Novum Instrumentum omne
Novum Instrumentum Omne, later called Novum Testamentum Omne, was a bilingual Latin-Greek New Testament with scholarly annotations, and the first printed New Testament of the Greek to be published. It was prepared by Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) and printed by Johann Froben (1460–1527) of Basel. Five editions were published, in 1516, 1519, 1522, 1527, and 1536. An estimate of up to 300,000 copies of Erasmus' New Testament were printed in his lifetime. The first edition (1516), titled Novum Instrumentum Omne, provided Erasmus' revision of the Latin Vulgate as more classical Latin; this evolved in subsequent editions as an independent Latin rendition informed by the Greek. The Greek text is a Byzantine text-type. The work was relaunched with a new title Novum Testamentum Omne in a second edition (1519), which notably was used by Martin Luther for his translation of the New Testament into German (the so-called "September Testament"). The third edition (1522), was used by William Tyndale for the first English New Testament (1526). The Erasmian editions, and the subsequent 16th century revisions thereof, fed into the Geneva Bible (1560), the King James Version(1611)  and Textus Receptus  which was the basis for the majority of modern translations of the New Testament in the 16th–19th centuries. Contemporary Efforts 

Giannozzo Manetti translated the New Testament from the Greek, and the Psalms from the Hebrew, at the court of Pope Nicholas V, around 1455. The manuscripts still exist, but Manetti's version was not printed until 2014. Greek fragments began to be printed as Greek fonts were cut: the Aldine Press published the first six chapters of John's Gospel in 1505. The early 1500s saw several authorized efforts to create and print scholarly polyglot and Greek editions of Bible texts. In 1512, French priest Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples published his revised version of the Vulgate's epistles of St Paul, corrected against Greek texts, as well as a four-translation edition of the Psalms, sponsored by  Cardinal Briçonnet. In 1502 in Spain, Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros put together a team of Spanish translators to create a compilation of the Bible in four languages: Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Latin. Translators from Greek were commissioned from Greece itself and worked closely with Latinists. Besides the compilation of the Bible, there was a new Latin text for the Vulgate. This text, much of which the Church Father Jerome had translated from Greek in the 4th century, was considered the only binding translation in the Catholic Church and used instead of a new translation. Cardinal Cisneros's team completed and printed the full New Testament, including the Greek version, in 1514. To do so they developed specific types to print Greek. Cisneros informed Erasmus of the work going on in Spain and may have sent a printed version of the New Testament to him. However, the Spanish team wanted the entire Bible to be released as one single work and withdrew from publication. Although the first printed Greek New Testament was the Complutensian Polyglot (1514), Erasmus' was published first (1516). Erasmus was invited by Cisneros to work on Complutensian Polyglot edition in 1517; also he offered him a bishop's office. But the Dutchman remained and never traveled to Spain. The Complutensian Polyglot edition was approved for publication by the Pope in 1520; however, it was not released until 1522 due to the team's insistence on reviewing and editing. In 1516 the Novum Instrumentum omne was dedicated to Pope Leo X. Erasmus requested a "Publication Privilege" (copyright) for the Novum Instrumentum omne (The Greek New Testament with his Latin translation) to attempt to ensure that his work (all publications) would not be copied by other printers. He obtained it from Emperor Maximilian I 1516. The fear of the Complutensian being publishing first, though, affected Erasmus' work, rushing him to printing and causing him to forgo editing. The result was a large number of translation mistakes, transcription errors, and typos, that required further editions to be printed (see " Second Edition"). Erasmus made use of the Complutensian Polyglot in subsequent editions. Erasmus' philological efforts helped launch what has been described as a "golden century of Catholic biblical scholarship" in the hundred years following his death. In 1518, Erasmus' Italian publisher the Aldine Press published the first complete printed Greek bible, the Aldine Bible, pairing the Complutensian Septuagint Old Testament with Erasmus' initial New Testament. In 1527, Italian friar Santes Pagnino published new Latin translations of both the Old and New Testaments, from the Greek and Hebrew, also sponsored by Pope Leo X. Approach

Latin
Erasmus described his editorial intent with the (Latin) New Testament as philological rather than theological: "to fill in the gaps, to soften the abrupt ones, to digest the confused ones, to develop the developed ones, to explain the knotty ones, to add light to the dark ones, to give Hebraicisms a Roman polish ... and thus to moderate παραφρασιννε παραφρόνησις: that is, 'to say otherwise so as not to say otherwise.'" He polished the Latin, declaring, "It is only fair that Paul should address the Romans in somewhat better Latin." Erasmus' Latin contained several controversial renderings—different to or augmenting the Vulgate—(with philological or historical justifications in the Annotations) of words which became significant in the Reformation. The  was a notable problem: his each edition of the New Testament adopted a different rendering from the Vulgate's  (do penance): variously  (may you repent),  (repentance) and  (repent of the former life). However the 1519—the edition used by Martin Luther's German translation—notably adopted Papal secretary Lorenzo Valla's suggestion of  (to repent, to become wise again, to recover from insanity or senility, or to regain consciousness) with historical justification from Lactantius, and with an intellective rather than affective connotation. In the judgment of one modern scholar "Erasmus' translation is a monstrous mix of Vulgate and Byzantine elements…Only linguistically, by the standards of humanistic Latin, is it an improvement." Greek
According to scholars such as Henk Jan de Jong, "In judging the Greek text in Erasmus' editions of the New Testament, one should realize from the start that it was not intended as a textual edition in its own right, but served to give the reader of the Latin version, which was the main point, the opportunity to find out whether the translation was supported by the Greek." To some extent, Erasmus "synchronized" or "unified" the Greek (Byzantine) and the Latin textual traditions of the New Testament by producing an updated translation of both simultaneously. Both being part of canonical tradition, he clearly found it necessary to ensure that both were actually present in the same content. In modern terminology, he made the two traditions "compatible". This is clearly evidenced by the fact that his Greek text informs his Latin translation, but also the other way round: there are numerous instances where he edits the Greek text to reflect his Latin version (and, perhaps, some lost Greek or patristic source from his prior research.) In one case back-translating was necessary: the manuscript page containing the last six verses of Revelation had been lost (from Minuscule 1rK, as used for the first edition), so Erasmus translated the Vulgate's text back into Greek, noting what he had done. Erasmus also re-translated the Latin text into Greek wherever he found that the Greek text and the accompanying commentaries were mixed up, where his Greek manuscripts lacked words found in the Vulgate, or where he simply preferred the Vulgate's reading to the Greek text (E.g., at Acts 9:6.) In Acts 9:6 the question that Paul asks at the time of his conversion on the Damascus road, Τρέμων τε καὶ θαμβὣν εἲπεν κύριε τί μέ θέλεις ποιῆσαι ("And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what will you have me to do?") was incorporated from the Vulgate. Annotations and scholia
The New Testaments included very substantial scholia: various prefaces on methodology, and annotations justifying the word choices. One notable preface, Methodus, was expanded in the second edition, then  spun out as an independent work: the "System (or Method) of True Theology" (, RVT): it promoted affective devotional reading where one inserts oneself into the Gospel situation as an observer of Christ's human actions and interactions, akin to the monastic Lectio Divina. Erasmus wrote that the “signs of profit from study” of the New Testament (RVT 1) using this method are, summarized: 

His preface Paraclesis promoted scriptural knowledge for devotional use by even uneducated laymen, including the vernacular. (See Plowboy trope.) Preparation
Erasmus had been inspired back in 1504 by his discovery of Lorenzo Valla’s Adnotationis Novum Testamentum, a work comparing the Latin Vulgate against Greek manuscripts. Erasmus republished Valla's work in 1505 and wrote in his preface about the need to recover the true text of the Bible. From 1499, encouraged by John Colet of Oxford, Erasmus began an intensive study of the Greek language. He began studying, collecting and comparing Latin and Greek manuscripts far and wide in order to provide the world with a fresh Latin translation from the Greek. By 1505 he had completed the letters of Paul, and by 1509 the Gospels, with a large collection of notes. Latin
Erasmus had learned Latin at an early age, read voraciously, and for much of his life refused to write letters or speak in any language other than Latin, favouring classical syntax but embracing the expanded post-antiquity vocabulary. Over more than a decade, he assembled a large number of variants in Vulgate and patristic manuscripts, enabling him to choose those Latin readings which approached closest to the Greek texts in his judgment. A key resource used for his initial Latin rendition (1516) was his long-prepared complete works of Jerome (1516), an author Erasmus had intensively studied and the translator of the Vulgate Latin version. He had begun collecting material on specific issues from early 1500s, in his extensive travels. In the later versions of the New Testament and Annotations, Erasmus made use material from his Froben editions of the Western and African patristic and classical authors, notably Ambrose and Augustine. Greek
Erasmus had, unusually, been taught basic classical Greek at school, but did not actively learn it until his mid 30s under the influence and assistance of his English circle, notable Greek experts Thomas Linacre and William Grocyn, and the writings of Lorenzo Valla, a Renaissance biblical scholar of the previous generation. In 1506/1507 he lived and worked at the Aldine Press which supported a community of over 30 Greek scholars, many refugees, such  as Marco Musuro (protégé of Janus Lascaris), and which conducted most of its business in Greek. In 1508 he studied in Padua with Giulio Camillo. He honed his Greek-to-Latin translation skills by translating secular Greek authors, such as Lucian (with Thomas More), Euripides and classical Adages and Apophthegms. In the later versions of the New Testament and Annotations, Erasmus made use material from his Froben editions of the Eastern and African patristic and classical authors, notably Cyprian, Origen and John Chrysostom. Erasmus was assisted by numerous scholars, both in Basel (such as Oecolampadius, for the first edition) and through his first-class network of correspondents (for example, he made enquiries of Papal Librarian Paulus Bombasius about Codex Vaticanus.) First edition 
In his dedication to Pope Leo X, Erasmus positioned the 1516 work within the humanist ad fontes (back to the source of the stream) program:

I perceived that that teaching which is our salvation was to be had in a much purer and more lively form if sought at the fountain-head and drawn from the actual sources than from pools and runnels. And so I have revised the whole New Testament (as they call it) against the standard of the Greek original... I have added annotations of my own, in order in the first place to show the reader what changes I have made, and why; second, to disentangle and explain anything that may be complicated, ambiguous, or obscure. It was a bilingual edition; the Greek text was in a left column, the Latin in a right. The substantial annotations came from Erasmus' previous decade of manuscript and  philological research throughout Western Europe. The Latin translation retained much of the Vulgate. The Annotations had been researched during the previous decade with recourse to many Latin and Greek sources. In England before coming to Basel in 1515, Erasmus had consulted with four Greek manuscripts, as yet unidentified. Froben Press 
On a visit to Basel in August 1514, he contacted Swiss-German printer Johann Froben of Basel. It seems that it was decided first to make his word notes into annotations on the Greek and Vulgate Latin, and then, at a late stage, to use a new Latin translation. In their own advocacy of the competing Alexandrian text-type and Critical Text against Erasmus' work,  Victorian scholar S. P. Tregelles  and modern critical scholar Bruce Metzger speculated without evidence that Froben might have heard about "the forthcoming Spanish Polyglot Bible," and tried to overtake the project of Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros. However, not only had the Complutensian Polyglot New Testament already been printed back in January 1514, months before Erasmus met with Froben in August, but the historical record shows the Pope had issue with some translations in the Polyglot. Translator Antonio de Nebrija quit the Polyglot project when Cardinal Cisneros refused to allow him to alter the translations according to the Pope's satisfaction. In July 1515, Erasmus went to Basel and Johannes Oecolampadius served as his editorial assistant and Hebrew consultant. The printing began on 2 October 1515, and in very short time was finished (1 March 1516). It was produced quickly – Erasmus declared later that the first edition was "precipitated rather than pubished" (praecipitatum verius quam editum) – with hundreds of spelling and typographical errors

Bibliographic

The work was titled:
Novum Instrumentum omne, diligenter ab Erasmo Rot. Recognitum et Emendatum, non solum ad Graecam veritatem verum etiam ad multorum utriusq; linguae codicum eorumq; veterum simul et emendatorum fidem, postremo ad probatissimorum autorum citationem, emendationem et interpretationem, praecipue, Origenis, Chrysostomi, Cyrilli, Vulgarij, Hieronymi, Cypriani, Ambrosij, Hilarij, Augustini, una cum Annotationibus, quae lectorem doceant, quid qua ratione mutatum sit. This title, especially words: Novum Instrumentum [...] Recognitum et Emendatum, means New Instrument [...] Revised and Improved. An  is a decision put down in writing. Direct Greek Manuscripts

To prepare the Greek text for the First Edition, Erasmus used several manuscripts available locally in Basel. Seven Greek manuscripts have been identified:  Erasmus had three Greek manuscripts of the Gospels and Acts, four manuscripts of the Pauline epistles, two manuscripts of the Catholic epistles, but only one manuscript with the Book of Revelation:

It seems that Erasmus did not intend to make a critical edition of the Greek, as such. He sent Miniscules 2e and 2ap to the printers "somewhat corrected" against the other manuscripts. He borrowed the manuscripts from Basel Dominicans Library. Manuscripts 1eap and 1rK Erasmus borrowed from Johannes Reuchlin. It is significant that he did not use the Codex Basilensis, which was held at the Basel University Library, and was available for him. Revelation 
In every book of the New Testament he compared several manuscripts, except the last book, Revelation, for which he had access to only one manuscript. That manuscript was not complete, the final leaf, which contained the last six verses of the book, having been torn off. Instead of delaying the publication on account of the search for another manuscript, he decided to translate the missing verses from the Latin Vulgate into Greek, alerting readers to thins in a note. He used an inferior Vulgate manuscript with textual variant libro vitae (book of life) instead of ligno vitae (tree of life) in . Even in other parts of Revelation and other books of the New Testament, Erasmus occasionally introduced self-created Greek text material taken from the Vulgate. F. H. A. Scrivener remarked that in Rev. 17:4, Erasmus created a new Greek word: ἀκαθάρτητος (instead of τὰ ἀκάθαρτα). There is no such word in the Greek language as ἀκαθάρτητος. In Rev. 17:8 he used καιπερ εστιν (and yet is) instead of και παρεσται (and shall come). The Annotations contain some readings of the Greek not found in the Basel manucripts, but from prior research in England, etc. Second edition 
The reception of the first edition was mixed, but within three years a second was made (1519). The Latin text was a more comprehensive rescension of the Latin of the Vulgate. A letter of recommendation from Pope Leo X is one of the prefaces. The second edition used the more familiar term Testamentum instead of Instrumentum. A  is an agreement without a written record. In the second edition Erasmus also used Minuscule 3 (Codex Corsendoucensis, or Vindobonensis Suppl. Gr. 52, entire NT except Revelation; 12th century) and an unidentified Gospel codex. The Greek text was changed in about 400 places, with most—though not all—of the typographical errors corrected. Some new erroneous readings were added to the text. For this edition, Erasmus re-worked his initial revision of Jerome's Vulgate into a new, more elegant translation. The Latin translation had a good reception. The second edition became the basis for Luther's German translation. After this edition, Erasmus was involved in many polemics and controversies. Particularly objectionable were the annotations from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford. López de Zúñiga, known as Stunica, one of the editors of Ximenes' Complutensian Polyglot, reproached Erasmus that his text lacked part of the 1 John 5:7-8 (Comma Johanneum). Erasmus replied that he had not found it in any Greek manuscript. Stunica answered that Latin manuscripts are more reliable than Greek. In 1520 Edward Lee accused Erasmus of tendencies toward Arianism and Pelagianism, and of unorthodox sacramentology. Erasmus replied that he had not found any Greek manuscript that contained these words, he answered that this was a case not of omission or removal, but simply of non-addition. He showed that even some Latin manuscripts did not contain these words. Erasmus asked his friend, the Prefect of the Vatican Library, Paulus Bombasius, to check the Codex Vaticanus. Bombasius sent two extracts from this manuscript containing the beginnings of 1 John 4 and 5, which has three dots in the margin but not the text of the Comma. Third edition 
The Greek of the third edition (1522) differed in 118 places from the second. With the third edition of Erasmus's Greek text  the Comma Johanneum was included. An often repeated story is that Erasmus included it, because he felt bound by a promise to include it if a manuscript was found that contained it. When a single 16th-century Greek manuscript subsequently had been found to contain it (Codex Montfortianus), Erasmus included it, though he expressed doubt as to the authenticity of the passage in his Annotations. This manuscript had probably been produced in 1520 by a Franciscan who translated it from the Vulgate. Henk Jan de Jonge, a specialist in Erasmian studies, stated that there is no explicit evidence that supports this frequently-made assertion concerning a specific promise made by Erasmus: so the real reason to include the Comma by Erasmus, was his care for his good name and for the success of his Novum Testamentum. In this edition Erasmus, after using Codex Montfortianus, misprinted εμαις for εν αις in Apocalypse 2:13. Oecolampadius and Gerbelius, who had assisted Erasmus, insisted that he introduce more readings from the minuscule 1eap in the third edition. But according to Erasmus the text of this codex was altered from the Latin manuscripts, and had only secondary value. This edition was used by William Tyndale for the first English New Testament (1526), by Robert Estienne as a base for his editions of the Greek New Testament from 1546 and 1549, and by the translators of the Geneva Bible and King James Version. Fourth edition 
The fourth edition (1527) was printed in three parallel columns, they contain the updated Greek, Erasmus' own Latin version, and a standard Vulgate. Shortly after the publication of his third edition, Erasmus had seen the Complutensian Polyglot, and used its Greek text for improvement of his own text. In the Book of Revelation he altered his fourth edition in about 90 passages on the basis of the Complutensian text. Unfortunately Erasmus had forgotten what places of the Apocalypse he translated from Latin and he did not correct all of them. Except in the Revelation, the fourth edition differed only in about 20 places from his third (according to Mill about 10 places). In November 1533, before the appearance of the fifth edition, Sepúlveda sent Erasmus a description of the ancient Vatican manuscript, informing him that it differed from the text which he had edited in favour of the Vulgate in 365 places. Nothing is known about these 365 readings except for one. Erasmus in Adnotationes to Acts 27:16 wrote that according to the Codex from the Library Pontifici (i.e. Codex Vaticanus) name of the island is καυδα (Cauda), not κλαυδα (Clauda) as in his Novum Testamentum (Tamet si quidam admonent in codice Graeco pontificiae bibliothecae scriptum haberi, καυδα, id est, cauda). In another letter sent to Erasmus in 1534 Sepúlveda informed him, that Greek manuscripts were altered from the Vulgate. Final edition 
The fifth edition of Erasmus, published in 1535, the year before his death, discarded the Vulgate. According to Mill the Greek of the fifth edition differed only in four places from the fourth. The fifth edition was the basis of Robert Estienne's 1550 New Testament, which was the first variorum  critical edition of the Greek, showing variants from the Complutensian Polyglot. Estienne's edition was used as the basis of Theodore Beza's versions, the Elzevier's 1633 textus receptus editions, and the base text of John Mill's 1707 critical edition. Popular demand for Greek New Testaments led to a flurry of further authorized and unauthorized editions in the early sixteenth century; almost all of which were based on Erasmus's work and incorporated his particular readings, although typically also making a number of minor changes of their own. Tregelles gives Acts 13:33 as an example of the places in which commonly received text did not follow Erasmian text (εν τω ψαλμω τω πρωτω → εν τω ψαλμω τω δευτερω). See also 

 Complutensian Polyglot Bible
 Editio Regia
 Textus Receptus

Notes

References

Further reading 
 W. L. Adye, The History of the Printed Greek Text of the New Testament, Southampton 1865
 William W. Combs, Erasmus and the textus receptus, DBSJ 1 (Spring 1996): 35-53. Johann Jakob Griesbach, Novum Testamentum Graece (London, 1809), Prolegomena, p. XVII ff. Henk Jan de Jonge, Erasmus und die Glossa Ordinaria zum Neuen Testament, Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 56 (1975), p. 51-77. Henk Jan de Jonge, Erasmus and the Comma Johanneum, Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses LXVI (1980), pp. 381–389
 
 
 

 R. Waltz, The Textus Receptus, Encyclopedia of Textual Criticism
 Martin Arhelger, Die Textgrundlage des Neues Testaments, 2008

External links 
 Novum Instrumentum omne, 1st edition, Basel, 1516. Novum Testamentum omne, 2nd edition, Basel, 1519. Greek New Testament
Early printed Bibles
New Testament editions