Biblical Humanism and Scholasticism in the Age of Erasmus

The question of how to study the Bible permeates the Christian tradition throughout its history. In the western Middle Ages the text of the Bible was approached by using the dialectical disputation developed after the eleventh century in the increasingly complicated Scholastic method.At the very end of the fourteenth century new historical and philological methods began to be favored. This in turn led to an awareness of the original languages of Scripture to which are attached the names of scholars such as Giannozzo Manetti, Johannes Reuchlin, Desiderius Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives, Martin Luther, and Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples. Together with a high regard for the Hebrew and the Greek texts, a beginning was made in the methodology of source criticism, a study of Patristic and Jewish (philological) commentary, and a confrontation of the Latin translations with the originals. All of this gave rise to a confrontation between members of the faculties of arts and those of theology at universities such as the new foundation at Louvain and the University of Tübingen.