Volume 28, Issue 1, 2016
Toan Do
Pages 141-163
A Plea for the Novum Instrumentum
Erasmus and His Struggle for a New Translation
In the wake of the humanism in the early sixteenth century, Erasmus of Rotterdam was often taxed with the “sin of journalism” as having little to contribute to the then--current obsolete Latinism. Despite much of the false accusation against his scholarship and erudition, one of Erasmus’s inaugural works, whose impact reverberates to this day, was the Novum Instrumentum (1516). Many of Erasmus’s contemporaries misunderstood this “new” Latin edition to be just “another” Greek edition of the New Testament. This article seeks to explore the background of Erasmus’s desire and struggle which led to the composition and publication of this Novum Instrumentum, on the one hand, and caused much confusion among his contemporaries, on the other.