Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §3.2
having such basic groundwork in place, the rest of us would simply be unable to
read and translate these texts in the first place and could have little confidence
that the texts themselves available for use are close to what original authors
wrote.
Precisely the same concerns motivated the first great advance in scholarship
on the writings of the NT. It was the recognition that behind the thousandyear
reign of the Latin Vulgate were texts in the original Hebrew and Greek,
which led to Erasmus's edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516, from which
all modern NT study in the West is derived. 10 Thus began a major enterprise for
scholarly inquiry into the past, which is still fundamental to all critical engagement
with the NT — the task of recovering the original text as written by the NT
writers (so the task was first defined), or (as it is now perceived) the task of
achieving as full a consensus as possible in regard to the text of the NT to be used
in scholarly circles and as the basis for modern translations. 11 Here too no selfrespecting
student of the NT will be without a copy of the Bauer lexicon, 12 as an
earlier generation had relied on Grimm-Thayer. 13 And here too it needs to be recalled
that however close to the 'original' the modern Greek New Testament is (or
is not), the first and unavoidable task of any NT scholar who wishes to speak
about or to draw on that text is the task of translation, a translation which takes
full account of the findings of these earlier generations of historical philology
and textual criticism.
3.2. The Reformation
In a broader historical perspective the Reformation forms a seamless extension
of the Renaissance. But from a Christian and theological perspective it naturally
calls for separate treatment. And indeed we can identify the Reformation as
marking a second phase in the developing historical awareness within western
10. E. G. Rupp, 'Desiderius Erasmus', EncBr 6.953.
11. See, e.g., W. G. Kiimmel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of Its
Problems (1970; Nashville: Abingdon, 1972/London: SCM, 1973) 40-50; and further K. and
B. Aland, The Text of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2 1989). The product of
continuing refinement is K. Aland, et al., eds., Novum Testamentum Graece (Stuttgart: Deutsche
Bibelstiftung, 26 1979, 27 1993) and/= The Greek New Testament (New York: United Bible
Societies, 4 1993).
12. W. Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian
Literature, ET and ed. W. F. Arndt and F. W. Gingrich (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1957),
revised and augmented by F. W. Gingrich and F. W. Danker (1979) = BAGD, third edition by
F. W. Danker based on Bauer's sixth edition (2000) = BDAG.
13. C. L. W. Grimm and J. H. Thayer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament
(Edinburgh: Clark, 4 1901).
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