Erasmus and Tyndale on Bible-reading

Abstract

The relation between Erasmus and the Reformation has been widely discussed, yet Erasmus' undoubted influence on William Tyndale has been little analyzed. In common with other reformers, William Tyndale learned to read the Bible from Erasmus. His reading of Erasmus, nevertheless, was not straightforward or simple, and certainly his theological conclusions were not the same. Erasmus set out his conception of Bible-reading in his Ratio verae theologiae of 1518, and those same principles are to be found throughout his writings of that time and later. Yet Tyndale's understanding of Bible-reading does not derive from this source, I will argue here, as much as from the Enchiridion militis christiani of 1503, which Tyndale had translated Even at that, Tyndale's reading of Erasmus was selective and idiosyncratic. Nevertheless, the result is not arbitrary, but derives from an Erasmianism reduced to its philological elements, ignoring the rhetorical theology that dominates Erasmus' mature hermeneutic. Erasmus' rhetorical theology is now very well known. It is Christocentric, in that the figure of Christ as a personality, as a perfect God-man, is central to it. The Erasmus of 1516-18 wishes the character of Christ to be known to all, to become alive in believers from their reading of the Scriptures. In the Introduction to the New Testament, he had mentioned the veneration of images and gone on: