53 - Erasmus

Studying the subject church history, I believe this is like the 53rd, so we've now set a new record for how many sessions we have gone through in church history.

We did this back in the 90s, we did 52 sessions, and so we are now heading into uncharted territory, which makes you the most patient folks that we've had so far.

But we are looking right now at the time period immediately before the

Reformation, the things that gave rise to the

Reformation, the things that were necessary for the Reformation to take the form that it did, rather than just being some type of a political or secular movement.

I mean, with the Renaissance taking place and everything else, something was going to change, the medieval world was falling apart, something had to happen, but what was going to be the nature of that change?

And obviously we look back and are extremely thankful for the move of God at that time, the spread of the gospel, the beginning of missions work, and all sorts of things like that.

So what was important in bringing that about? So we're sort of in the middle of that, and we were looking at the rise of humanism.

We mentioned last week that this was not humanism in the form that we would speak of it today, even though it did clearly contain the seeds of what would become modern -day humanism.

It would take a long time before that would really come into full flower. And we finished our time, we looked at a fellow by the name of Lorenzo Valla, and Valla is one of the more important people that you've never heard of, because he was smart enough to not publish his findings while he was still alive, because the fact that what he had discovered, the conclusions he had come to, would have been extremely dangerous in his day.

That is, he had seen through the, might say he had seen through the veil of anachronism.

That is, he had recognized that things had changed, that during the medieval period the vast majority of people, as I've mentioned, never traveled more than seven miles any one direction from where they were born, so their world was very small.

And so the vast majority of people believed that things had always been the way they were now.

So it was easy to foist upon the conscience frauds, forgeries, some of the most important documents of the medieval period upon which, for example, the authority of the

Roman Church and the papacy had been based, were fraudulent documents. The pseudo -Isidorean decretals, for example, upon which people like Thomas Aquinas depended greatly in his defense of the papacy were about,

I think the number is about 92 % false. About 92 % of the quotations from the early

Church Fathers that contained were not from the early Church Fathers. So the donation of Constantine, all these things were frauds, but they had been, had a very, very important part in establishing the authority of the

Church. And Vala began to see through these things, and you may recall he did so by examining

Jerome's commentaries, comparing the text of the Latin Vulgate with that.

His thinking was, well, we don't copy Jerome's commentaries very often, but we copy the

Bible very often, so if there's going to be corruption or change, it's going to be in what's copied more often than what's not copied so often.

And he did discover there had indeed been changes. And so we then wrapped up with a man who comes after Vala, very, very important man by a name of Desiderius Erasmus.

And Erasmus is a man who, as we mentioned last week, was rummaging through a library and found

Vala's work and was very impressed with him. And Erasmus, Erasmus did not back away from a fight.

Erasmus is one of those guys that, as we look back on this time period, there is so much in him that we can identify with and want to go, yay

Erasmus. I was going to say, yay Desiderius. That's just,

I'm not, you could never come up with a cheer for someone named Desiderius. I'm sorry, it's just not really possible. Desi?

No, that's not going to work. But, you know, we, there were just so many things.

And during the Reformation itself, because he dies in 1536, and so he's alive for the first, you know, almost 20 years of the

Reformation, and many of the Reformers looked to him to join with them, but he never did.

Yet, he had been known for his stinging, satirical, sarcastic -filled criticism of the established

Church of the day. His, we have,

I guess we're sort of getting back to this time period, though not without nearly as much class, on the

Internet, where graciousness, kindness, any type of decorum is just thrown out the window.

And once you get online, you can have somebody who in real life will say, pardon me, excuse me, thank you, be nice to the dogs and cats and so on and so forth, and they go into their room and turn on that screen.

It's like, and out come the fangs and the guns and everything else.

And we all know people like that. And sometimes we look back and we read some of the pre -Reformation,

Reformation period writing, and it's easy for us to go, well, we certainly have become cultured since then.

And, of course, if you're wondering about this name and going, where have I heard it before?

There's a couple reasons why you might have. One of them, probably, if you're Reformed, is due to the fact that the first written debate of the

Reformation is between Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther. And Erasmus had written on the freedom of the will, and Luther responded a year later with his book

On the Bondage of the Will. And all of us cheer Luther is on the bondage of the will, though most of us have never actually read

The Bondage of the Will. And if you have, then you know that, you know,

Luther will on one page be speaking of Erasmus's tremendous ability with the language and his great intelligence and his study and so on and so forth.

