52 - Factors Leading to the Reformation

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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So what we're looking at, for those of you who are visiting with us, haven't been with us before, we are...

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I think with this lesson go past the length of the last time

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I did church history back about 1996, maybe even earlier than that. I was just talking with Brick, realized recently that next year will mark 30 years at PRVC for me.

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When you got someone like Pastor Fry, it's been around like forever, 30 years sounds like nothing.

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But yeah, 30 years. And somewhere in that course of time we did church history, we did it in 52 sessions.

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And I think this is the 52nd session, and we still got a ways to go. No, we're not going all the way, don't worry.

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As I've mentioned, we go up through the Reformation and that's about... As far as I'm comfortable going, as far as my studies are concerned.

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But anyway, we are currently in the factors that led to the

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Reformation and explained why the Reformation began when it did, why it couldn't have begun earlier than it did, all of this in reference to God's providence in ordering all of these things.

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And so we had looked at the corruption in the papacy, the great schism, also called the

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Babylonian captivity of the church, the Avignon papacy. And that this, over the course of centuries, had helped to break down in Western thought the inviolability and power of the

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Roman papacy. Not to the point where, you know, I mean obviously in the 1870s you're going to have the first Vatican council proclaim the infallibility of the

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Pope. To be honest with you, nobody at this point in time, except maybe a few popes, had even dreamed that one up yet.

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So it was still in the development phase. But still, it did help to, especially for the laypeople, to demonstrate that that particular institution was liable to error and to problems.

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And so the next issue, vitally important in the rise of the

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Reformation, is the fall of Constantinople. Now, of course today this is known as Istanbul.

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It's the ancient Byzantium. It had been the seat of the

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Western Roman Empire after the split between East and West. The Eastern Roman Empire had been focused there in Constantinople, Byzantium, now modern -day

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Istanbul. And it had functioned as the head of the

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Byzantine Empire. If you do any study on Islam, and interestingly enough, one of the alleged prophecies of Muhammad has to do with the

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Romans and the Persians. And the Romans would have been the Byzantines, centered there in Constantinople.

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This particular city had a rich, rich, rich history. And it happens to sit at an extremely strategic location.

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It's sort of the gateway into Europe. And Constantinople and the crumbling, shrinking, but still there

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Byzantine Empire had functioned for many centuries as a buffer against the expanding

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Islamic presence. Then, brilliantly, one of the, and I mentioned this during the brief discussion we had at the

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Human Self -Destruction. Certain Italian business interests, nation states, were having a feud with Constantinople.

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And so they worked out with one of the crusades that, hey, we'll provide you the ships to get you over there, because it's a long walk from Europe to the

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Holy Land. Lots of bad stuff can happen as it did. So we'll give you the ships, but we'd like you to sort of hang a left and go sack

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Constantinople while you're at it, which they did. And this weakened

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Constantinople, and eventually, not the next year, or maybe not even the next generation, but in a relatively short period of time, did lead to the collapse of Constantinople to the

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Ottoman Turks in 1453. And hence, the

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Islamic movement into Europe itself, which was a massive, massive issue at the time of the

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Reformation, and in fact is relevant to you and me. And you're sitting there going, how?

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Well, many ways, as we'll note in a moment. But one way that it's directly relevant to us is this historical reality of the fall of Constantinople and the evasion of the

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Ottoman Turks into Eastern, what we would call today, Eastern Europe, is how both

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Roman Catholics and magisterial Protestants, so Calvin, Zwingli, Luther, their followers, how they viewed

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Anabaptists. Now, we come out of the English Baptists, we come out of a later form of that, but the idea of a free church, the idea of a church that's made up of people who profess faith in Jesus Christ, and hence have been publicly baptized, that concept was considered horrifically treasonous in the days of the

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Reformation. Because, as I've noted, the tax rolls of the state were the baptismal rolls of the church.

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And so, to seek for a free church was to fundamentally compromise the unity of the society, and that was seen as weakening the ability of that society, that nation, that culture, to withstand the attack from the outside, from the

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Muslims. And so, very often, the anti -free church, anti -Anabaptists, as they were called, of course,

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Anabaptists could cover a huge range of beliefs, some of which weren't even Trinitarian. But a lot of the polemic that you will see against the

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Anabaptists then was imported to deal with us when

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Reformed Baptists came into existence, and so on and so forth, was based upon this idea of a fundamental attack upon Christendom.

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I mean, I sort of smile to myself every time, I didn't look it up, but one of the, there's two, two or three, really only two, maybe three

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Luther written hymns that we sing in the Trinity Hymnal, and one of them's a fairly short one.

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I think it's on the left page down at the bottom. But if you look it up, it uses the very term

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Christendom from Luther, and it's fascinating to me to recognize what that meant to Luther.

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How many of you saw my little video that we shot over in Germany back in September, where I'm at the

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Wartburg Castle, and we're talking about the Anabaptist that was in prison there.

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Anybody, anybody see that? A couple of you do, okay. Long story here that will,

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I'll probably show that, you know, come to think of it, I'll probably show that when we get into the

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Anabaptist later on, because it's pretty much what we finish up with. But that whole concept of Christendom, one of my favorite films, which we'll definitely watch, we've got some movies to watch in Sunday School coming up,

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I'm not sure how well we're gonna, we'll just announce on the Sunday School thing, we watched such and such a movie, go to YouTube and watch it, because they're all on YouTube free now.

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But one of the films we've watched a number of times on New Year's Eve services here is called

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The Radicals, and Michael Sattler, the story of Michael Sattler and his eventual execution, and at his trial, he was caught by the

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Roman Catholics rather than the Protestants, so the Protestants hadn't treated him very well either, and it would have done the same to him one way or the other.

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But at his trial, he was doing too well, and so they changed their approach and brought in the

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Muslims, and how you're supposed to, you know, are they not the Antichrist, so on and so forth, and got

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Sattler that way rather than trying to deal with him from a straight theological perspective. And again, it all goes back to sacralism, the sacerdotal church, all that kind of stuff.

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Well, all that comes back to the fall of Constantinople, and we would identify as political pressures that resulted from that, from the

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Islamic invasion from the East. But you've got to realize, we separate stuff out that they did not separate out.

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And so it's sometimes difficult for us, we try to import our categories backwards into their experience, and it just simply wasn't their experience.

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Now, what was vitally important, that stuff aside, what was really vitally important was that it's not like the people in Constantinople didn't see this coming.

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And so many escaped from Constantinople to the West, including many

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Greek scholars, and they brought their manuscripts with them. And so at the same time that, as we're going to see in a moment, you have the

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Renaissance and humanism arising, there needed to be original sources for them to be drawing from, and many of those original sources, which remain in various European libraries to this day, were brought into Europe from those

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Greek scholars fleeing from Constantinople. And so when we think about, you know, when we talk about Zwingli, we're going to talk about how he would do a debate with Roman Catholic priests, and he would simply come in, and he'd have two pulpits set like this, and he'd simply put his

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Greek New Testament down the one, and his Hebrew Bible on the other, and that's all he'd use. And this poor priest, all he can do is muddle his way through the

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Latin Vulgate. And so Zwingli is just able to slice and dice him, because he's become proficient in these more primitive languages as far as the scripture is concerned.

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Well, where did that stuff come from? Well, a lot of it came when those Greek -speaking scholars fled west immediately prior to the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

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And also, they would then be very important in laying the foundation for the relearning of these languages, because even at this time, even for the next 100 years, especially in Roman Catholic countries, learning the biblical languages would bring you under suspicion of heresy.

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Who are the Greeks? Well, the Greeks are heretics. Then who needs to learn their language except people who are heretics?

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And so even learning those languages, and learning Hebrew, oh my goodness, that was even worse.

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So it was a dangerous thing, especially within the

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Roman Catholic areas, for that to be taking place. So it was a fascinating period of time to be alive for certain, and we can be thankful for those who risked their lives, literally, to learn biblical languages so we might have what we have today.

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Now, next thing, in the factors in the rise of the Reformation, very obviously, one we've all been waiting for, printing.

