TEMP - For Analysis - 2 of the 3 pages that are at Brill Online
Grantley McDonald
Biblical Criticism in Early Modem Europe: Erasmus, thejohannine Comma and Trinitarian Debate (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), Pp. xvii-384.
McDonald’s monograph, a revised version of his 2011 Leiden PhD, offers the first comprehensive treatment of debates over the
Comma Iohanneum (1 John 5:7-8) from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. Erasmus features prominently in the subtitle, one of his portraits by Holbein adorns the cover-and he is indeed a major connecting thread in this long, transnational, and transdenominational story. As McDonald demonstrates,
controversies over the Johannine comma usually involved discussions of Erasmus’ reasons, first, for omitting it in his 1516 and 1519 editions of the New Testament, and, then, for restoring it in 1522 on the basis of a single English manuscript, the so-called
Codex Montfortianus. McDonald’s study of the quest for, rediscovery and identification of, this manuscript is especially illuminating. Nevertheless, one may disagree with McDonald’s argument that ‘making the character of early editors into the primary criterion for the soundness of their editions’ was tantamount to 'undermin[ing] the value of philological method’(238). For most readers—unable to examine manuscripts for themselves-the authority of a printed edition necessarily came down to the
fides of the editor: a notion combining his moral trustworthiness as well as his scholarly abilities (‘candor’ (238), was a word much used in this context). Summarizing the arguments of the lawyer Roger North in this regard in a letter of 1713, McDonald rightly speaks of ‘a pact of authority and trust’ (200). Useful parallels, however, could have been drawn with contemporary controversies over alleged falsifications in patristic editions, using, for instance, the work of
Pierre Petitmengin.
For most of the book, when McDonald deals with early modern history, he appears
in full command of an impressive range of primary sources. He does not confine himself to theological controversies, but also considers biblical editions (in Greek, Latin, and oriental languages), vernacular translations, liturgical books, and catechisms. His account is lucid and generally balanced, despite an
occasional proclivity to value judgments (see e.g.,
122 on Stillingfleet; 127-128 on ‘the disappointingly low intellectual level’ of William Howell’s Oxford university sermon; 158 on Thomas Smith). McDonald pays consistently close attention to the political, social, and cultural contexts of scholarly debates. There are only a few minor
mistakes. ‘The 1586
Index expurgatorius’ (81) is actually a Protestant pirated edition of the 1571 Belgian Index, prepared under the direction of Benito Arias Montano and published by Christophe Plantin-- one of the clearest instances of the connection between scholarship and censorship in the sixteenth century. The expurgation of Erasmus’ work had been entrusted to the Divinity Faculty of Louvain
.1 Moreover, this 1586 edition ‘apud loannem Mareschallum Lugdunensem’ was published not in Lyon (bibliography, 347) but in Heidelberg, where Jean Mareschal was a religious exile.
2 The Jablonski who informed Friedrich Ernst Kettner about
codex Ravianus was the famous Daniel Ernst Jablonski, ‘Potentissimi Regis Borussiae Prot-Ecclesiasta Aulicus’, not his son Paul Ernst, who was still a student at the time (185 and index s.v)
.3
Had McDonald ended his account around 1800, with the controversy between Travis and Porson (266-276), his book would have been a first-rate study of the relations between philology and theology in early modern Europe and of the textual construction of religious orthodoxy-and deserved the highest praise. Unfortunately,
the final chapter on 'the long nineteenth century’ does not maintain quite the same level of excellence. The section on the modernist crisis in the Catholic Church (300-311) is sketchy, more appropriate to a student textbook than a research monograph. To describe Duchesne as ‘the modernist Louis Duchesne’ (304) is a gross simplification. More egregiously, a figure as major as the Dominican Marie-Joseph Lagrange, founder of the
École biblique in Jerusalem, who was deeply distressed by the 1897 decree of the Holy Office on
comma lohanneum (see the authoritative biography by Bernard Montagnes, who quotes from Lagrange’s
Souvenirs and his spiritual diary) is omitted entirely. So, too, the enormous secondary literature on modernism is largely ignored. There is not a single reference to the work of the late
Émile Poulat--widely regarded as the greatest authority on the subject.
