Robert D. Sider (edited), Erasmus on the New Testament, (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2020).

Mark Vessey (edited), Erasmus on Literature: His Ratio or “System” of 1518/1519, (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2021).

Erasmus was too good a humanist to live only in the past.

—P.S. Allen

The name of Erasmus will never perish.

—John Colet

Erasmus has published volumes more full of wisdom
than any which Europe has seen for ages.

—Thomas More

I am halfway through the Ratio Verae Theologiae of Erasmus, loving the clarity and balance of his Latin, his taste, his good sense, his evangelical teaching. If there had been no Luther, Erasmus would now be regarded by everyone as one of the great Doctors of the Catholic Church. I like his directness, his simplicity, and his courage. All the qualities of Erasmus, and other qualities besides, were canonized in Thomas More.                                                        

Thomas Merton

Erasmus has often not been treated the best in both 16th-century Reformation-Renaissance history, thought, and religion, or the centuries that followed. The Roman Catholic Church put his writings on the Index at Trent and many Protestants have uncritically bowed the knee to Luther’s rather volcanic and reactionary rebuttal to Erasmus’ Freedom of the Will (1524), in the rather feisty The Bondage of the Will (1525). Both Roman Catholics and Protestants, therefore, in the religious and culture wars of the 16^th century did not know how to cage this wild bird. Erasmus tended to transcend the tribalism of both the Roman Catholic and variations of Protestant clans and Sanhedrins. And yet it was Erasmus, more than anyone else, in his various translations and annotations of the New Testament, who raised substantive questions about serious mistranslations (and the theological-pastoral implications of them) of Jerome’s Vulgate. The main translations by Erasmus of the New Testament in 1516, 1519, 1522, 1527, and 1535 did, as the saying goes, lay the egg that Luther hatched. It was in these, increasingly so, translations, commentaries, and annotations that Erasmus distinguished himself as one of the most significant scholars of the first half of the 16^th century. The recent publications of Erasmus and the New Testament (2020) and Erasmus on Literature (2021) do need to be read together as companion tomes on Erasmus’ layered and nuanced approach in how to read, interpret and apply the text of the New Testament. In fact, both books walk the extra mile to highlight the all too obvious reality that Erasmus should not have been marginalized in his age and ethos or our context. But, it is to these two books worth the reviewing we now turn.