Collected Works of Erasmus Controversies, Volume 80-81

When a Parisian publisher in 1523 intended to reprint one of Erasmus’s popular paraphrases on the New Testament, he was forced to submit the work to the members of the theological faculty of the University of Paris. The influential syndic of the faculty, Noël Béda, took charge of the censorship and detected numerous unorthodox elements, particularly Lutheran tendencies.

Béda was so shocked by what he had read that he extended his research to all the other paraphrases of Erasmus on the New Testament that he could get his hands on. In the following years, Erasmus attempted to prevent Béda from publishing his findings and to steer clear from a condemnation of his books by the Parisian theologians. He failed in both respects, despite the five polemical writings presented here in volumes 80 and 81 for the first time in translation , in which he attempted to refute Béda's objections.

The mutual insurmountable incomprehension between the two scholars – exemplary of the contrast between scholastic and humanist approaches to the Bible in the early sixteenth century – is the common thread in this fierce and at times unsavoury quarrel.