4 An original, not terribly difficult, contribution would have been to consult the archives of the Holy Office--which had remained closed to scholars of Poulat’s generation--in order to shed light on the 1897 decree: was it indeed meant, as has been surmised, to ‘intimidate’ exegetes on the eve of the International Catholic Scientific Congress in Fribourg?
5 McDonald seems to have made no attempt to do so. Opting for a very broad chronology is now fashionable: I cannot help thinking that, in the present instance, it was somewhat over-ambitious.
In both his introduction and his short conclusion, McDonald claims that the Johannine comma is still a living issue;
its genuineness is virulently maintained in conservative evangelical circles, especially on the Internet. ‘In a poll taken on the website puritanboard.com, nearly half the respondents replied that they believe the comma to be a genuine part of Scripture’ (9). One can understand McDonald’s eagerness to show the relevance of his study (314)— although he might have specified that, in the poll in question, the number of respondents totalled sixty, twenty-nine of whom replied that the comma ‘is Scripture’ (
https://www.puritanboard.com/threads/johannine-comma.37481/, accessed by McDonald in January 2016, by this reviewer in July 2017). Such attitudes are no doubt of interest for a cultural anthropology of fundamentalism, yet one wonders whether they should be regarded as a continuation of the story that McDonald so well told for the early modern period, when defenders of the comma were central, eminently legitimate figures. As late as 1900, a prestigious public ‘intellectual’ like
Ferdinand Brunetière, member of the
Académie française , was confident he could demonstrate the genuineness of the comma
.6 Although the discourse of Internet evangelicals may reach the same conclusion, it certainly does not enjoy the same cultural and social authority. Is there not a point when a position has moved so much out of the mainstream that the discussion is actually settled?
Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont, the great Jansenist critic of the late seventeenth century, certainly believed so: ‘ce seroit perdre le temps’, he insisted, ‘que de l’employer a examiner ces pieces, qui sont rejettees generalement par toutes les personnes un peu habiles’.
7 An
anonymous German reviewer quoted by McDonald made this point about the comma as early as 1785 (258). This was an important
epistemological breakthrough: the introduction of the idea of progress in philological criticism.
1 See
Index expurgatorius librorum (Antwerp, 1571), 99; J. M. de Bujanda,
Index des livres interdits, vii.
Index d'Anvers 1569,1570,1571 (Sherbrooke-Geneva, 1988), 825: G. Van Calster, ‘
La censure louvaniste du Nouveau Testament et la rédaction de l'index érasmien expurgatoire de 1571’, in
Scrinium Erasmianum, cd. J. Coppens (Leiden, 1969), 2:379-436, at 409 and 430 for the
comma Johanneum). These would have been more topical references than those given n. 46.
2 See e.g., Wilhelm Port,
Hieronymus Commelinus, 1550-1597.
Leben und Werk eines Heidelberger Drucker-Verlegers (Leipzig, 1938), 12,14, 37; Eugénie Droz, ‘Fausscs adresses typographiques (Suite)’,
Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 23 (1961), 380-386; Georges Bonnant, ‘Les
Index prohibitifs et expurgatoires contrefaits par des protestants au xvi* et au xvii* siècle’,
Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 31 (1969), 630.
3 Friedrich Ernst Kettner,
Historia dicti Johannei de Sanctissima Trinitate, I. Joh. cap. V. vers. 7. (Francfort and Leipzig, 1713), 206.
4 Even his dissertation
, Histoire, dogme et critique dans la crise moderniste (1962,3rd cdn. 1996) is not mentioned: on the comma, see 130, 239, 255.
5 B. Montagnes,
Marie-Joseph Lagrange: une biographie critique (Paris, 2004), 148-149.
6 Alfred Loisy,
George Tyrrell et Henri Bremond (Paris, 1936), 98.
7
Memoires pour servir à i’histoire ecclesiastique des six premiers siecles, 7 (Paris, 1700), 268.
Jean-Louis Quantin
Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sorbonne, 45-47 rue des Ecoles,
F-75005 Paris, France
jean-louis.quantin@ephe.sorbonne.fr