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I mean, if you're going to identify almost any one thing that was absolutely necessary for the

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Reformation, as we know the Reformation historically to have taken place, it was printing. We've talked about Wycliffe and stuff like that.

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The problem is anything, I mean, think about how widely spread

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Wycliffe's writings were, and they are all done by hand. How much more widespread would they have been if there had been printing press?

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I mean, if Jan Hus is deeply influenced in Bohemia by what Wycliffe writes from England, and there's no printing press, you can get the idea of why it's, well, one of the things

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I learned when we were over in Germany this last time, well, I think it was in preparation. No, it was while we were over in Germany this last time.

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Luther held the record for the largest number of units printed, biggest distribution in Germany, in the

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German language, for 200 years after his death. 200 years after his death. So the

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Reformers figured out, get the word out. They were the first people to use the internet. They would have been big on Facebook.

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That's the way it was about it. So not for very long until Facebook censored them. But anyway, that's just sort of how that works and is working even to this day.

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But printing, absolutely vital to the

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Reformation, both to its start and to its promulgation, because as we're going to see when we get into Luther, key to Luther's coming to have the proper insight and understanding justification, and then that forces him to understand

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Sola Scriptura and all the other things that we'll get into, was the fact that he possessed, during that pivotal period in his life, a printed edition of the

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Novum Instrumentum, the first edition of Erasmus' New Testament.

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And I hesitate to say Erasmus' Greek New Testament, that's normally how it would be described to you. But Erasmus has been one of my sort of pet projects over the years.

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Read a lot more books about Erasmus than probably you should. But his first edition, he was not really focused on the

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Greek. The Greek was a sort of an afterthought. It was just sort of a really cool idea to have a diglot, a two -language text, where on the one page you have the

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Latin, the facing page you have the Greek. His focus was on providing a new

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Latin translation, which he knew was going to get him into a lot of trouble. Because by this point in time, the

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Vulgate had reigned supreme for over a thousand years. And you don't tamper with what's been being used for a thousand years.

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But as we're going to see in a moment, Erasmus had come to understand that the

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Vulgate had experienced corruption over its transmission. And so he provided a fresh

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Latin translation. And then in the process, just sort of threw the Greek in. Well, by the third edition, the

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Greek was now the focus of all the controversy, rather than just an afterthought.

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But it was having that Greek and Latin available to you that was one of the key issues for Luther in Luther's own studying of, for example, the concept of repentance.

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Being able to see punitentium agitate in Latin over here and metanoia over here, and be able to look it up and go, hmm, don't mean quite the same things, you know.

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Vitally important, vitally important. So printing had to exist beforehand to provide some of the, you know,

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Zwingli needed to have his Greek and Hebrew texts. And Calvin needed to have his stuff. And there needed to be, you know, printing already in existence.

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And then the utilization of printing in the promulgation of that text.

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As you know, you know, I went to the Gutenberg Museum. It was the last stop we did on our tour back in September.

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And I didn't take the tour. You might say, why? Well, first of all, I was pretty toured out by then, okay?

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I mean, we had been doing this for quite some time, and I was just toured out.

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And so I should do it. Maybe I will do it someday. But I did have a good reason.

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I was searching for a German bookstore to buy a German Bible for our

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Muslim bus drivers. So I did have a good reason for why I was doing it. I did find one eventually, even though, oh, such a secular state.

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You know, I walk into this large two -story bookstore, and I ask for a

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Luther Bible. And these poor ladies behind the counter are like, a what?

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You know? And it may have been my German's that bad, but I don't think it was.

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And they weren't even having to figure out what I was saying in English. I was speaking German. So still, it's like, oh, religious stuff.

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Oh, there's a religious section upstairs over to that side. And you can just tell they have a lot of people coming in asking for Bibles there, you know?

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And I picked up the Bible and, you know, blown the dust off. Sad. But anyway, so it would have been interesting because I know the invention of the movable block type print, fascinating.

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Gutenberg used a mirror to do his typesetting, because you have to typeset it backwards, obviously. And so he developed the idea of using a mirror and stuff.

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And I even did see they have a little place you can go over and you can put on a printer's thing, and you can set type and print stuff in the whole nine yards.

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And so I'm sure it's quite interesting. But anyways, in 1455, the

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Bible was printed at Mainz at 1 ,282 pages long.

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And up until that point, the whole process was a closely guarded secret.

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I mean, because it's sort of like, hey, I've got something here nobody else has got, and nobody else has figured it out. So I'm going to get, you know, I'm going to get myself rich here.

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The problem is, but Mainz was sacked the next year. And they broke into the print shop and stole everything and spread the technology all over Europe.

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So much for thinking you were going to get rich. But anyways, as we all probably already know, the invention of printing in this form was one of the most important developments in Western history.

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There's no question about it. The ability to communicate quickly, to print quickly, very, very quickly, the church and state are developing what eventually we call the

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Index Prohibitorum, the index of prohibited books. Rome would develop that after the

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Reformation, and of course, all Luther's books would be on it, and so on and so forth. And then you get book burning.

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Now, book burning had been happening before the invention of printing. The fires just got a lot bigger afterwards because you had a whole lot more to burn than you had initially.

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And so it's hard to overestimate the impact that printing had.

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We have lived in a time period in our own lives of a similar revolution, however, and that is obviously the invention of the

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Internet by Al Gore. And so that particular invention has revolutionized things,

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I think, in a very similar way to the way the printing press did, with one difference.

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And that is, it seems to me that the invention of printing led to a greater literacy, whereas the invention of the

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Internet has led, I think, to a tremendous diminishment of the attention span of most adults, and hence,

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I think, to a diminishment in literacy. Because I don't think being able to read a meme is literacy.

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And if memes tell me anything, most of them can't spell for their lives, even with spell -checking software.

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I mean, I cannot believe how many times I've looked at a meme, and the point was funny, but it was completely ruined by the fact that the person who produced it could not spell basic English words.

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And it wasn't because they were trying to be funny, either. It's just they didn't know. And it's just sad. So while the modern

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Internet has the potentiality of advancing literacy, it seems that because of its form, more often it produces a shallow substitute for literacy.

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I don't think you read as much because of it than we did when we actually read books, real, whole books, things like that.

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So just my thought on that. Now, obviously, associated with this, the next issue, the

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Renaissance. Now, the Renaissance, many people would say the

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Renaissance contained within it the very seeds of what we now see happening in Europe today. And in a sense, it's true.

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The wild -eyed secularism, the insanity that we see around us in transgenderism, things like that, can that be traced in some fashion back to the

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Renaissance? Well, I suppose so. You can trace almost anything back if you really want to work hard enough at it.

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But are there seeds of the coming humanism and secularism within Renaissance thought?

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Well, I suppose. I don't think it had to be that way, but you could say that.

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It is interesting to recognize that the world was changing, and something was going to happen.

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There was going to be some kind of change in European society. It could not remain the primarily rural, agrarian, feudal, the

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Pope controls everything type of a situation. You know that in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovers a new world.

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The medieval world was coming apart at the seams. Nationalism was on the rise.

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Very important to recognize why that's important. Why would nationalism being on the rise be relevant to the

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Reformation? Real simple. When Tetzel is selling his indulgences in Saxony, under people's breath, you had people saying, well, why can't that money stay in Germany and build cathedrals in Germany and help

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German Christians rather than going to Italy to build Italian cathedrals?

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Now, up until the rise of nationalism, you had basically had the idea that people were citizens of the

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Holy Roman Empire first and foremost, and then you might be in the

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German area or an Italian area or something like that, but the idea of being a

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German first and having that as an identity marker, this was something that was again important in the rise of the

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Reformation. Travel was increasing. Remember during the medieval period, average person never traveled more than seven miles any one direction from where they were born.

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That's a pretty small world. Very, very small world. I remember my parents commenting back when we lived in Pennsylvania that we would actually meet people in Pennsylvania who had never left the valley in which they lived between the various ranges of the

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Appalachians. And I mean, so those mountains defined the world for them.

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And we always found that so strange because my parents always wanted to travel and stuff like that and see other things.

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And so travel was increasing. With that came knowledge of new places. There was also a fascinating concentration of very dynamic, important personalities at this point in history.

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In the year 1500, Leonardo da

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Vinci was 45 years old. Christopher Columbus was 45 years old. Machiavelli was 31.

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Copernicus was 27. Erasmus of Rotterdam was 33. Michelangelo was 25.

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Raphael, that's actually a painter for those of you who grew up with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Actually, most of these,

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I need to define those because you're a little confused right now. Raphael was 17.

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Luther was 17. Zwingli was 17. And Calvin would be born in 1509.

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So that's quite a list of individuals who have had a massive impact upon Western society.

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And they're all alive at the same time, except for Calvin. He's the second generation, but right afterwards.

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There was also at this time a shift in economic distribution. Very important was the development of a middle class.

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That middle class had begun to develop for a couple different reasons. The Crusades, when you had a bunch, a bunch, a bunch of people leave, including knights and people like that, and maybe not come back, their lands would frequently end up being distributed amongst a wider number of people.

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And then very, very importantly, something we've talked about before, the Black Death, which by the way, they did not ever describe it as the

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Black Death. It was called the Great Mortality between 1347 and 1354.

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Primarily 1348, 1351 was the primary period of that incredible thing.

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When I was in seminary, my church history professor said that one out of every three people in Europe died during that time period.

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I purchased a few books last year, again in preparation for the, for the, actually it was last year, in preparation for the trip over to Germany and the tour we did over there.

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And the more modern books I was very interested in seeing tend to say that number is the low end.

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That probably across Europe it was 45 to 50 percent, and in many of the major cities as much as 75 percent.

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So let's take one out of every two. That's a huge number of people to die within about three years.

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And just run the numbers in your mind. If there was

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X amount of wealth in Europe in 1346, and there is now one half

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X number of people in 1352, everybody's got twice as much as they did before.

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And especially laborers. You know, you may still be rich, you may still be in nobility or something like that.

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Maybe you could hide out, you know, in a high mountain castle and keep away from it, but you still have to have people work your land and bring in your crops and fix your walls.

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And all of a sudden there's half as many of them as there used to be, which means they can get paid a whole lot more because the guy next down the road gets into a bidding war with you as to who gets the workers.

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And so between travel, there was also very interestingly,

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I only mention this in passing because of what we face today all the time, but the 1200s, the 13th century, the 1200s were a good century for mankind in the sense that there was, and we've been able to prove this with tree ring studies and stuff like that, there was global warming.

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And it had nothing to do with man. That just happens on its own. There's this thing up in the sky, it's real hot, and it goes through cycles and just sort of works that way.

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And so it got so warm. Well, there's a reason why it's called

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Greenland, but it's not green anymore. The arable, cultivatable, profitable area of crop growing in Europe went a good bit north.

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And everyone's, you know, up until the modern period where you have this utter ignorance of history, people knew this for a long time.

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I mean, I was in seminary in the 80s, and my professor mentioned this, it's been well known that there are a number of, for example, cities in northern

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England and Scotland that are named in such a way that had to do with vineyards and the growing of crops that you can't grow there anymore.

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But they once did. It's etched in the walls. So there was a time when it was considerably warmer than it is even now.

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Can you imagine what it was like in Phoenix then? That's why there wasn't a city here. They were smarter than we are.

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Yeah, good. They didn't have Palo Verde back then to run all the air conditioners.

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So when you can plant more crops, guess what?

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You get more people. And so there is a population boom because you've got enough food to,

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I mean, that's the big issue, is food. And so going into the 1300s, things are looking pretty good, except that it cooled off again.

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And all of a sudden, those fields that had started producing less and less and less, it's getting colder and colder and colder.

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And a lot of people have theorized that part of the reason for the great mortality in the middle of that century can be related to the degradation of the food supply and the bringing on of the cold weather and so on and so forth.

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And so that is a fascinating thing to observe as well that is normally not mentioned by anybody.

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So the point is you get a middle class. And when you get a middle class, a couple of things start developing as a result.

