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--by Kenneth J. Ross

On March 7, 1516, Desiderius Erasmus (ca. 1469–1536)—Renaissance humanist, Catholic reformer, and Dutch educator—wrote to a friend with great relief from Basel, Switzerland, that the printing of his Greek New Testament was at last complete. It was, he later admitted, “more thrown together than edited,” but even so he had a right to be pleased. A decade of research and nearly a year of hard labor had produced the first printed edition of the New Testament in its original language. The foundational document of the Christian Church at...