Bruce Gordon

Shaping the Bible in the Reformation

This volume collects significant new scholarship on the late mediaeval and early modern Bible, engaging with the work of theologians, the devotional needs of the laity and the shape their concerns gave to the most important book of the age.

Architect of Reformation : an introduction to Heinrich Bullinger, 1504-1575

Offers an introduction to Heinrich Bullingers life and theology. This book features contributions from Bullinger and Reformation scholars that address such categories as theology, spirituality, ecclesiology, humanism, politics and family.

“For If We Are True Prophets”: Huldrych Zwingli on Martin Luther

This article examines how Huldrych Zwingli wrote of his relationship to Martin Luther in two key works from 1523 and 1527. In his Auslegen und Gründe der Schlußreden and the later Amica exegesis, Zwingli speaks of his own experience of coming to the Gospel and of his understanding of Luther’s place in the Reformation. In describing his breakthrough Zwingli developed an understanding of conversion and presented himself as a model for other Christians. In his assessment of Luther, the Zurich reformer moved from an initial concern to establish the grounds for unity to a harsh critique in which he saw the Wittenberg professor as destroying the movement he had begun. The article presents the case for moving away from the question of Zwingli’s dependence on Luther to a more expansive understanding of their relationship that throws light on the diverse paths to reform in the early 1520s.

The Bible in the Reformation

The Bible remains a stumbling block for historians of the Reformation, as well as for those who continue to claim the inheritance of the sixteenth-century revolution. In the scholarly field, the study of the early modern Bibles has yielded ripe fruits in the hands of historians of scriptural exegesis and of the book, but their insights are rarely integrated into narratives of the Reformation. The unwillingness of historians to engage with the complex challenges presented by the Bible, as well as with the protean ways in which the sacred text was read and interpreted, distorts our understanding of a torrid age of religious change. We need to recover the Bible as the lens through which the sixteenth-century world was viewed. What were the implications, we need to ask, of the multivalent relationships between, on the one hand, interpretations, translations, and readings of Scripture by reformers and lay people and, on the other hand, the development of institutions, conceptions of identity, history, and gender, and the formation of doctrine. Specific instances have been investigated thoughtfully, but Reformation scholars have recoiled from more integrated studies of the ambiguous place of the Bible in Reformation culture and its consequences for the subsequent development of contemporary society. The work of Brad Gregory is a notable, if controversial, exception. This short essay briefly addresses one line of thought by looking to the role of the Bible and tradition in Protestant thought as a way of thinking about pre-modern culture. Beginning with Erasmus, we consider the nature of the Reformation Bible, an unstable text in a constant state of development and of becoming in the sixteenth century. The evolution of the Reformation biblical text casts in relief both the considerable achievements of Protestant and Catholic scholars and the significant challenges faced by reformers seeking the foundations of authority. The creation of Renaissance humanist scholarship beholden to ideals of linguistic and textual fidelity, the Reformation Bible was a text unlike anything previously known. Famously, however, little consensus emerged on how it was to be translated or interpreted. Christ’s words “This is my body” rend the curtain of reform during the 1520s, leading to a bitter dispute that permanently divided Protestantism.

What I am Reading

Over the past few years I have been engaged in a collaborative project, with Matthew McLean of the University of St Andrews, investigating Protestant translations of the Bible into Latin. As early modernists and teachers, we are familiar with the importance of the work of Luther, Tyndale, Zwingli and others who brought scripture into the languages of the people. Indeed, one of the most astonishing experiences I have had recently was to speak about a Tyndale Pentateuch and New Testament recently acquired by the Beinecke Library at Yale. Such emphasis on the vernacular, however, has overlooked the reality that for most sixteenthcentury Protestant churchmen Latin remained a sacred language and the common tongue of the educated. Erasmus’s New Testament of 1516 and his later Latin translation were an inspiration to a generation of humanists who endeavored to learn Hebrew and Greek in order to render the Word of God into Latin, the language of the church and its theology. Our project examines the evolution of Protestant Latin Bible scholarship over the sixteenth century, considering issues of translation, page and text, doctrine, and readership. We focus on four Bibles: Sebastian Munster’s Old Testament of 1534/ 5; the 1543 Biblia Sacrosancta from Zurich; Sebastian Castellio’s Biblia Latina; and the several editions of the Testamenti veteris of Franciscus Junius and Immanuel Tremellius. In addition to these Bibles there were numerous translations of individual books of the Bible. The challenges facing the translators were legion. To begin, knowledge of Hebrew in the early and mid-sixteenth century was limited to a small group of men dependent on their Jewish teachers. There was little agreement on how Hebrew should be turned into Latin. Jerome was regarded as the model to be emulated, but the needs of the sixteenth century were different. Munster intentionally translated the Old Testament into literal, ugly Latin not because he was a poor stylist. His intention was to provide a tool for Christian scholars to learn the ancient language. Ten years later the scholars in Zurich eschewed the literal approach to produce a translation of Hebrew into Latin that was pleasing to the eye. Although they held Munster in high regard they cast his literal renderings into the marginalia. The most radical approach came from Sebastian Castellio, who argued that Moses, the author of the Pentateuch, should be treated as a Greek orator. The Hebrew of the Old Testament was, therefore, to be put into the very best Ciceronian Latin to the extent that the traditional Latin vocabulary for God, angels, and the church was abandoned for more elegant classical words. Finally, the most influential Bible was prepared by reformation, Vol. 20 No. 2, November, 2015, 151–153