You two are book-men.
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Erasmus of Rotterdam—for so he called himself, even though he spent but the first few years of his life in (or near) that city—was the poor bastard son of a Dutch priest. A narrative—somewhat confusing, in all likelihood deliberately so—of his early years is contained in his Compendium Vitae (Summary of My Life). It seems that when he was still in his teens both his parents died of plague, after which he was sent by his legal guardians, who wished to discharge their responsibilities as expeditiously as was seemly, to a tuition-free boarding school run by the Brethren of the Common Life. The Brethren had begun as a lay association of similarly minded men who endeavored to follow the example of Jesus by living as simply and prayerfully as possible. Erasmus soon enough found himself forced to take monastic vows in the convent of the Augustinian canons at Steyn near Gouda, so that he might continue to be fed and housed once his school years were over and the small inheritance left by his father had dwindled to nothing—thanks, according to Erasmus, to the guardians’ mismanagement. By the time Columbus set sail, Erasmus had been ordained a priest. It was, in one respect, an unequal exchange: Erasmus had received no inner call to be a cleric and had to spend much of the rest of his life putting distance between himself and his official vocation.
His encounter with the Brethren, however, gave him solid building blocks on which to construct a career. At their school—of which Erasmus has little good to say—the boy had been turned to the pleasures of the intellect, especially to the spirit of Italian humanism and Renaissance textual scholarship, which were slowly gaining adherents in northern Europe. Moreover, the Brethren were devoted to a book—possibly, after the Bible, the most influential book in all of Western history—by one of their predecessors,The Imitation of Christ, the masterwork of Thomas à Kempis, written a century earlier, which pointed the reader toward constant meditation on the events in the life of Jesus as depicted in the gospels. The practical purpose of this meditation was to implement the advice and imitate the example of Jesus in one’s own life, insofar as that was possible. This evangelical1 bias—that is, this predisposition for interpreting all matters through the perspective of Jesus and the challenge of the gospels—remained with Erasmus for the rest of his life. Humanistic learning in original languages and enthusiasm for ancient texts and their interpretation were combined in Erasmus with his profound reverence for the received words of Jesus.
For more than a thousand years, the only Bible known to Christians in the West was the translation called the Vulgate (this page). Over time, despite the fact that Jerome may have had to rely in some instances on inferior Hebrew manuscripts, the Vulgate accrued virtually infallible status in the monolingual Western Church, whose intellectual resources had been so diminished.
The Vulgate was not infallible but, like any large translation ever made, contained both obvious mistakes and passages and phrases the accuracy of which was arguable. By Erasmus’s day, however, the ability to read Greek and even Hebrew (both of which had been virtually unknown to Christian scholars of the West in the Middle Ages) was becoming more usual, at least among the learned. And this development, supported by the spreading use of the printing press, enabled Erasmus to carve out an original career: he became the first writer to live by his writing. He was indeed the inventor of the bestseller.
His first book, Adagia (Adages), was a collection of Latin sayings and phrases, which Erasmus had culled from antiquity, some attributable,2 others copied by Erasmus from classical monuments, still others as anonymous as the most ancient of ancient writings. The Adagia could hardly have been simpler in concept and execution, but it caught something of the mood of the time—a popular quest for ancient roots—and was an enormous success in its first edition as well as in its several subsequent editions, each edition expanded and containing ever more notes and diverting mini-essays by Erasmus. Thanks to this collection, modern European languages contain translated variants of many of the simple sayings originally collected by Erasmus, such as “Festina lente” (“Make haste slowly”). Such seemingly timeless bons mots as “to call a spade a spade,” “a cough for a fart,” “crocodile tears,” “the bowels of the earth,” “to look a gift horse in the mouth,” “In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king,” “There’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip,” “Leave no stone unturned,” “Fields are green far away,” and thousands more may be traced ultimately to the Adagia.
Erasmus’s second book was entitled Enchiridion Militis Christiani (Handbook for a Christian Knight), and with it the author took his first uncertain step into the fray of controversy. He himself tells us how he came to write it, driven out of Paris, where he was then studying, to the castle of Tournehem on account of a recurrence of plague. At the castle resided a knight, a friend of Erasmus, whose wife was “of a deeply religious turn of mind, while he himself was no man’s enemy but his own—a spendthrift plunged in fornication and adultery, but in other respects a pleasant companion in every way.” The pious wife entreated Erasmus to “write something that might get a little religion into the man,” for she was “fearfully concerned about her husband’s salvation.” Erasmus goes on to boast—modestly—that he was chosen for this unenviable task because the man to be addressed had “the greatest contempt for all theologians, except for me.”
The burden of Erasmus’s argument in the Enchiridion is that Christianity comes in two versions: formalistic Christianity, concerned only with physical rituals and outward show, and a Christianity of the spirit that takes seriously the words and spirit of Jesus but is unconcerned with what Erasmus calls “silly little ceremonies.” “What is the use of being sprinkled with a few drops of holy water as long as you do not wipe clean the inner defilement of the soul? You venerate the saints, and you take pleasure in touching their relics.… Would you like to win the favor of Peter and Paul? Imitate the faith of the one and the charity of the other, and you will accomplish more than if you were to dash off to Rome ten times.” Unfortunately, claims Erasmus, “most Christians are superstitious rather than faithful, and except for the name of Christ differ hardly at all from superstitious pagans.” The sole escape route from this pagan impasse of holy water, relics, and pilgrimages is what Erasmus calls philosophia Christi (the philosophy of Christ), anchored in “the Gospel teaching.”
The argument, as presented by Erasmus, is dotted with learned Platonic references, all pointing out that the only purpose of visible things is to lead us to the Invisible; and it is full as well of Thomas à Kempis’s constant emphasis on a life uncluttered, poor, and centered on the example of Jesus. Erasmus’s unique combination of humanism and Christ-centeredness has a stoic, even a grimly serious northern European flavor. It is hard to imagine any Italian, except perhaps Michelangelo, making a similar argument and bringing together such seemingly disparate elements as an unyielding Platonism and an equally unyielding evangelical piety.
No one knows if Erasmus won over his friend the knight, though I doubt it. Pleasant companions steeped in fornication are seldom amenable to such reasoning, posed, it must be said, in so monkish a manner. I imagine the knight continued as he was, attracted to religion as outward show and pursuing his pleasures with knightly vigor. But the book was so original in its literate and clever criticism of religious formalism that it fairly tore through the Europe of its day. Written in 1501 and published a few years later, it would by century’s end boast more than seventy Latin editions and countless translations into every major European language.
With his newfound celebrity, Erasmus discovered that he was increasingly able to live apart from the monastic community to which he was formally vowed. In his first years as a monk, he had fallen passionately in love with another young monk. Once that relationship had come to nothing, Erasmus kept himself free of erotic entanglements for the rest of his life.3 But he also came to loathe the shut-up atmosphere of convents, and gradually he found himself in contact with humanistic churchmen throughout Europe who were so entertained by his books that they were happy to dispense him from monastic obligations, especially stabilitas—the obligation to remain in one place and not flit about. Erasmus would be a traveler and guest for the rest of his life, never residing for long in one place, seldom serving even a short term at a university (though offered many such positions), but often the recipient of the genial private hospitality of his fellow humanists in various parts of Europe.
One of his favorite jaunts was to cross the Channel to visit his dear English friends, especially the lawyer Sir Thomas More, who would soon become the young King Henry VIII’s confidant and high official. Sir Thomas was personally more austere than Erasmus. He had in his youth considered a monastic vocation and continued to practice monastic-style mortifications (much fasting, a hair-shirt worn in secret beneath his handsome street clothes) throughout his life. But More was never dreary: we have abundant attestation to the merriness of his populous household, to his own playfulness and wit, and to his personal generosity. However hard he may have been on himself, he was the ideal host.
Erasmus was most appreciative. So much so that he wrote an original book-length composition in tribute to More. It was entitled Moriae Encomium (In Praise of Folly) and, like his earlier publications, it was wildly successful. The text is a soliloquy by Folly herself, explaining her thoughts on various subjects. The reasoning is cockeyed but convincing. Like a puffed-up politician or public personality of our own day (say, Glenn Beck, Charlie Sheen, Donald Trump), Folly takes herself quite seriously. She introduces her attendants: Drunkenness, Ignorance, Self-Love, Flattery, Wantonness, et al. She insists that all great endeavors—war, civil society, the church and its theology—depend upon her, and that all important people—lawyers, professors, scientists, kings, popes—are her followers. At the end of her discourse, she finds herself incapable of making the customary rhetorical summary of her remarks because she has already forgotten what she was saying. The format enabled Erasmus to satirize everything and everyone in the world of his time while escaping the condemnations that would have been hurled at him had he tackled his subjects straight on. Even the newly crowned pontiff, Pope Leo X, was amused.
Moriae, the genitive form of the Latin word for “folly,” is also a tongue-in-cheek nod to More himself, since the book’s title could be translated In Praise of More. For a reader today, the title pretty much sets the tone of the tome: it is full of donnish jokes, learned if mildly humorous asides meant to be caught and appreciated only by insiders, other humanists. But by this point the fashion for humanism was sweeping Europe, giving Erasmus an audience so sizable as to be the envy of all.
Following quickly on the Encomium came the anonymous distribution of a brief dialogue entitled Julius Exclusus e Coelis (Julius Excluded from Heaven) in commemoration, as it were, of the death of Pope Julius II, Michelangelo’s great patron and Leo X’s immediate predecessor. Julius arrives at the Pearly Gates in full armor and is stopped by good, honest Saint Peter, who has no intention of letting this smug monster into Heaven. Julius fulminates in the excessive manner that always got him what he wanted on earth. He even declares Peter excommunicate, but to no avail. In life, says Peter, Julius failed to perform his one real duty—“to preach Christ to others.” He can go to Hell.
This dialogue traveled up and down Europe at warp speed, causing repeated outbreaks of laughter everywhere at the expense of the Holy See. Erasmus never admitted to being its author, though he never actually denied authorship, either. He had become the Jon Stewart of his day.
Erasmus was now in a position to offer his most consequential—and least humorous—work. About the middle of the second decade of the sixteenth century, there appeared an Erasmian text that would become the essential catalyst of the Reformation. It was initially entitled Novum Instrumentum Omne (The Whole of the New Instrument), an attempt no doubt to camouflage its contents; in later editions it would receive the plainer, more revealing title of Novum Testamentum Omne (The Whole of the New Testament). In its most complete editions it offered three texts in parallel columns: the New Testament in the traditional Latin Vulgate of Jerome; the New Testament in a better Latin version as translated by Erasmus; and the original Greek text of the New Testament, supplied so that those who knew enough Greek could check that Erasmus’s Latin was indeed an improvement on Jerome’s. “It is only fair,” boasted Erasmus, proud of his gracefully classical Latin style, “that Paul should address the Romans in somewhat better Latin.” The Greek text became the textus receptus, the standard scholarly text for generations to come.4
It is astonishing to realize that till this publication saw the light almost no one in Western Europe had read through the original Greek of the New Testament for close to twelve centuries. The Greek East, of course, had always depended on its Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. (Erasmus created his Greek text by pasting together different portions of the best manuscripts he could find, “collating,” as he called it blandly, “a large number of ancient manuscripts.”) But this publication marked the first time the Greek text had been set in type anywhere in the world.
It also marked the first time anyone had seen fit to issue a completely revised Latin translation. It made possible all the vernacular translations that would soon flood Europe, eventually putting this more accurately Latinized New Testament within the grasp not only of those who could read Latin but of anyone who could read the printed words of his own language. And as the cheap and novel products issuing from more and more printing presses encouraged more and more people to learn to read, the potential audience for Erasmus’s great work was growing phenomenally. Though, as yet, probably few more than 10 percent of Western Europeans could read fluently in any language, many, listening to the new texts read to them, must have made a silent resolution to master the alphabet. “Literacy now!” could almost have been the slogan of the age.
How different the passionless, calculating, urbane, friend-making Erasmus from his younger contemporary and fellow Augustinian, the impassioned, impulsive loner and small-town professor, Martin Luther. Though their names would be forever linked by their northern European origins, by their common devotion to the New Testament, by their desire to put its text into as many hands as possible, and by the controversies each would engender as a result of his prayerful meditations on this text, their temperaments could hardly have driven them further apart.
Luther first came to public notice as an innovative lecturer on the Bible at a tiny new university in the little Saxon town of Wittenberg. Like the vast majority of university teachers throughout Europe, he was in orders, in his case as an Augustinian monk of an especially severe convent, called the Black Cloister. Unlike Erasmus, who had sought the cloister only to avoid hunger and homelessness, Luther’s motivation was highly subjective, even neurotic. On his way to becoming a lawyer in accordance with the wishes of his upwardly mobile father, a prosperous businessman engaged in copper mining and smelting, young Martin found himself on horseback in a darkening countryside near his university5 as a thunderstorm was unleashed. A bolt of lightning, striking beside him, terrified the rider (and, I should imagine, his horse), convincing Luther that the next strike was meant for him, and he cried out to the patroness of miners, “Hilf du, Heilige Anna!” (“Help thou, Saint Anne!”), promising “Ich will ein Mönch werden!” (“I will become a monk!”) The scene, recalled by Luther many years later, evokes the fast-receding piety of the Middle Ages, in which external events were often read simply as signs from God (or, more darkly, from Satan), and even seems to belong more properly as a fictional episode in a timeless collection of German fairy tales.
Such a scene cannot be imagined of our placid Dutch humanist, who would surely have calculated the probability of his escape from electrocution with more dispassion and perhaps comforted himself with an adage from Horace or from one of the Greek dramatists. And yet, the parallels between Erasmus and Luther remain striking: like the Dutchman, the German was schooled by the Brethren of the Common Life (later offering no bouquets to their educational practices, which he compared to going to Hell) and came under the influence of Thomas à Kempis’s revered Imitation of Christ. Like Erasmus, Luther was unhappy in the cloister—but unlike Erasmus, it is a bit difficult to imagine what mode of life would have made Luther happy.
As it was, the young Augustinian devoted himself to much fasting, self-flagellation, long and stressful hours spent on his knees in prayer, anxious pilgrimage, and frequent, interminable confession of his supposed sins, imposing on his confessor for up to six hours at a single session. “If anyone,” he would recall later, “could have gained Heaven as a monk, then I would indeed have done so.” But, looking back, he was to remember this period as a desert of despair: “I lost touch with Christ the Savior and Comforter, and made him the jailer and hangman of my poor soul.”
Luther’s much-put-upon confessor and monastic superior, Johann von Staupitz, tried to jolly him out of his obsessions, telling the young man that he seemed to turn every fart into a sin, then, in a continuing attempt to free him from his ever deeper slough of introspection, ordering him to take up theological studies in preparation for a career as a university lecturer, hoping that such an occupation would return the young monk to a healthier frame of mind. Luther was hardly unique, except perhaps in the abysmal depth and unrelieved constancy of his melancholy. Manuals for masters of novices and for other superiors charged with the care of new monks have always been full of warnings on the dangers to young inmates of scrupulosity of conscience and obsession with personal sin, so easy to cultivate in the hothouse atmosphere of a religious house. Those who indulge themselves in unrelenting breast-beating are recognized as drags on communal spirit and on their own mental health and are even labeled informally as “scrupes” or awarded some similarly unflattering cognomen in an attempt to zap them out of their lethargic self-presentation. In ordering his charge to concentrate on something other than himself and his supposed sinfulness, Staupitz was just going by the book.
Luther’s plunge into biblical studies—he never did anything by half measures—became the all-pervading occupation of his life. The worried monk’s central psychological problem was that he could never make himself believe that he was forgiven by God. No matter what he did or tried to do, no matter how much he abased himself, he could always detect the perverse pride of the unregenerate sinner beneath all his attempts at self-justification. The answer was to give up on self-justification, and he found the answer to his paralyzing dilemma in Paul’s most elaborate and considered piece of prose, the Letter to the Romans—written to the community of Roman Christians, whom Paul had never met. Whereas all of Paul’s other surviving letters are addressed to Gentile communities (or individuals) that he had personally converted, this one, the longest of Paul’s letters, is addressed to a community founded by others, which Paul would meet only in his last days, while awaiting his own execution.
Paul’s other letters have as their subjects problems current in the lives of those addressed. “Romans,” as it is called in church circles, is more general, more theoretical, more essay-like, as befits a letter to strangers. It is also the author’s last general statement of his central theological preoccupations, full of memorable, emotion-filled passages: “If God be for us, who can be against us?…For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:31, 38–39).6
Though Luther found ultimate relief for the dilemma of his conscience in Romans, Paul is addressing there a quite different dilemma, one that had occupied the writer in one way or another throughout his ministry: the claim that the ethical norms of pharisaical (later, rabbinical) Judaism justify those who keep them. Jesus himself had made light of such justification in the course of his own ministry and had often dismissed it outright,7 as in this passage from Luke:
And [Jesus] spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others: Two men went up into the [Jerusalem] temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican [tax collector for Rome, a profession despised by Jews]. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself: “God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.” And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted (Luke 18:10–14).
Here, as in many other passages in the gospels, Jesus condemns self-righteousness as a form of self-delusion and praises honesty and humility, which lead to true justification before God. Indeed, Jesus throughout his ministry shows himself extraordinarily sympathetic to the trials and sorrows of ordinary people, condemnatory only of the smugly religious and the uncaring rich of his time and place. Because his time and place were first-century Jewish Palestine under Roman occupation, there is no way of knowing for sure whether Jesus would be similarly condemning of smugly religious pagans (or of smug Christians, devotees of a religion that did not yet exist). It is difficult even to know if such a category could be made to refer to the religions that encircled the territory known to Jesus, or if he was dealing only with what he saw as a specifically Jewish syndrome. (There can be no doubt that he would have found the uncaring rich of any time and culture appropriate objects for condemnation.)
In Romans, Paul certainly seems to be building to some extent on Jesus’s bias against pharisaical Judaism, but he also moves that sentiment in the direction of a more detailed analysis, one that involves not just dramatis personae like the Pharisee and the publican but that places Jesus himself at the center of the argument. “All” of us, whether Pharisee or publican, says Paul, “have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; yet all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that comes in Christ Jesus. Through his blood God has presented him as a means of expiating sin for all who have faith.… For we maintain that a human being is justified by faith apart from deeds prescribed by the law” (Romans 3:23–25, 28).
Jesus in the course of his earthly life could hardly have been expected to speak of universal expiation through the shedding of his own blood. But he does refer to something quite like that on “the night before he died for us” (in the words of the Eucharistic rite): “And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission [forgiveness] of sins’ ” (Matthew 26:27–28).
Paul pushes these propositions still further, coming so close to Luther’s obsessions that the young monk could have felt that Romans was written especially for him:
Now we know that the law [of the Jews, especially the Ten Commandments] is spiritual, whereas I am of flesh, sold in bondage to sin. I do not understand what I do. For I do not do what I want to; and what I detest, that I do. Yet if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But as it is, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. I know that no good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. I can desire what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I desire, but instead the evil I do not desire. Yet if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. So I discover this principle at work: when I want to do right, evil is ready at hand. For in my inmost self I delight in God’s law; but I see another law in my members battling against the law that my mind acknowledges and making me captive to the law of sin that is in my members. Wretch that I am, who will rescue me from this doomed body? Thanks be to God—(it is done) through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my flesh to the law of sin (Romans 7:14–25).
However much such passages may have clicked with Luther, assuring him that Paul had foreseen his dilemma and had the perfect resolution, I doubt Paul was imagining anyone remotely similar to a fussily scrupulous monk. “The law of sin that is in my members”—Paul repeats “my members” at least five times—would have been far more appropriately applied to a Roman paterfamilias, the kind of male who saw himself as free to do whatever he liked to almost anyone, someone closer in presumptuousness to, say, an Arab tyrant, an American movie star, a macho Italian prime minister, or a sensual Frenchman in charge of the IMF.
Nevertheless, Luther fashions the argument of Paul’s letter into the foundation of his own theological vision: “We realize that all things work together for the good of those who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose. Those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son [Jesus] that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.8 Those whom he predestined, he also called; those whom he called, he also justified; and those whom he justified, he also glorified” (8:28–30).
By the time Paul wrote these words to the Roman community, probably in the late 50s of the first century AD, there are unlikely to have been many Jewish Christians among them, even though Jews would have been the original founders of the Christian Church in Rome. We know that in the 40s the emperor Claudius had expelled the Jews from the city and that they had only recently been returning in significant numbers. Paul, however, finds it necessary to make reference to his own people in his usual lamenting way: “My sorrow is great and the anguish in my heart is unrelenting. For I could even wish to be accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen by descent. They are Israelites, and to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenant, the giving of the law, the cult, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and from them by natural descent comes the Messiah, who is God over all, blest forever! Amen” (9:2–5).9
But the Jews have in the main rejected Jesus. This, too, Paul speculates, is part of God’s plan, so as to make room for the Gentiles “until the full number … comes in,” after which “all Israel shall be saved” (11:25–26). This hope, thrown in between more richly rhetorical passages, is not given much logical ballast; it is merely asserted. What occupies Paul more generally is the persistent restatement of his central theme: “If you profess with your lips that ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Such faith of the heart leads to uprightness; such profession of the lips to salvation. For Scripture says, ‘No one who believes in him shall be put to shame.’ No distinction is made between Jew and Greek: the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call upon him. ‘For everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved’ ” (10:9–13).10
There are certainly passages in the Scriptures that would take us in another direction altogether. Paul and Luther have, in effect, bracketed the whole of the Hebrew Bible, labeled by Christians “the Old Testament.” Yes, in their view that library of witness is—in some sense—the Word of God, but now (since the sacrifice of Jesus) its words can be properly interpreted only in the light of the words of the New Testament.
But just a minute! Cannot even some of Jesus’s words, as recorded by the evangelists, the writers of the four gospels, be set at variance with Paul’s argument? Is not the Good Samaritan—in Luke’s Gospel Jesus’s great (if fictional) figure of authentic kindness—aSamaritan, that is, a despised heretic and no believer in Jesus? Is he not meant to be seen as saved by his acts of kindness to the anonymous victim of a mugging, whom more respectable types refuse to assist?
And, even more pointedly, what of all those who at the Last Judgment in Matthew’s Gospel are welcomed into Heaven not because of their faith, but because of their deeds? Do they not even confess to Christ that they were unaware of his presence in their lives? Could they not be unbelieving Jews or Hindus or (my God!) atheists?
When the Son of man [Jesus] shall come in his glory [at the end of time], and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory. And before him shall be gathered all nations; and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats. And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on his left. Then shall the King [Jesus] say unto them on his right hand, “Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat, I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink, I was a stranger and ye took me in, naked and ye clothed me, I was sick and ye visited me, I was in prison and ye came unto me.” Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, “Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? Or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? Or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?” And the King shall answer and say unto them, “Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brothers, ye have done it unto me” (Matthew 25:31–40).
What I mean to point out by citing critical biblical passages that seem to argue against the Pauline/Lutheran stance of justification by faith alone is that the Bible is indeed a complicated business, not in any sense a single book dropped by God into the laps of the faithful for their simple instruction and edification, but an elaborate double library of many separate volumes (most in Hebrew with a little Aramaic mixed in and containing a separate bookcase or two in Greek), the oldest stories originating in a dimly appreciated, preliterate Mesopotamian society, the whole production the result of more than a thousand years (perhaps, if we go back to earliest sources, more than two thousand years) of storytelling, transmission, addition, and revision, written, rewritten, edited, and compiled by more hands and hearts—and in more places and evolving cultures—than we will ever be able to identify; and all this adding to the unadulterated mystery even of the most recent volumes, dating to about the end of the first century AD.11
Here, in the second decade of the sixteenth century, as Luther lectures to his university students on the text of Romans, we are looking at an early moment in something almost analogous to the Big Bang. Thanks to the scholarship and entrepreneurial labors ofErasmus, the original Greek text of the New Testament is on the verge of becoming widely available once more. It will, together with a growing continent-wide hunger for pristine literary texts of all kinds and—most unexpectedly—the spark of Luther’s immensely subjective reading of the Bible, induce a societal explosion of, well, biblical proportions.
Luther’s personal approach to the Bible could scarcely have been further from the careful, text-reverencing approach of Erasmus, whose notes to his edition of the New Testament are marvels of dispassionate consideration of style and content, still useful (and even revelatory) to a contemporary biblical scholar. In Luther’s exposition the contemporary scholar will find only Luther, not especially interested in history or the evolution of cultures and ideas, in search of the Word of God only to quiet the quaking in his breast.
At the same time, we should not imagine that Luther’s psychological theology came to him full blown. Though it is easy enough now to read his earliest notes on Romans and see where he is headed, it would take the prompting of an unusually shameless and aggressive display of ecclesiastical corruption to provoke Luther into the public challenge that would make his a household name throughout Germany and, soon thereafter, throughout Europe. That irruption would ever after be called the Indulgences Controversy.
Albrecht of Brandenburg was a bishop in need of money, lots of it and as soon as possible. He was a pluralist, which may sound like a good thing but wasn’t. In recent times, the word is sometimes drafted to mean a philosopher holding more than one ultimate principle; in Luther’s time it meant only someone holding more than one bishopric.l2 Albrecht held two and a half: in 1512 he was named archbishop of Magdeburg and administrator of the monastic town of Halberstadt and from 1513 he was also archbishop of the much grander city of Mainz. The archbishop of Mainz was one of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Emperor and therefore one of the most powerful men in Germany. Albrecht could not at first exercise his episcopal offices because he was still in his early twenties, and the church’s canon law required an acting bishop to be at least thirty. Pope Leo X, himself only thirty-seven at his election (having been created cardinal at the tender age of thirteen, though not ordained priest till after his election), found that he and Albrecht had so much in common that he graciously dispensed with the canon that blocked Albrecht’s path. What the pope and the archbishop especially had in common was their need for vast sums of money, Albrecht because he was in serious debt to the Augsburg banking house of the Fugger family, Leo because he was extraordinarily overextended. He loved the many beautiful and expensive purchases that he made continually and unhesitatingly; he had wars to conduct; he was, in addition to his duties as pope, ruler in all but name of his beloved Florence (and the second legitimate son of Lorenzo il Magnifico); and he was building the new Saint Peter’s Basilica, for Heaven’s sake.
Why, you may ask, would anyone want to be archbishop of two separate sees more than 250 miles apart? Awfully burdensome, no? No, since one of the few distinct obligations would be to collect the revenues due by law to the archbishop of each city. It was in anticipation of such income that the famous Fuggers had extended their loans in the first place.
Pope Leo meant to raise the new Saint Peter’s without making any contribution from his own purse, which he reserved for more personal satisfactions. To pull this off, the obvious papal route would be a spectacular secret deal. Leo was good at doing deals: after all, important bishoprics (and not a few unimportant ones) were always for sale. This was how Albrecht, the baby bishop, had won Mainz: the Fuggers had put up the capital that Albrecht had turned over to the pope in exchange for his appointment. Such quid pro quo, called simony,13 was the oil that lubricated the greasy world of ecclesiastical appointments.
To lubricate all necessary wheels, Albrecht entered into an agreement with the pope and the Fuggers: the bankers would finance the continued building of Saint Peter’s; Leo would renew the practice, initiated by his predecessor Julius, of selling indulgences to fund the building of the papal basilica; Albrecht would allow a band of salesmen to enter his dioceses to sell the indulgences to the faithful; and the proceeds would be split fifty-fifty between the pope and the Fugger family.
We who in the recent past have been victimized by a great conspiracy of bankers may be tempted to regard the Fuggers as the underlying villains in this deal. But the astonishing self-regard and almost cosmic gluttony of the reverend churchmen—neither of whom had so much as a dash of genuine spirituality in his makeup—can hardly be minimized. Both supposed “successors to the apostles” were worldly epicureans, devoted to their own pleasures. Albrecht was a Hohenzollern, amorous and overweight. His influential family, from whom would spring the kings of Prussia, was using his appointments to block the ambitions of a rival clan, led by Frederick the Wise, also an imperial elector. Saxony was divided between the two families. Leo’s family, the Medici, iconic bankers of Europe, would in this period lose their precedence to the fabulous Fuggers. Leo himself, dying unexpectedly of malaria in late 1521, would leave empty the papal treasury, which had been overflowing at the time of his election, and leave his successors struggling under considerable debt.
To understand what an indulgence is, one must visit the funhouse of medieval theology. The first Christians seem to have expected the end of the world (and the Second Coming of Christ in judgment) to occur in their own lifetimes or soon thereafter. As the interim between the two advents of Christ began to stretch into centuries, prophets would rise in most eras to announce that the End Time was just around the corner. Then, after nothing happened, the prophets would fall and be forgotten. Most Christians turned their attention from the possible end of the world and toward the mystery of death. If Christ is unlikely to return in my lifetime, what can I expect after death? What can my friends and family expect? What can I do for those who have gone before me, those who “sleep in Jesus,” as Paul put it in his letter to the Thessalonians?
I can pray for them, of course. More than that, because the church is a Communion of Saints, of those on earth and of those who have gone before, I can surely pray—that is, speak in supplication—to those who have already reached God and ask them to pray for me and for others who may need their prayers. But what can I do for a loved one—a friend, a parent, a spouse, a child—who I know made a mess of things on this earth, who stole money, betrayed another, committed murder, told monstrous lies, or failed to fulfill profound obligations to others? In brief, what can I do for friends, acquaintances, and relations who failed at some point in the course of their earthly existence in their duty to love God and neighbor—which category probably includes most people?
If they failed spectacularly, they are already in Hell and there is nothing that can be done for them. Spectacular failure—in medieval Christian terms—was not a matter of doing great evil (say, genocide or serial murder or robbing widows or oppressing orphans) but of failing to repent for what one had done. Even the most grievous sin could be forgiven if one were to repent sincerely, for God is merciful. Hell was reserved for those who failed to repent, who by clinging to their sin had made themselves permanently unworthy of God’s presence. This was why sudden death was so feared: it did not give you time to put your spiritual house in order. You might have meant to repent but hadn’t quite got round to it. Too bad. Down you go. All the way.
Thanks be to God, the mysterious Communion of Saints that we (or at least all the baptized) are part of has a very earthly component, the visible, audible church, which guides us along the paths of our lives, enabling us to sort out our sins, make repentance, and at the last return to God. In its manuals for priestly confessors, the church enumerates the sins we must all confess, listing these in order of seriousness from the least (venial) to the most serious (mortal), to those so grave as to entail formal excommunication from the Communion of Saints and, therefore, requiring special dispensation, such as a writ of forgiveness issued by a bishop or pope.
One of the big questions in all this is: Who gives forgiveness? The only obvious answer is God or, if you like, God in Christ. On what basis does God, the Supreme Being who created all things and keeps them in existence, forgive? The basis is the blood of Christ, the Incarnate Word who by his suffering and death redeems mankind, who buys back human beings from their just perdition, which their sins should by rights make inevitable. This salvation was first foretold (ever so dimly) by God in the Garden of Eden just before the first man and the first woman were sent off into permanent exile (Genesis 3:15). Then, in the course of the Old Testament it was foretold ever more explicitly, especially in the words of the latter prophets, whose books Christians moved (from their original position after the Torah in the Hebrew Bible) so that they would serve as introduction to the four gospels of the New Testament.
But God uses ordinary men for his purposes. One of the clearest uses may be seen in his deployment of the clergy to guide and instruct other Christians, who are mostly ignorant and illiterate. Priests and their bishops are there to lead the rank and file in the fulfillment of their Christian duties, to remind them of their sins, and to guide them to repentance.
Okay, but, keeping in mind how dull-witted most of these people are, let us, the clergy, lead them not just by example and exhortation but by law and order, prescription and proscription, regulation and exclusion, condescension and condemnation. Ordinary Christians must be kept in line for their own good and for the good of society as a whole.
It is easy to see how, as literacy increased by leaps and bounds and as the petty chieftains of Europe gradually grew into powerful princes of grand ambition, the time-honored legitimacy of pastors leading their human flocks and of bishops interfering in the political sphere might be called into question, especially as so many members of the higher clergy were seen not as holy exemplars but as grasping hypocrites, looking to take personal advantage of the whole complicated system they themselves had created.
Erasmus and other humanists had already made “silly little ceremonies” the objects of their derision. No arena of church life was more open to criticism and satire than the scam of indulgences. However sincere the original idea may have been, indulgences seem to have been designed as virtually irresistible temptations for corrupt churchmen. The original idea was that you or I, because we had been saved by the blood of Jesus and were members of the Communion of Saints, could call upon the merits he had piled up for us in the course of our redemption and apply them to ourselves and to others.
Huh?
This is where most reasonable people may begin to lose the thread of ecclesiastical reasoning. The merits of Christ—and of his saints (those already with him in Heaven)—came to be seen by higher churchmen as a sort of bank account of infinite worth that could be called upon as needed. The church—that is, higher churchmen—could set the rules for writing checks against this account. According to these rules, the faithful could borrow from the merits of Christ and assign them to the needy, either to themselves or to others, especially to their deceased loved ones. Thus, the kissing of a certain bone from a dead martyr’s hand, penitential pilgrimage to a particular shrine, an assigned set of prayers, an assigned number of masses (endowed by the pious faithful and whispered by a priest at a designated altar), a good work (such as volunteering at a hospice), even a financial contribution to the building of a small chapel or a great basilica, could shorten or even eliminate the temporal suffering due to sin.
Let’s say you have repented your sin, whatever it was, and can rely on the merits of Christ for your salvation. That doesn’t mean that God is going to let you completely off the hook now, does it? Let’s say you murdered a particularly annoying relative. You confessed your sin to a priest and were assigned a significant penance. All well and good, but you still must suffer for that sin, if not in this world, then in the next. You won’t go to Hell, though you may end up spending a very long time in Purgatory (exactly like Hell, except that you finally get out). But an indulgence can lessen your sentence. And a plenary indulgence means that all the temporal punishment due to your sin is erased. So if you have won a plenary indulgence (or someone else has won it on your behalf) and if you die right at that moment, without the opportunity to commit additional sins, you will go straight to Heaven.
It is not only rather easy, it is even tempting, to knock over this elaborately rationalized house of cards. Several aspects of it—such as the dominance of clergy over the lives of other Christians, the necessity for a sacrament of Penance, and the existence of a place called Purgatory14—were not, in any genuine sense, part of the faith of the earliest Christians and took centuries for bishops and theologians to construct and justify. These constructions became ever more elaborate in the course of the Middle Ages; by the time of Luther what we might call “justification by rationalization alone” had become so much a part of the clerical mindset that many would no longer have noticed how much invention and even fantasy was going into these constructions.
In spring 1517, bands of indulgences salesmen arrived in Hohenzollern Saxony. They were selling plenary indulgences in return for monetary “donations.” They stayed through summer. They walked (or rode)15 everywhere, preaching in cathedrals, churches, and public squares. Wherever they went (and there were few places too small for their attentions), they were received as celebrities, stirring up interest and enthusiasm. They offered an excellent return on investment: salvation for gold, just an insignificant bit of gold. Whether or not the words are accurate, news of their rhyming pitch resounded through the land:
When the coin in the coffer rings,
The soul from Purgatory springs!
Some, it seems, believed that a little gold could even release a damned soul from Hell itself. “Even if you have ravished the Virgin Mary, an indulgence will free you from punishment!” is one of the promises the gossips claimed had been made. Whatever was said—and we have no recordings to consult—it is only too likely that the peddlers, Dominican friars all, were no more scrupulous in their pitches than Columbus in his descriptions of the North Atlantic route. The object of a successful salesman is to clinch the sale.
We do have drafts of their sermons, probably penned by their leader, Johann Tetzel, and, while they do not engage in the basest claims, they are models of how to stir a crowd by pity and fear:
You priest, you nobleman, you merchant, you woman, you virgin, you matron, you youth, you elder, go into your church (which, as I have said, is now Saint Peter’s) and visit the hallowed cross that has been set up for you, that incessantly calls you.… Remember that you are in such stormy peril on the raging sea of this world that you do not know if you can reach the Harbor of Salvation.… You should know: whoever has confessed and is contrite and puts alms into the box, as his confessor counsels him [emphasis mine], will have all his sins forgiven.… So why are you standing about idly? Run, all of you, for the salvation of your souls. Be quick and concerned about redemption as about the temporal goods you doggedly pursue day till night. “Seek ye the Lord while he may be found … while he is near”; work, as John says, “while it is day,” for “the night cometh when no man can work.”
Do you not hear the voices of your dead parents and others, screaming and crying: “ ‘Have pity on me, have pity on me … for the hand of God hath touched me’? We are suffering severe punishments and pain, from which you could rescue us with a few alms [emphasis mine], if only you would.” Open your ears, because the father is calling to the son and the mother to the daughter.
One of the most revealing sentences is the opening invocation, addressing priests, nobles, merchants, and their wives—in other words the people with some money. Little time would be wasted on farmers, serfs, the poor. We’re really interested only in those who have gold to part with. The salvation of the penniless is none of our business.
Wittenberg, located in the part of Saxony ruled by Frederick the Wise, lay just outside the commission of Tetzel and his fellow friars. Frederick had one of the largest collections of holy relics in Europe. He was not about to allow their power and importance to be leeched away by a new papal indulgence. And, anyway, cooperation with Albrecht (who also had a large collection)16 was unthinkable. But Tetzel set himself up across the border in nearby Jüterbog whither Wittenbergers were lured to hear the famous friar preach. They returned to Wittenberg with their purchased certificates, granting full remission of sins, which some of them brought to Doctor Luther in confession. Luther was deeply troubled by what they showed him and horrified by the promises they claimed had been made to them. He felt compelled to act.
What he did not do, despite the strength of the legend, was to nail ninety-five theses to Wittenberg’s church door in an act of public rebellion. It is important to realize that Brother Martin was at this time a faithful Augustinian monk, a small-town professor who taught theology at his little, new university. He would later express regret that, as he came to public notice, he was still a convinced papist. If we know he had a somewhat rocky spiritual life, the world knew nothing of him; and what he knew of himself hardly suggested the revolutionary fame that would soon accrue to him. Martin framed his displeasure, not in a public act of any kind, but in a diplomatically phrased and private letter to Archbishop Albrecht.
Luther, aware of the enormous social distance between himself and the princely archbishop, begins humbly, calling himself “fex hominum” (a shit among men),17 who nonetheless dares to address his august archbishop on account of the gravity of the occasion.Indulgences, he argues, cannot bring a human soul to salvation or holiness; and Christ never commanded anyone to preach such things, only to preach his gospel, which is being submerged and lost beneath the vulgar clatter of this hawking of indulgences. It is a simple but pure and powerful argument that any saint would have taken seriously.
Along with his letter, Luther included a list of thesis statements. These were not fully reasoned arguments, nor were they meant to be; they were just sentences intended to spark a formal academic argument or disputation. Such statements are still used in our day to announce a public debate, usually following the word “Resolved.” Sending off such thesis statements was not an unusual action at the time. Many writers and university lecturers availed themselves of the format. Erasmus used it, as would Galileo. The thesis statement was simply the announced proposition that would then have to be defended or opposed by reasoned argument in the course of a scheduled academic defense.18 Ninety-five such thesis statements may have seemed a bit much, but then Luther was an overreacher, not a man easily confined to conventional limits.
The first thesis statement smartly sets the stage for all that will follow: “Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when he said ‘Poenitentiam agite,’19 willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.” The second thesis statement calls into question the need for the church’s sacramental confession, asserting that Jesus cannot have meant to impose such a thing when he spoke the words quoted in the first thesis. As always, Brother Martin is not far from his own experience, whether as confessant or confessor. The fourth thesis statement continues in this personal vein: “The penalty [of sin], therefore, continues so long as hatred of self continues; for this is true inward repentance, and continues till our entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven.” Self-hatred, though hardly smiled upon in our current how- to books on self-esteem, was part and parcel of an exemplary Christian life from the time of Jesus till well past the time of Luther. But Luther’s early emphasis here on the primacy of self-hatred surely speaks of his own inner turmoil.
By the fifth thesis statement the pope is cited with the claim that he “does not intend to remit, and cannot remit any penalties other than those which he has imposed either by his own authority or by that of the canons [of church law].” Thereafter, the pope is cited more than thirty times, in some instances to delightfully humorous effect. (At the time of composing these thesis statements, Luther was reading Julius Exclusus, which can only have cheered him on.) “Christians are to be taught that the pope, in granting pardons, needs, and therefore desires, their devout prayer for him more than the money they bring” (Thesis 48). “Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the pardon-preachers, he would rather that Saint Peter’s church should burn to ashes than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh, and bones of his sheep” (50). So the pardon-preachers have begun to reach out even to those with little or no gold to spare (not unlike the greedy American bankers who, in our day, have made fortunes by luring those with insufficient resources into taking on subprime mortgage loans). “Christians are to be taught that it would be the pope’s wish, as it is his duty, to give of his own money to very many of those from whom certain hawkers of pardons cajole money, even though the church of Saint Peter might have to be sold” (51). Oh, yeah.
Luther goes on—in the form of thesis statements, no less—to report some of the questions he has heard people raise: “This unbridled preaching of pardons makes it no easy matter, even for learned men [like Luther], to rescue the reverence due to the pope from slander, or even from the shrewd questionings of the laity. To wit: ‘Why does not the pope empty purgatory, for the sake of holy love and of the dire need of the souls that are there, if he redeems an infinite number of souls for the sake of miserable money with which to build a church?’ ” (81, 82). These questions, supposedly framed by others, occupy eight theses, ending with “Since the pope, by his pardons, seeks the salvation of souls rather than money, why does he suspend the indulgences and pardons granted heretofore, since these have equal efficacy?” (89).
The questions, couched in innocent language, are actually clever and sophisticated. And, for the most part, they are unanswerable. Luther may not have nailed his theses to the church door, but he has nailed the papal scam for what it was. “The true treasure of the Church,” as he states in Thesis 62, “is the most holy Gospel,” in keeping with which “Christians are to be taught that he who sees a man in need, and passes him by, and gives [his money] for pardons, purchases not the indulgences of the pope, but the indignation of God” (45). But perhaps the most unanswerable is Thesis 86, also couched as a “shrewd” question from “the laity”: “Why does not the pope, whose wealth is today greater than that of the richest Crassus,20 build just this one church of Saint Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of poor believers?”
The piquancy, the verve, of these “theses” is enough, even today, to stimulate a reader’s thinking or even to shock one into wakefulness. Though Luther would continue to write reams and reams of books and broadsides throughout his life, some exceedingly eloquent and few dull, he seldom if ever improved on the lively asperity of the Ninety-Five Theses; and so it is not surprising that this list of statements, tucked in with his humble letter to the archbishop, should continue to stand as his most famous work.
Good ol’ Marty Luther, oh good ol’ Marty Luther
Played in the Reformation Band.
His Five-and-Ninety Theses
Just tore the pope to pieces.
We think the Reformation’s gra-n-d!
So sing children at Lutheran summer camps in the United States (or so they did before a new fashion of interconfessional ecumenism embarrassed their counselors).
The Theses send out a spirit that is catching: here is a bandwagon, the reader may be prompted to declare, that I’d like to jump on. Of course, if they’d remained in their envelope or been deep-sixed in the archiepiscopal archives, no one would ever have heard of them. Somebody (a disgruntled secretary perhaps) had them printed; and then the distribution began! For the network of printing presses had now become what the Internet is for us: an unstoppable, nearly instant, and universal marketplace of communication. Within a month, all of Germany had read the Theses or heard them read publicly; by year’s end, all of Europe—in Luther’s original Latin or in the many vernacular translations made with amazing alacrity. There were as yet no copyright laws, so no one asked Luther’s permission to print his Latin text or to make and publish translations.
The Theses appeared so fresh, so bold that no one could remain neutral: you loved them or you hated them. In Germany, at least, where there was much muttering against the anti-German policies of the papal establishment (which collected fees and taxes and gave back little or nothing), most people delighted in the Theses’ vigor and passion but even more in their clarity and appositeness. All of Germany’s resentments, and no doubt even some points no one had thought to raise before, had at last been given clarion expression. The sale of indulgences plunged throughout the German lands, as people roared with laughter and the name “Luther” became a household word. No wonder the Theses are remembered as having been nailed to the door of Wittenberg’s collegiate church.
1 In the United States in our day, the word “evangelical” has come to be associated almost solely with fundamentalist (and similarly unbending) Christians. But its original meaning is “of the Gospel.” Our word “gospel” is an early English contraction for “good spell,” “spell” then meaning “tidings” or “news.” This English word “gospel” is intended as a translation of the Greek euaggelion and the Latin evangelium, both meaning “good news” and referring to the four narratives of the New Testament, the earliest of which, Mark’s, is actually labeled “the good news of Jesus Christ.”
2 Many of Erasmus’s favorite sayings were taken from Lucian, a Greek satirist of the second century AD, whose copious writings and hilarious skepticism would continue to inspire Erasmus’s work. Luther would find the atheistic Lucian repellant.
3 Publicly, at least, Erasmus condemned homosexual relations, taking the same Aristotelian line as the church: it was obvious that the penis–vagina instrumentality of the human body indicated that the Creator had intended sex for procreation. Anything else—sex for any other reason—was therefore a violation of the Creator’s wishes and a grievous sin. But it is impossible to know whether Erasmus actually subscribed to this view or was just keeping himself out of unnecessary trouble with theological authorities. Sex, as may be seen by its absence from his treatise to his friend the philandering knight, was not one of Erasmus’s subjects.
4 Another Greek New Testament was printed a year or two earlier than Erasmus’s version. It was to be part of a much larger Spanish project, the Complutensian Polyglot, which would include the entire Greek Bible, the Vulgate, the original Hebrew of the Old Testament, and an ancient Aramaic rabbinical commentary. Its New Testament had to await the editing and printing of the much larger Old Testament before it could be distributed. Meanwhile, Erasmus got wind of the Spanish project and won from pope and emperor an exclusive four-year license, thus ensuring that his own multilingual work, rather than the Complutensian Polyglot, would become the European standard. He understood instinctively what has since become conventional publishing wisdom: if there are to be two books on the same subject, be sure to get yours out there first.
5 As an undergraduate he studied at Erfurt (which he would later describe as a “beerhouse and whorehouse,” i.e., a typical German university of the time). His doctorate in theology, however, would be bestowed by Wittenberg when he was twenty-six.
6 In this volume, I normally use the King James Version (with modernized punctuation and spelling) when quoting from the Bible, because it seems especially appropriate for tasting the flavor of the period. Here, however, and in subsequent quotations from Romans, I employ the Anchor Bible translation by Joseph A. Fitzmyer, because of the clarity of its contemporary English.
7 I do not mean to pass judgment on the sufficiency of the ethical norms of ancient Judaism, which does so repeatedly on its own, as in Isaiah 64:6, which condemns “our upright deeds” as no better than “used tampons.” (Some of the best lines in the Hebrew Bible never quite make it into the translations.)
8 The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), a gender-inclusive translation, renders this phrase as “the firstborn within a large family,” certainly a defensible translation. The Greek word for brother, adelphos, meaning “from the same womb,” has a ready feminine form, adelphe.
9 Pace Fitzmyer, I doubt this is an assertion of Jesus’s divinity. A more likely translation might be “the Messiah. God who is over all be blessed forever. Amen,” a very Jewish conclusion. The translation challenge lies in the lack of punctuation in ancient manuscripts.
10 Paul’s first scriptural quotation here is from Isaiah 28:16, the second from Joel 3:5, in both of which “the Lord” referred to is—in the Hebrew original, which Paul would have known—“YHWH,” the God of the Jews. These glancing references could suggest that, at least toward the end of his life, Paul may have seen Jesus as, in some sense, God—a development I found no evidence for when considering Paul’s earlier letters in Volume III of the Hinges of History, Desire of the Everlasting Hills, Chapter III.
11 The mysteries of the Bible can only be nodded to here. The Gifts of the Jews and Desire of the Everlasting Hills examine its texts (and the unity of its two compilations) in some depth.
l2 Or other highly lucrative ecclesiastical benefice. It did not refer to an overburdened priest attempting to serve two or more poor parishes.
13 Simony was named for Simon Magus, a sorcerer who makes an appearance in Chapter 8 of the Acts of the Apostles, asking to buy from the apostles the power to bestow the Holy Spirit, in later centuries imagined to be a specific capability of a bishop.
14 The early Christians thought of all the members of the church together as a “holy priesthood” (1 Peter 2:5 and 9); private confession was invented in Ireland about the seventh century AD (see How the Irish Saved Civilization, pp. 176ff.); the word “sacrament” originally referred to a pagan Roman legal or military obligation. Augustine of Hippo in the early fifth century referred to the faithful dead as passing through a purgatorial fire, but Purgatory as a place like Heaven or Hell would take centuries more to be fully imagined.
15 Friars, supposedly paupers, were enjoined by canon law to walk, never ride, but any bishop could dispense them from this rule for a supposedly greater good.
16 Albrecht’s collection included such items as some of the mud God had used to fashion Adam, branches of the Burning Bush from which God had spoken to Moses, the finger with which the apostle Thomas had traced the scar in the side of the risen Jesus, and, most precious of all, several vials of the Virgin Mary’s breast milk. Frederick’s collection included similar items.
17 Fex (or faex), the plural of which is feces (or faeces), can mean dregs or refuse, but here there is no doubt about Luther’s meaning. Whether writing in Latin or German, he seldom missed an opportunity for a little bathroom humor.
18 If a particular thesis came subsequently to be accepted by a majority of academics, it could end up as part of the curriculum, to be taught by lecturers and memorized by students. See this page.
19 These are the words of Jerome’s Latin translation. Literally, they should be translated as “Do penance.” The actual Greek of the New Testament—Metanoeite—means literally “Change your mind” (or, more loosely, “Change your heart, opinion, or attitude”). It is less prescriptive and surely has nothing to do with the sacrament of Penance. SeeDesire of the Everlasting Hills, pages 69ff.
20 Crassus was a legendary Roman profiteer of the first century BC who, like our vulture capitalists, made his fortune on the misfortunes of others.