720 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 12'.»4-1517.
as it is found to be in harmony with the teachings of the Church.i
Later in the l&th. century, the free critical spirit which the Revival of Letters was begetting found pioneers in the realm of exegesisinLaurentius Valla and Erasmus, Colet, Wesel aiid Wessel. Ss has already been said, Valla not only called in question the genuineness of Constantine's donation, but criticised Jerome's Vulgate and Augustine. Erasmus went still farther when he left out of his Greek New Testament, 1516, the spurious passage about the three witnesses, 1 John 5: 7, though he restored it in the edition of 1522. He pointed out the discrepancy between a statement in Stephen's speech and the account in Genesis and questioned the authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Apostolic origin of 2d and 3rd John and the Johannine authorship of the Apocalypse.
In opposition to such views the Sorbonne, in 1526, declared it an error of faith to call in question the authorship of any of the books of the New Testament. Erasmus recommended for the student of the Scriptures a fair knowledge of Latin, Greek and Hebrew and also that he be versed in other studies, especially the knowledge of natural objects such as the animals, trees, precious stones and geography of Scripture.^
The nearest approach to the exegetical principles as well as doctrinal positions of the Reformers was made by the Frenchman, Lefevre d'Etaples, whose translations of the New Testament and the Old Testament carry us into the period introduced by Luther. It remained for Luther and the other Reformers to give to the literal or historical sense its due weight, and esj)ecially from the sane grammatical exegesis of John Calvin is a new period in the exposition of the sacred writings to be dated.
The early printing-presses, from Lyons to Paris and from Venice and Niirnberg to Cologne and Liibeck, eagerly turned out editions of the entire Bible or parts of it, the vast majority of which, however, gave the Latin text. The first printed
1 Gerson, De sensu lit. scr. sac. Du Pin's ed., 1728, I. 2 sq., says, setisus lit. semper est verus and sensus lit. jndicandus est prout ecclesia a Sp. S. in,' spirata determinat et non ad cujuslibet arbitrium.
^ Paracusis.
§ 77. STUDY AND CIRCULATION OF THE BIBLE. 721
LatinJBible, which ap£eaTeda;t_MamjLJgit]iQut date and j_D^two volumes, belongs before jj:55 and bears the name of the Gutenberg Bible from the printer or the Mazarin Bible from the copy which was found in the library of Cardinal Mazarin. Before 1520, no less than 199 printed editions of the entire volume appeared. Of these, 156 were Latin, 17 German, — 3 of the German editions being in Low German, — 11 Italian, 2 Bohemian and one Russian, i Spain produced two editions, a Limousin version at Valencia, 1478, and the Complutensian Bible of Cardinal Ximenes, 1514-1517. England was far behind and her first printed English New Testament did not appear till 1526, although Caxton had set up his printing-press at Westminster in 1477.
To the printed copies of the whole Scriptures must be added the parts which appeared in plenaria and psalteria, — copies of the Gospels and of the Psalms,^ — and in the postiUce which contained the Scripture text with annotations. From 1470- 1520 no less than 103 postUlcn appeared from the press.^
The number of copies of the Bible sent off in a single edition is a matter of conjecture as must also be the question whether copies were widely held by laymen.*
1 Falk, pp. 24, 91-97, gives a full list with the places of issue. "Walther gives a list of 120 MSS. of the Bible in German translation. The Lenox Library in New York has a copy of the Mazarin Bible. The first book bearing date, place and name of printers was the Psalterium issued by Fust and Schoffer, Aug. 14, 1457. See Copinger : Incunabula biblica or the First Half Century of the Latin Bible, Lond., 1892.
2 Often only a brief selection of Psalms was given. Such collections were meant as manuals of devotion and perhaps also to be used in memorizing. See Talk, p. 28 sqq.
3 Falk, p. 32. The word postilla comes from post ilia verba sicut textus evangelii and its use goes back to the 1.3th century.
* Janssen, I. 23, 75 attempts to establish it as a fact that the copies struck off were numerous. He cites in confirmation the edition of the Latin Grammar of Cochlseus, 1511, which included 1,000 copies, and of a work of Bartholomew Arnoldi, 1517, 2,000 copies. Sebastian Brant declared that all lauds were full of the Scriptures, and the Humanist, Celti, that the priests could find a copy in every inn if they chose to look. 6,000 copies of Tyndale's New Testament were printed in a single edition. The Koberger firm of Niirnberg has the honor of having produced no less than 25 editions, 1475-1520. Its Vulgate was on sale in London as early as 1580. 3a