Humanists and the Bible

dogmatic purpose of the moment. He was concerned too with improving

the quality of the Latin style; but, in contrast to Manetti, he was opposed to
rhetorical a.J:JJ.elioration such as the use of different Latin words to translate
the same Greek one. /'
Although some of Valla's alterations to thecYylgate were later to have
grave dogmatic consequences - the most significa~tIS.liis passage on faith
and grace - he tended to avoid any interpretative comments. 13 His true
importance lies in his insistence on the knowledge of Greek and the need to
compare existing translations with the Greek text, his emphasis on gramma-
tical precision and his use of non-Christian texts contemporary to the New
Testament in order to attest usage. He was severely critical of all earlier
theologians, including Augustine, who had ignored the Greek. Where Valla
can be criticized - and where his methods were to be improved upon by
later scholars - was in his choice of Greek manuscripts. These were by no
means reliable, and Valla's treatment of them was uncritical. 14
Despite the approval accorded to his methods by his employer, the
humanist pope, Nicholas V, Valla was attacked fiercely in his lifetime. As in
the case of Manetti, however, the manuscripts of his work seem to have had
little circulation and no influence on his contemporaries. Only later was he
more fortunate than Manetti. Valla's reputation was to be salvaged many
years after his death by Desiderius Erasmus, who came across a manuscript
of his notes on the New Testament in 1504 in a convent near Louvain and
published them the following year. He himself elaborated on Valla's
methods in the most influential work on the New Testament to appear in
the early sixteenth century. But to this we will return after examining the
parallel development of Old Testament studies.

In contrast to New Testament scholarship the study of the Old Testament

was less connected with the hunt for manuscripts which might contribute to
a more faithful rendering of the original. The reason for this is that, in the
Renaissance, early manuscripts of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament
were so rare as to be virtually inaccessible to European scholars. Later
manuscripts, on the other hand, had been standardized by the Jewish
grammarians known as the Massoretes, who, between the sixth and tenth
centuries AD, provided the Hebrew text with vowel points. The problem
which faced Renaissance scholars was one of understanding and interpreta-
tion far more than one of discovering codices. This meant the ability to read
the targums, the Aramaic paraphrases of the Old Testament in circulation
by the third century AD, and to understand the commentaries of far later
rabbis writing between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially those
by Rashi, Abraham ibn Ezra and David Kimhi. The task of the Hebrew

105