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You get banking because the middle class has money. They want to do something with it. And so banking as an industry begins to develop, especially in Italy, but it spreads from there.

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And you then have as well, very importantly, the beginning of the spread of universities.

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You had had the first universities in the 1100s in Europe, and now these begin to spread out from the major cities like Paris.

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And you get larger and larger numbers of universities. The more universities you have, the more opportunity for education, scholarship, research, study of the heavens, study of biology, the whole nine yards begins as you're coming out of those dark ages.

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And so as you know, well, you may know, those universities are very often a hotbed of new ideas.

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I mean, we'll look at it today. They're not hotbeds of new ideas anymore. You can only have one idea in our universities anymore, and that's whatever

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Karl Marx tells you. But for many centuries, that's where innovation would come from.

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And of course, at the Reformation, the church recognized that it was the universities that were of such great danger.

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That's where the bad stuff was coming from, and they knew that that was a problem.

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Then you have the rise of humanism. And obviously for us, humanism is a bad word.

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Secular humanism is almost swearing at somebody in our context.

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But it was part of the Renaissance movement. Italian humanism was at the center of the movement.

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And the great cry of ancient humanism was ad fontes, ad fontes, to the sources, to the source, literally.

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And so humanism at this time did not emphasize human autonomy against God.

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All the humanists of this time period would have been Christians in the sense of an acknowledgment of the supernatural, so on and so forth.

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But humanism emphasized study, scholarship, and the reading of the original languages over against simply repeating what

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Peter Lombard's sentences said from the Middle Ages. So it was sort of a reaction against the cold, stilted scholasticism that we had looked at before.

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It was not primarily a denial of the supernatural. The seeds of today's humanism, however, were definitely present at this time, and you can draw some pretty straight lines over time back to this time period.

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Now, two of the individuals that we'll look at briefly, well, we'll just look at one now and start on the other.

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We're not going to be finishing this morning, but fascinating fellow that you've probably, how many of you can honestly say that you have ever heard of Lorenzo Vala, V -A -L -L -A,

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Lorenzo Vala? Mike, are you saying yes? No? Oh, okay. Brother Callahan?

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Huh? You heard it when you were in school. That's a good place to hear it. That's a good place to hear it. You owe a lot to Lorenzo Vala, whether you know it or not.

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It's one of the things I like about teaching history is you start finding out some of the people in the past that you owe things to and didn't even know you owed it to.

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And I think there's something good about us moderns when we start realizing how much we owe to people who came before us.

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We tend to think we did this all on our own. We didn't. To this time, anachronism.

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Remember, we've talked about anachronism. I've mentioned to you five, six times in the course of this study that during the medieval period, if you look at the artwork, especially artwork depicting biblical scenes,

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David will be riding on a horse, and he's riding to a castle, and he's wearing armor, and he's got knights because that's what kings do.

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And if you don't travel more than seven miles from where you're born, if you don't ever go to Rome and go, hey, those people look different than their old statues, you end up thinking everything's always been the way it is now.

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And Lorenzo Vala was one of those individuals that had a capacity that very few of us have, and that was to think outside of the strictures of his particular time frame in history.

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And Vala recognized that things had changed, that things were changing.

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He was a literary critic, and he would look at ancient works and go, uh, that couldn't have been written back then.

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So for example, he proved that the great donation of Constantine, upon which papal authority was based, the idea that Constantine had donated the city of Rome to the papacy, this donation of Constantine had been viewed as, here's proof.

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The emperor gave Rome to the papacy. He proved it was, in fact, a forgery.

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Now, of course, today everyone recognizes that. But in that day, this was a good way to guarantee you're going to find yourself bound to a bunch of wood and lit up like a match.

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It really was. Didn't matter whether you were right or wrong. This was dangerous stuff.

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But Vala proved the donation of Constantine was, in fact, a forgery. In his ad notations in novum testamentum, notes in the

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New Testament, he compared the current text of Latin Vulgate, and here's the thing, this is brilliant when you think about it.

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Everybody knew who had translated the Vulgate, the great Jerome. And so I don't know if Vala's just sitting around one day, sipping a

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Pepsi or something like that, but talk about anachronism. But he goes, you know, the

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Vulgate has been copied and copied and copied and copied, generation after generation of generation for 1 ,100 years.

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Well, 1 ,000 years. You know, there's a lot of opportunities for change and stuff like that there.

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But you know what hasn't been copied over and over and over and over and over again would be Jerome's commentaries. They're not nearly as popular.

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I mean, they've been copied a few times, but they're not like the Vulgate. So I bet that if I go back to Jerome's commentaries,

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I'll be able to find what he originally wrote and compare it with what's in the

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Vulgate and see if there's been changes. Well, golly, Bob, he was right. He found numerous changes in the text of the

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Latin Vulgate in comparison to Jerome's commentaries. Now, who would have thought of that? Well, a smart guy did.

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And that was Lorenzo Vala. Now, like I said, this was dangerous.

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So he never published his work. What's it like to write all your stuff down, discover all this stuff and go, well,

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I know that's true. But nobody else does. And I ain't stupid enough to tell him.

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You know, I like my own skin well too well. And so he just hid that stuff away and shared it with one or two friends he could trust.

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But he wasn't going to go to print with this because he wanted to live a nice long life.

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Well, he died in 1457. And these two never met.

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But the reason most of us know about Lorenzo Vala is because the next guy we look at, which we're not going to finish in two minutes,

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I can assure you, because, again, we owe a lot to him. And I could probably end up telling you more about him than you ever wanted to know.

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And that is a fellow by the name of Desiderius Erasmus, born approximately 1466.

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So he dies within a decade, approximately. It was born about a decade after Vala.

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And he dies in 1536. And he's called the

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Prince of the Humanists. And the primary reason we even know about Vala is that Erasmus was rummaging around in a library, which is what scholars in those days did.

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They didn't sit there with a computer googling stuff. They didn't sit there running databases and doing bibliographical ransacking on a glowing screen, which is what we do today.

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I mean, that's what I'm doing. I mean, when I find a good book in the textual critical area, you go to the bibliography, you start going, oh, got to get that one.

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Oh, got to get, you know, that's, you know, didn't have that ability. Didn't even have a card catalog back then.

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Remember card catalogs? Anyone remember card catalogs? Oh, yeah, whoo -hoo. If you don't remember card catalogs, you're a young 'un.

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Man, that was the Google of my age. You know, pull that baby out and dee -dee -dee -dee -dee.

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Wasn't that fun? It just made you feel so scholarly. Anyway, that was doing hard work.

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That was doing the real research back then. He's rummaging through old manuscripts.

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And he runs across this guy named Lorenzo Valla. And he starts reading what

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Lorenzo Valla had to say. And he's like, whoa. And so Erasmus was evidently considerably braver than Valla was, because it didn't take long for Erasmus to publish

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Valla's works, figuring he can always blame Valla. So he doesn't, he can't get burned.

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The worst thing he can do is dig up Valla's bones and burn them. So he doesn't figure Valla could care less any longer.

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He's been gone for a while. So that's how Valla's works end up being published, is

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Erasmus digs them out of a library and goes hoo -hoo -hoo. And he's deeply influenced by that.

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And what's very important is that idea of recognizing how textual transmission changed over time is going to end up influencing why there are certain verses in your

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King James Version of the Bible that are not in your ESV. Now the rubber's starting to meet the road, because Erasmus is going to have the biggest influence upon the production of what is today called the

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Textus Receptus, which is the Greek text upon which the

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King James Version of the Bible was based. And believe it or not, to this last summer on this very issue.

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So it remains something that's relevant to us even to this day. So we will, for those of you taking notes, pick up with Erasmus on our next study.

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Okay? All right, let's close the word part. Father, once again, we are thankful for the freedom that we have had to consider your actions in the past.

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And as we get closer to our time period, we would ask that you help us to remember and to recognize that we have been given so much.

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We have been influenced so heavily by those who've come before us. It's important for us to understand these things, to recognize your hand of providence in all things as well.