Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Reformation of the Bible: The Bible of the Reformation: Catalog of the Exhibition by Valerie R. Hotchkiss and David Price, pp. 3-62. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996.

In the following excerpt, Pelikan discusses Bible translations during the Reformation, identifying the significant continuity between the Renaissance traditions of Christian humanism and the translation efforts of Reformation scholars. Hebrew text in this essay has been replaced by transliterations set within brackets.

Sacred Philology

The scholarly foundations for “the Reformation of the Bible” as well as for “the Bible of the Reformation” were laid by the principles and methods of what Paul Oskar Kristeller has called “sacred philology,”¹ which became the common property of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Mutatis mutandis, therefore, Anthony Grafton's description of most humanists in the Renaissance would apply also to many scholars in the Reformation: “The men who called themselves humanists...