The next page over will say something along the lines of, it's difficult for me to respond to what you have said on this point because it is of the level of the stupidity of slopping hogs.

In fact, there's a website where you can go and get daily insults from the writings of Martin Luther to use on your friends and family, if you wish to do such a thing, because it's not difficult between those books and the table talk and stuff like that to come up with quite a large number of Lutheran insults.

And Erasmus was certainly not above such things himself. And so it's, you know, on the one hand, we look at Erasmus and, you know, he was the one who either came up with or at least made famous in his mockery of the relics trade.

Remember, we talked a little bit about relics earlier on. And by this point in time, and we're going to talk more about it once,

I'm going to read to you from the catalog, the Reliquary Catalog of Wittenberg, the kinds of relics that were now regularly being bought and sold and collected.

And, you know, at this time period, there are people who literally are making pilgrimages to go to these sites and they are paying money to enter into these rooms where there are all these relics like feathers from the angel

Gabriel and a piece of Jesus' baby diapers or nappies, as they're called in Europe and Australia.

You know, vials of Mary's breast milk. I mean, seriously, you know. And then, of course, you had, did we talk about the house at Loretto?

Did I mention to you the house at Loretto? Oh, goodness. The house at Loretto was a house in Italy that the church taught was the house where the

Virgin Mary lived when the Annunciation took place. I think it was when the Annunciation took place. It might have been her later house, but I think it was where the

Annunciation took place. And you might go, Italy, huh? It's a long walk to Israel from Italy.

Well, there was an explanation. The house was in Italy because angels had picked it up in Israel and flown it to Italy and put it down in Loretto.

And so, you could go to this house and you could gain indulgences.

And I know we discussed indulgences. I know we explained the concept of indulgences at some point.

That is one of the problems in being 53 lessons in, and that's well over a year, is after a while it just starts getting rather fuzzy for us older folks as to what we've talked about before.

But you could gain indulgences, you know, by praying at the house of Loretto and, you know, and the church said this is what happened.

And so, there you go. And Erasmus wrote with tremendous sarcasm of the relic trade.

And again, I'm not sure if he was the one that made it up or if he made it famous, but he did point out that you could literally build a ship with all the fragments of the true cross that were currently on display in Europe.

Now, you think about how much wood there is in the cross and it would be pretty tough to build a ship out of that, but you literally could just traipsing around Europe and seeing all the pieces of the true cross.

And there were literally thousands and thousands and thousands of the nails that were used to nail the

Lord to the cross. And that crown of thorns must have had about 50 ,000 thorns in it and everything else because this was the kind of piety that you would see all across Europe at this time.

And so, Erasmus is one of those who is taking the risk, quite literally, to criticize this kind of stuff.

And he, likewise, he had heard in 1499, he had heard a man preaching by the name of John Collett.

John Collett. Now, this is still almost 20 years before Luther's 95

Theses. And he was using a very different form of interpretation and exegesis in his preaching.

He was giving grammatical, historical exegesis.

He was looking at the Greek, primarily. He was giving the historical background.

He was relating one text of Scripture to another text of Scripture in their original context.

And he wasn't using allegorical interpretation, which had quite literally infected the church since the days of...

Very good. There are at least three people that are still conscious in the room. That's good. All right. Fifteen minutes in, we've still got a few people that are with me.

That's good. Origin. And you might have even pushed that back to Clement of Alexandria. But the

Alexandrian school had truly infected the entire church with this concept of the spiritualizing, allegorizing way of interpretation.

And so Erasmus is challenged by this. He recognizes the value of this.

He expands his studies in the original languages as best you could at the beginning of the 16th century.

It wasn't nearly as easy as it is for us today. You know, I always have people coming up to me,

I want to learn to read the Greek New Testament. Well, that's a noble thing. There's no greater commentary on the

New Testament than the New Testament in Greek. I will stand by that statement. It is a true statement.

But people ask me, I want to do that, but I don't have time to go to school. I don't have time to take classes, even though obviously here in Phoenix there'd be lots of classes you could take between the various schools that that are here.

I need to do it on my own. Well, you can do that. There are grammars and workbooks.

And there's one set that I suggest to people. It's a full grammar workbook, computer programs with tests and quizzes and parsing guides and the whole nine yards.

And even the guy who wrote it has put all of his lectures online, so you can listen to him as he presents his own material.

