In the footsteps of Erasmus - Leuven

It was every humanist's dream to discover a long-lost ancien scripts. Erasmus, however, did not find something old, but something recent: in 1504 in the Abbey of 't Park he came across the notes that the well-known humanist Lorenzo Valla had made on the text of the New Testament. Lorenzo was best known for debunking an important Vatican document as fake. However, the text of the document could not be as old as claimed and was thus a forgery. Erasmus defended Valla against a reluctant audience.

Valla would have liked to rewrite the Bible without the grammatical and stylistic errors and tinkering with the Word of God, all of this was of course not appreciated by everyone.

Erasmus explains why it has to be this way. Several variants of the text were known from old copies. Some passages were mistranslated, some misunderstood, others obviously added later. Opponents said you couldn't change anything because every comma was important. Erasmus claimed that you have to be extra critical when every comma is important.

Erasmus took an example from Valla and one of his great life projects became annotating and retranslating the New Testament itself.

When the church splits into Catholics and Protestants, he is forced to take sides in Leuven and leaves for Basel where he feels at home