been corrected
by Jerome, preserved by the church and sanctioned by the Council of
Trent. [Sidenote: 1592] In order to have this text in its utmost
purity an official edition was issued.

[Sidenote: Biblical scholarship]

Modern critics, having far surpassed the results achieved by their
predecessors, are inclined to underestimate their debts to these
pioneers in the field. The manuals, encyclopaedias, commentaries,
concordances, special lexicons, all that make an introduction to
biblical criticism so easy nowadays, were lacking then, or {567} were
supplied only by the labor of a life-time. The professors at
Wittenberg, after prolonged inquiry, were unable to find a map of
Palestine. The first Hebrew concordance was printed, with many errors,
at Venice in 1523; the first Greek concordance not until 1546, at
Basle. To find a parallel passage or illustrative material or ancient
comment on a given text, the critic then had to search through dusty
tomes and manuscripts, instead of finding them accumulated for him in
ready reference books. That all this has been done is the work of ten
generations of scholars, among whom the pioneers of the Renaissance
should not lack their due meed of honor. The early critics were
hampered by a vicious inherited method. The schoolmen, with purely
dogmatic interest, had developed a hopeless and fantastic exegesis, by
which every text of Scripture was given a fourfold sense, the
historical, allegorical, tropological (or figurative) and anagogical
(or didactic).

[Sidenote: Erasmus]

Erasmus, under the tuition of Valla, felt his way to a more fruitful
method. It is true that his main object was a moral one, the overthrow
of superstition and the establishment of the gentle "philosophy of
Christ." He used the allegorical method only, or chiefly, to explain
away as fables stories that would seem silly or obscene as history. In
the New Testament he sought the man Jesus and not the deified Christ.
He preferred the New Testament, with its "simple, plain and gentle
truth, without savor of superstition or cruelty" to the Old Testament.
He discriminated nicely even among the books of the New Testament,
considering the chief ones the gospels, Acts, the Pauline epistles
(except Hebrews), I Peter and I John. He hinted that many did not
consider the Apocalypse canonical; he found Ephesians Pauline in
thought but not in style; he believed Hebrews to have {568} been
written by Clement of R