Word against Image

Abstract

Abstract There is a theologically startling moment in Erasmus’ “Paraclesis,” the introduction to his editio princeps of the Greek New Testament. In his eagerness for the “philosophy of Christ,” presented now in the original language and in his new Latin translation, Erasmus goes so far as to wonder whether the Christ portrayed in the printed gospels does not live “more effectively” than when he dwelt among men. For Christ’s contemporaries, Erasmus asserts, saw and heard less than readers may see and hear in the text Erasmus has just edited. The written gospels “bring you the living image of His holy mind and the speaking, healing, dying, rising Christ himself, and thus they render Him so fully present that you would see less if you gazed upon Him with your very eyes” (my emphasis). This startling devaluation of the actual incarnation in comparison with the textual record of it may not be a fully considered position of Erasmus. In context it seems rather an expression of the enthusiasm of presenting the first typographical edition of the Greek New Testament to Europe. But it is an illustration, and a characteristic one at that, of the intensity of Erasmus’ conviction that Christ was to be encountered most fully in the word, and not in any visual, material form.