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When the sixteenth-century reformers formulated sola scriptura they did so in a context of both curiosity and consternation over the Bible. Gillian Evans, in her instructive Problems of Authority in the Reformation Debates,1 commented that '[i]t is a supreme irony that it was at the time when Scriptura sola became a reforming slogan that it became unprecedentedly difficult to point unequivocally to the Sacred Page and say, "That is Holy Scripture"'.2 For all their gains, the humanists who laboured over scripture incurred a host of questions. Which manuscripts are reliable? What is the relationship between the original languages and the Vulgate translation? Is it legitimate to emend the Vulgate on the basis of textual criticism? The Greek New Testament and Hebrew Old Testament? What of the stylistically rude aspects of New Testament Greek? Could a scholar point out a flaw in a biblical author's verbiage? In short, humanist scholars struggled to understand the nature of scripture in light of their new skills. The net effect of this, as Evans argues, was a challenge to the nature of biblical authority.
To Evans's conclusions must be added the fine work of Erika Rummel, particularly her detailed article 'Biblical Scholarship: Humanist Innovators and Scholastic Defenders of Tradition'3 on the fierce debates between humanists and scholastics. This article furthers and complements Evans's discoveries. While it does not focus on the authority of scripture as such, it contains important insights about scripture's sixteenth-century status. Rummel explains that humanists who used philology to study scripture were considered dangerous and rebellious: '[B]iblical humanists were frequently accused of being "lovers of innovation", a charge that carried historical ballast and put them in a class with plotting revolutionaries and political assassins'. 4 The 'epithets "bold" and "presumptuous" feature prominently in the traditionalists' descriptions of efforts to correct Scripture'.5 Scholastics dubbed humanist philology 'a shadow power' and believed that 'the real power of rendering judgment was vested in the theologian who held the magisterium'.6 The scholastics, then, worried about the humanist overthrow of tradition, while the humanists saw tradition as a barrier to the ancient truth. Ironically, both were interested in preserving the past.
In particular, scholastics felt humanists disparaged the venerable...