes Pagnino published new Latin translations of both the Old and New Testaments, from the Greek and Hebrew, also sponsored by Pope Leo X.
Approach Historian Erika Rummel identifies four tasks for the publication:
"clarification of the New Testament's teachings on the basis of the Greek text; improvement of the Latin translation from a stylistic point of view; elimination of grammatical peculiarities and solecisms from the Latin New Testament; and the effort to provide the most accurate possible edition of the Greek New Testament."
However, Erasmus did not believe that a single translation could ever be a definitive rendition of a different language. Having multiple translations of the Latin plus the Greek, and especially his Annotations, allowed fuller coverage of the verses' meaning:
Because of this, Erasmus claimed his translation was not intended to supplant the Vulgate for public use, though both the Vulgate and the Greek needed to be purged of copyist errors. Indeed, demonstrating a nascent intuition of different text traditions, one of the aims was to allow comparison of the Latin quotes of the Western Church Fathers and the Greek quotes of the Eastern Church Fathers. However Erasmus even noted that sometimes even the original Greek itself may not fully convey the original meaning:
The Greek and Latin New Testament with annotations was the scholarly part of his wider biblical program that included his Paraphrases (from his conviction that the humble and faithful unlearned could be true "theologians") and Patristic editions (from his conviction that even an optimal translation should not be read divorced from the understanding of the immediately succeeding generations of Christian teachers). Some historians have claimed that, for Erasmus' Philosophia christi, the popular Paraphrases were actually more important than the Novum Testamentum omne (in which, in turn, his Annotations were perhaps more important to him than his Latin and Greek recensions).
On scribal errors, mistranslations and corrections According to historian Lucy Wooding, "Three points stand out: Erasmus did not expect to find a single definitive text; he was happy (like St Augustine) to see several possible interpretations of any given biblical verse; and he expected ultimately to rely on Church tradition."
Erasmus himself later summarized his approach as philological, forensic and pre-theological, and that the formal aim was not to produce a definitive Greek recension or Latin translation: he included Patristic quotations as evidence about the existence of different traditions. Notably he did not warrant that his Greek manuscripts were necessarily more correct in every passage than the Latin sources:
However: "I freely admit that there are a great many things that I could have treated in a more scholarly fashion. I do not deny that in some places I fell asleep out of weariness."
Erasmus' philological efforts helped launch what has been described as a "golden century of Catholic biblical scholarship" in the hundred years following his death.
Latin Erasmus polished the Latin, declaring, "It is only fair that Paul should address the Romans in somewhat better Latin.""Epistle 695" in Collected Works of Erasmus Vol. 5: Letters 594 to 841, 1517–1518 (tr. R.A.B. Mynors and D.F.S. Thomson; annotated by James K. McConica; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 172.
Initial editions had light revisions of the Vulgate. By the last editions, Erasmus' Latin version differs from the Vulgate for about 40% to 60% of the text. Erasmus frequently borrowed from Lefèvre d'Étaples's and Valla's translations. In the Fourth Edition, Erasmus included his own independent translation in addition to the revised Vulgate.
In the negative judgement of one modern scholar "Erasmus' (Latin) translation is a monstrous mix of Vulgate (Western) and Byzantine elements…Only linguistically, by the standards of humanistic Latin, is it an improvement...Erasmus changed the Vulgate text (of Heb. 9, in 5th ed.) wherever this seemed to him to be necessary or desirable, but otherwise he left it as it stood."
Examples Erasmus' Latin contained several controversial renderings—different to or augmenting the Vulgate—(with philological or historical justifications in the Annotations) of words which became significant in the Reformation.
The was a notable problem: each of his editions of the New Testament adopted a different rendering from the Vulgate's (do penance): variously (may you repent), (repentance) and (repent of the former life). However the 1519—the edition used by Martin Luther's German translation—notably adopted Papal secretary Lorenzo Valla's suggestion of (to repent, to become wise again, to recover from insanity or senility, or to regain consciousness) with historical justification from Lactantius, and with an intellective rather than affective connotation.Cook suggests that was a particularly inflammatory choice as it suggested self-correction not only "with the sins, but with the errors, the madness, and the moral confusion of his own age." is the ultimate word in The Complaint of Peace. In the 1522 Annotations Erasmus insisted that a true change of mind would include sorrow, confession, and satisfaction, the traditional three components of penance,A view re-affirmed by the Council of Trent, Sess 14, Canon IV: yet noting that these components were not actually explicit in the traditional proof-text, 2 Cor 7:10.
Another important translation choice was Greek logos to Latin sermo (speech, conversation) rather than verbum (word), after the first edition. "Christ is for this reason called logos, because whatsoever the Father speaks, he speaks through the Son." This emphasized the Son as the self-disclosure of God, and dynamic or energetic rather than static. Critics worried this turned Christ into the Voice of God rather than the Mind of God.
For Romans 12:2, the Greek has συσχηματίζεσθε (syschēmatizesthe) and μεταμορφοῦσθε (metamorphousthe).
The Vulgate Latin has conformani and reformamini. Erasmus rendered them configuremi and transformemeni. English Catholic bibles (Wycliffean, Douay-Rheims, etc) have "be conformed" and "be reformed". (Knox has "fall in" and "must be an inward change".) Tyndale-based bibles used "fashion" and "be changed". From the King James Version onwards, Protestant bibles used "be conformed" and "be transformed."
Greek According to scholars such as Henk Jan de Jonge, "In judging the Greek text in Erasmus' editions of the New Testament, one should realize from the start that it was not intended as a textual edition in its own right, but served to give the reader of the Latin version, which was the main point, the opportunity to find out whether the translation was supported by the Greek." The continuous Greek text only needed to be good enough for this ancillary purpose: