← All figures

The Pre-Reformation

Desiderius Erasmus

1466 1536

Rotterdam / Basel · Humanist scholar, editor of the Greek New Testament

“Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched.” His 1516 Greek New Testament put the apostolic text back into scholars’ hands and revealed, for instance, that Matthew 4:17 calls for repentance, not do penance — a textual point with vast theological consequence. Erasmus himself remained Catholic and broke with Luther over the will, but the philological tools he forged were indispensable to the Reformation.