Erasmus's Novum Instrumentum Omne

For a thousand years, a European Christian who wanted to read the New Testament in its original Greek had to find a Greek manuscript and a reader willing to work through it by hand. Desiderius Erasmus changed that permanently in 1516, when the Basel printer Johann Froben published his edition of the Greek New Testament, the first ever to reach a printing press, alongside Erasmus's own new Latin translation and critical notes explaining his choices against the entrenched Vulgate text. The edition was, by Erasmus's own later admission, rushed: he worked from whatever Greek manuscripts he could find in Basel, a handful, none complete and none earlier than the tenth century, and where his sources ran out he simply translated the missing verses back into Greek from the Latin Vulgate, producing Greek readings found in no actual Greek manuscript at all.

The haste had a commercial motive. Erasmus and Froben knew that a rival edition, more careful and more thoroughly prepared, had already been printed in Spain under Cardinal Cisneros's direction and was awaiting papal approval before publication. Getting to market first mattered more, in that moment, than getting every reading right, and the first printing of Erasmus's edition consequently carried enough errors and inconsistencies that he spent several later editions correcting them, an imperfect start to a text that would nonetheless become the working basis for the Protestant Reformation's vernacular Bibles.

The story of the first printed Greek New Testament is really the story of two editions racing each other, only one of which is usually remembered as first. Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros's team at Alcala de Henares in Spain had finished printing their Greek and Latin New Testament, part of the larger Complutensian Polyglot Bible project, by 1514, two years before Erasmus's edition appeared. But the Polyglot could not be published, in the sense of being distributed and sold, until it received papal approval, and that approval did not arrive until 1520, with the completed multi-volume Bible not actually reaching readers until 1522.

Erasmus and his publisher had no such wait to endure, and his edition reached the market in 1516, four years ahead of the technically earlier Spanish work. Because printed availability rather than printing date is what determined which text scholars, reformers and translators actually used, Erasmus's hastily assembled edition, not Cisneros's more careful one, became the Greek New Testament of the Reformation, the direct ancestor of the Textus Receptus that underlies Tyndale's English New Testament, Luther's German Bible, and eventually the King James Version. Being technically second did nothing to prevent Erasmus's edition from effectively winning.