g was to more uniform and better texts: the next step forward
was no less important. To scholars content with the general sense of a
work, a translation might be as acceptable as the original. Improved
standards of accuracy led men to perceive that an author must be
studied in his own tongue: in order that no shade of meaning might be
lost. Here again the two periods are easily distinguished. Nicholas V
set his scholars, Poggio and Valla, to translate the Greeks, Herodotus
and Thucydides, Aristotle and Diodorus. The feature of the later epoch
is the number of Greek editions which came out to supplant the
versions in common use. The credit for this advance in critical
scholarship must be given to Aldus for his Greek Aristotle, which
appeared in 1495-9; and he subsequently led the way with numerous
texts of the Greek classics. At the same time he proposed to apply the
same principle to Biblical study. As early as 1499 Grocin in a letter
alludes to Aldus' scheme of printing the whole Bible in the original
'three languages', Hebrew, Greek and Latin; and a specimen was
actually put forth in 1501.

In this matter precedence might seem to lie with the Jewish printers,
who produced the Psalms in Hebrew in 1477, and the Old Testament
complete in 1488; but as the Jews never at any period ceased to read
their Scriptures in Hebrew, there was no question of recovery of an
original. Aldus did not live to carry his scheme out; and it was left
to Ximenes and the band of scholars that he gathered at Alcala, to
produce the first edition of the Bible complete in the original
tongues, the Complutensian Polyglott, containing the Hebrew side by
side with the Septuagint and the Vulgate, and for the Pentateuch a
Syriac paraphrase. The New Testament in this great enterprise was
finished in 1514, and the whole work was ready by 1517, shortly before
Ximenes' death. But as publication was delayed till 1522, the actual
priority rests with Erasmus, whose New Testament in Greek with a Latin
translation by himself appeared, as we have seen, in 1516.

Thus by an accident Germany gained the credit of being the first to
assert this new principle, the importance of studying texts in the
original, in the field where resistance is most resolute and victory
is hardly won. And now it was about to enter upon a still greater
contest. Erasmus' New Testament encountered hostile criticism in many
quarters: conservative theologians made common cause with the friar