But even with that, I would say that 99 out of 100 people had asked me that, and they get the books and they do the whole thing.

99 out of 100 never finish. So it was a lot tougher, a lot tougher back then.

We are so much more distracted than they were at that time that it's amazing.

But he begins learning all of this material. Erasmus may have been one of the last

Renaissance men. A Renaissance man is, you know, there was a time when human knowledge was not so wide that it could not be mastered by one individual.

And Erasmus was widely read in all sorts of things. And, you know, a true, true scholar.

And he became interested in publishing the first printed edition of the

Greek New Testament. And so he saw that one of the problems in getting people more into the original languages, remember the the cry of the of the humanist,

Ad Fontes, to the source. And so he recognized that the most useful thing that could be done, and it would certainly get someone's name rather well memorialized, would be to get that first usable, printed, you know, use that new fancy gadget called the printing press to get that out there.

Because as it was right now, if you wanted to access those original languages, you had to go to a library and you had to utilize hand copied manuscripts of varying levels of quality and even readability for that matter.

Remember, you're reading somebody else's handwriting. Yes, people did write with their hands these things called quills or pens back then.

I realize that's probably and that will fade away into nothingness over the next couple of generations.

We don't need to bother with that anymore. You just talk to your phone.

Siri does everything for you now. So Siri's on a phone, Mr. Calhoun. Don't worry about it.

Yeah, you heard of it. Anyway, so he did some inquiries being sort of on the inside of things in scholarship in Europe and came to find out that Cardinal Jimenez was pretty much already done with a multi -volume polyglot,

Greek and Latin, and I think it had

Hebrew in the Old Testament and a huge work of scholarship and it was almost done.

But it was going to be a big thing rather than a single volume. He wanted to do something in a single volume and so he moved to Basel, Switzerland, assuming that the library at Basel would have the best collection of manuscripts that he could draw from in putting together not just a

Greek New Testament. He recognized the value of that, but in light of Lorenzo Valla's work, his big focus initially was on a new

Latin translation, which was really dangerous. I mean, you know, when we say, well, it's really dangerous, that would be like someone in our modern context coming out strongly on a conservative political issue in a modern university.

It's dangerous. You could lose your job and you could. A lot of people have. When we're talking dangerous back then, we're talking dangerous as in being tied to a stake and having wood stacked around you and being turned into a torch.

Dangerous. A different kind of dangerous. And even though that may be coming to a university campus near you in the not too distant future either.

But that was his first focus, but he wanted to have the

Greek there as well. Again, that Ad Fontes idea. So he moves to Basel, Switzerland and he starts work and it's pretty easy to get manuscripts of the

Gospels, to get manuscripts of Paul's letters. But he was disappointed in the number and quality and quantity of manuscripts there in Basel, but he already had a printer by the name of John Froben.

And Froben knew about Jiménez and he knew if Jiménez gets his done, well, actually

Jiménez was done. What they're waiting for is papal approval. Because in those days you didn't publish anything that didn't have the papal stamp of approval on it.

Or again, Schumann matchstick comes to mind. And so they're moving along here and Froben's pushing

Erasmus. And after his first edition did come out in 1516, he described it as precipitated rather than edited.

That's sort of what you would say to your teacher or professor when you turn in a paper that you finished writing the night before and never even had a chance to proofread, let alone to edit or smooth out or do anything else.

Precipitated rather than edited. So Erasmus had about half a dozen manuscripts for the whole

New Testament. And he had one from around the 10th century that probably was the best one he had, but he didn't trust it.

So the New Testament that he produced was primarily based upon 12th, 13th century manuscripts.

And he did have to engage in a certain level of textual criticism.

Now when you think about what he was doing, I mean he's doing a whole new Latin translation and he's doing all this stuff with the

Greek. I mean it's, and he doesn't have a bunch of folks running around doing the research for him. He doesn't have

Google, he doesn't have Accordance Bible Software or Logos or Bible Works or Olive Tree or whatever else we have on our iPads and iPhones today.

It's a tremendous amount of work and he would, there would be a time, I don't know if he was working on that, there would be a time when he was describing working at his desk during the summer and it was beastly hot and he was being just bombarded by mosquitoes.

And just as a reminder for the fact that the Reformation took place in a in a world that had a more supernaturalistic outlook than we have.

Without this being a overstatement or a, no he didn't really mean that, no he really did mean that, he believed that the mosquitoes were demons that were trying to keep him from his work.

And if you've ever lived in Minnesota you might agree with him on that.

I've lived in Minnesota and we lived in a big old farmhouse and if you went out at the end of the day there were just mosquitoes everywhere.

And the lovely thing about living in a 105 year old farmhouse back then was we had, the entire attic was filled with bats.

And as soon as the sun would go down all of a sudden you start hearing and out they come.

And you just had to wait just a few minutes. And those, there were so many up there, they just would vacuum that yard up and you could go out and not have a single mosquito bother you because they all just became munchies for the bats.

They just went all over the place and okay they're all gone, alright you can go outside now, alright cool. So that was our version of off.

Our version of off had wings and little fangs and hang upside down and stuff like that so.

But we didn't, it never really crossed our minds to say that the bats were angels getting rid of the demons, you know.

It just didn't really fit the world view. But that was the world view of that particular time.

And so Erasmus is working as quickly and as hard as he can on his

Greek New Testament polyglot. It wasn't called the New Testament, it was called the Novum Instrumentum.

The Novum Instrumentum, the new instrument as we would literally translate it.

And he's got enough to do most of what he needs until he gets to the last book of the

New Testament. And he can't find anything. There is no

Greek manuscript of the book of Revelation. And by the way, it is not the book of Revelations.

Please, thank you. Just like it's not Psalms 110, it's Psalm 110.

Just two of my little pet peeves. I've been listening to all this scripture memory music recently and it just, every time they go,

Psalms 102. I just want to drive off the road or something like that. No, it's Psalm 102. Anyway, he can't find anything.

And so finally, he borrows from a friend of his, a man by the name of Johannes Reuchlin, who himself is a fascinating fellow.

Reuchlin wrote one of the first Hebrew grammars for Christians, yes.

Like it sounds. R -E -U -C -H -L -I -N.

See, Kelly's not here to bug me about writing on the board. So, we do have a Mrs. White, but she's not bugging me about writing on the board.

So, I can get away with it. Johannes Reuchlin, John Reuchlin. Reuchlin was a really fascinating guy because he wanted to learn

Hebrew. And so, he somehow convinced a

Jewish rabbi, because this Jewish rabbi must have been either very brave or needed money, one of the two, to meet with him at night and teach him

Hebrew. Because for a Jewish rabbi to teach a Christian Hebrew automatically meant the death sentence.

Automatic death sentence. Inquisition is still quite active at this point in time. And so,

Reuchlin writes one of the first Hebrew grammars that is then very helpful for others who are learning that language.

But part of the reason he wanted to do that is he was into Kabbalism. The sort of Jewish, mystical, numerological, magical weirdness.

What was that singer's name from back in my generation? Madonna. Thank you.

Madonna got into that stuff. I wouldn't have wanted to be the only one in the room to remember that name.

But everyone's looking at you, ooh, know about Madonna, huh? Okay. He was into the same type of stuff.

And that was part of his motivation. So, you know, it's real easy for us. We got to be really careful.

We can't, we can't give in to the temptation to sterilize things and go, yeah, well,

I remember Johannes Reuchlin and he helped us learn Hebrew and then not go. And part of the reason he was into this really weird

Jewish magical, strange stuff. But Reuchlin was known to Erasmus.

And so Erasmus is like floundering around. What? I can't decanonize the

Book of Revelation here. Can't, can't put out a New Testament. It's only got 26 books in it. What am

I gonna do? And so Reuchlin has a Latin commentary on the book.

And the Latin commentary has the

Greek of the Book of Revelation in it, interspersed in the commentary.

And so that's what Erasmus has to use for his first edition. And so he literally has to sit there and read through the commentary and extract the

Greek from the commentary to come up with the Greek for the Book of Revelation.

Now, I think I've mentioned to you before, the Book of Revelation has a pretty interesting textual history to begin with.

We mentioned early on that it's, it struggled for acceptance in the canon of the wider church.

And there were a number of places where it simply wasn't accepted early on. And as a result of all the

New Testament books, the book that we have the fewest ancient manuscripts of is the

Book of Revelation. And I know I've told you in the past, may not have been a part of this particular series, but it is fascinating to me that we only have two very fragmentary papyri, made of papyrus, copies of the

Book of Revelation. And what is really, really interesting about that is that in that book, chapter 13, you have the giving of the number of the beast.

And we all know what the number of the beast is, right? Shut up.

And what's really, really interesting, and if you have any questions about this, obviously

Sean wants to talk to you after class, to talk to you about the significance of this, but the two early papyri manuscripts of the

Book of Revelation both have as the number of the beast 616, not 666.

And so if you have any, any questions whatsoever about what that means, do not ask.

Either Pastor Fry or myself, Sean has volunteered to spend the entire afternoon with you here, discussing that if you would like.

So anyway, that, the result of this is that Erasmus' Greek text of the

Book of Revelation is unique, to say the least. But then the worst part is, he gets to the end of the commentary, and the last couple pages have fallen off of the book.

It's about the last six verses of the last chapter of the

Book of Revelation are missing. And this is the last thing he's got to do. He's done with the Latin, Froben is like knocking on his door going, we have to hurry, we have to hurry.

You know, Jimenez could come out with his edition any, at any moment. And, and so what

Erasmus does is he back translates from his Latin into Greek.

And he does a wonderful job. I can't, I can't hardly think of any living scholar today that would be able to do as well as Erasmus did.

He did a great job, but he created a number of readings that had never appeared in a Greek manuscript of the

Book of Revelation ever before. And what's fascinating is even, you know, he ended up doing five editions.

The first was in 1516, the last was 1535. Widely distributed, widely distributed, extremely important.

But he never did much repair in the Book of Revelation, even though he had plenty of time later on, it just wasn't the most popular book.

And many of the readings that he produced that were highly questionable from extracting from a commentary, and then a number of the unique readings that he came up with in the last chapter of the

Book of Revelation by back translating from the Latin are still in the

King James Version of the Bible to this day. They're sitting right there in the

Bible that you have on your, on your table in front of you. Because the

King James and then the New King James are both based upon what is called the

Textus Receptus, or the TR. And the

TR, there is a very strong movement amongst

Reformed people today, including Reformed Baptists. To go back to the TR, the

TR, there is no one TR. That's one of the problems. I did a debate book with Doug Wilson last year on this issue, and one of the questions that I asked him was, okay, if you're going to say this is the inspired inerrant text we must utilize over against any of the modern texts, the current standard modern text in Christian scholarship, including all the

Reformed seminaries and stuff like that, is the UBS 5th edition or the Nestle -Allen 28th edition, they're the same, all the same wording, just different paragraph divisions and punctuation.

If you're gonna say we can't use those, we have to use TR, which one? Because Erasmus has five editions, each one's different than the other.

Then Calvin's printer, a man and his Latin name was Stephanus, his actual name was

Robert Estienne, he put out a couple of editions. Most popular was the 1550 edition, and I think

I have brought my 1550 in. I have a 1550 Stephanus, not a facsimile, it's a 1550

Stephanus. It was donated to the ministry in 2010, it's worth $35 ,000. So I don't carry it around much, you know, don't leave it in the car, things like that.

But it's still in great shape to this day, it's amazing. The paper they used back then, so much better than the paper we use today and stuff.

They actually printed books to last back then. But you've got the 1550 Stephanus, and then you've got 1598

Beza, Theodore Beza, Calvin's successor at the school in Geneva, as pastor in Geneva.

Theodore Beza did an edition in 1598. Those seven editions, five of Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza, were the printed editions that the

King James translators used to translate the New Testament. They didn't use Greek manuscripts, they used the printed editions.

But they're all different from one another. So the scholars of the King James had to make choices when those differed from one another.

So they were doing what was called textual criticism. They were, when there were differences, they made a choice as to which one they were going to translate.

And they often put notes in the margins back then, when there was a difference. The original King James had lots, many, many, many more notes than almost any

King James that's printed today. And so I asked Doug Wilson, I said, so which of these, and in fact the term

Textus Receptus comes from 1633, when the Elsevier brothers, they weren't actually brothers, it was cousins or something, but anyways they were called the

Elsevier brothers. They were publishing an edition of the Greek New Testament. And Textus Receptus simply means received text.

The text that has been received. Well, received by whom? Erasmus was just doing the best he could to come up with manuscripts.

It's not like there was a, you know, church council and all sorts of scholars involved in getting the best manuscripts together.

No, it was rather haphazard. And so which one?

And to my utter shock, Doug Wilson actually came up with one.

And to my shock, and yet to my joy, he said we should use the 1550

Stephanos. I'm like, yeah, I've got one. That's great. I've gotten an actual original copy of the inspired and errant text.

That's great. But that's what this movement is coming from. And your

King James and your New King James are based on the TR. New American Standard, NIV, ESV, anything else basically, is based upon modern texts that obviously draw from a significantly wider database of manuscripts than were available to Erasmus and even onward.

Stephanos had a few more manuscripts he looked at. Beza, a few more he looked at. But that is a huge, huge issue to this day.

Fascinatingly enough, one that I have to deal with way, way too much. Anyway, he puts out his edition in 1516, immediately overcome with attacks.

One of the main reasons was he did not have in his first or second editions of his

New Testament the Comma Johannium.

Mmm, yes. I heard a thoughtful, hmm, the

Comma Johannium, which in the

King James version is 1st John 5 .7. Now, when

I was a junior in high school, I went out on a outreach visit on a

Monday night at a local church that some of you know well. And I ended up talking to the mother of a junior in high school guy that had visited our church, and they were

Mormons. And I didn't know anything about Mormonism.

And she said some stuff about not believing in the Trinity, and I was sitting here going, where am

I gonna go? What am I gonna do? And to my chagrin, we spent that whole time discussing 1st

John 5 .7. Because it was the only verse I knew, the Father, the

Son, the Spirit, these three are one. The Father, the Holy Ghost, the Spirit, these three are one. And it's all

I knew to do. And unfortunately, it's all a lot of people know to do. And the reality is the

Comma Johannium, the earliest Greek manuscript that actually contains it in its text is about the 14th century.

It's not original. If it is original, we have no reason for ever trusting anything else the

New Testament has to say. Because all, all of the

Greek manuscripts for a thousand years after John wrote don't have it. That means something really significant, really important, could just go disappear and only be preserved in other language translations like the

Latin. And that's a huge thing to say, but there are a lot of people that are willing to say it.

They don't know that they're saying it. I had one guy, did anyone remember, remember the

Jack Chick tracks? Remember Jack Chick? And the, and then they had the Alberto series, which was the guy was a former

Roman Catholic priest and, and he wrote all these things about how terrible Rome was and stuff like that and all the conspiracy theories and stuff.

Well, I went and saw Alberto once. He was speaking here in Phoenix. This is in the 1980s. Ironically, he was speaking at an apostolic church down in South Phoenix, non -Trinitarian, whatever.

Little guy. He was about yay big. And I was talking to him afterwards.

And because I was carrying a New American Standard Bible, he looked me right in the eye. You're going to hell. You cannot, you cannot be saved reading that Bible.

You have to read the King James Version of the Bible. And there, there are, there are people to this day who

I am the Antichrist because I will say 1

John 5, 7 is not original. It was not written by John. And the interesting thing is the first two editions of Erasmus didn't have it.

And he was attacked for that. You're an Arian, you're denying the Trinity, you're denying the deity of Christ. And so he said,

I've just never seen a Greek manuscript that contains it. And so a couple years ago,

I'll finish with this story, and then we're not done with Erasmus yet. A couple years ago,

I visited Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and I went to the library there.

One of the man -made wonders of the world. The reading room there, unbelievable.

If you don't, if you've never seen it, Google it. It's unbelievable. Up in the archive room,

I got to put my hands on and look at Codex Monfortianus.

And normally when you see manuscripts, they'll say this century, that century. This one says 1520.

We know exactly when it was written. And we know who wrote it. And it was written specifically to force

Erasmus to put the comma into his Greek New Testament. One of his enemies had one of, who was the head of a, it was a prior of a monastery, had one of his monks write this whole thing up, put the comma in there, and then it's presented to Erasmus as evidence that, see, this is an ancient reading.

And Erasmus didn't know that that's where it had come from. And so in the third edition, he put it in with a big long note in his annotation saying why he felt that it wasn't original.

But who reads notes? And so it's in the third, fourth, and fifth editions of Erasmus's Greek New Testament, which is why it's in your

King James and New King James versions of the Bible. So Erasmus is a pretty important guy.

And what's going on at this period in time is pretty important as well. And so, but remind me to pick up with some of the theology of Erasmus.

If you could do that, Sean, if you could remind me. I want to talk a little bit about the theology of Erasmus, because that's sort of important to touch on as well.

Okay? We have gone over time. I apologize. Let's pray. Father, we thank you once again for the freedom we have to look back upon your providence over time.

We ask that we would learn, that we would use this as light for our path today. Be with us now as we go into worship.