Biblical Humanism and Scholasticism in the Age of Erasmus (2008)
Erika Rummel
https://books.google.com/books?id=A6tvzRBSkFsC&pg=PA26
In his preface to Pope Nicholas V and in his earlier preface to the
reader, Valla claimed the mantle of St. Jerome in confronting the
corrupt state of the Latin translation of the New Testament.66 Valla
wished, he explained, to examine whether the Latin text conformed to
its “Greek source,” that is, to the Graeca veritas.67 To the charge that he
was assaulting Jerome’s translation, Valla responded that he intended
to defend Jerome, not attack him.68 In reality, however, Valla set out to
purge the Vulgate not only of scribal corruptions, but also of trans-
lation errors, as is clear in the Collado/' Annotations themselves and as
he himself admitted in the two prefaces to the Collado. He promised
to pluck the thistles inadvertently left behind, as it were, in Jerome’s
harvest.69 He also wanted to eliminate the inaccuracies created by pas-
sages rendered in word-for-word fashion in Jerome’s Vulgate.70 In a way,
Valla was replicating in the fifteenth century Jerome’s attempt to bring
the rustic Old Latin translation of the Bible up to late antique Latin
standards. Valla sought to bring it up to the revived classical standards
of quattrocento humanism.71
Valla’s emendations could not, of course, but suffer from the qual-
ity of the manuscripts he used. For the Collatio, Perosa notes that in
Matthew more than a third of Valla’s Vulgate citations and about ten
percent of his Greek citations do not correspond to modern editions.'3
Moreover, like Erasmus, he used Greek manuscripts reflecting an inferior
recension, that is, the contemporary Byzantine text, rather than the
superior Alexandrian text recovered in modern times.73 Despite these
handicaps, Valla’s biblical criticism was revolutionary precisely because
it was seriously philological as he consistently and in detailed fashion
collated the Latin text with the Greek. By comparison, for instance,
the commentary of the great fourteenth-century Hebraist Nicholas of
Lyra is remarkably unphilological, even in the Old Testament, where
his knowledge of Hebrew should have suggested more philological
criticism. Indeed, the Additions to Nicholas’s commentary made by the
early fifteenth-century Jewish convert Paul of Burgos have more of a
philological tinge.74 Medieval Hebraists were certainly well aware of
some fundamental philological principles—Nicholas Maniacutia’s trea-
tise Suffraganeus Bibliothecae is a good example of such awareness75—but
none ever published a collation of the Vulgate with the Hebrew, let
alone of the Septuagint with the Hebrew.
