August 2006

Parish History Episode 64 - The New Learning

Robert Kent, Rector of Houghton-le- Spring from 1500 to 1528, was, as we have seen, the first rector of this parish to have had the benefit of a university education. He was also, we may reasonably assume, the first Rector of Houghton to have had any knowledge of the Greek language, the language in which the New Testament had first been written down, but a language with which the Church in Western Europe had long since lost touch.

It had not always been thus. Many of the more learnèd monks in the Anglo- Saxon monasteries of Northumbria had possessed Greek texts of the Bible and of patristic literature, and had been able to read them. But all that learning had been swept away, in England and in other lands, by the Viking invaders.

Eventually, with the Norman Conquest, peace and stability returned once more, but, although many of the Norman bishops and churchmen were scholars and theologians, their reading was confined to the Latin tongue alone.

In the High Middle Ages thinkers at the universities arising in such cities as Naples, Bologna, Padua, Paris and Oxford had, with some help from Jewish and Arab scholars, progressed from the study of the Latin classics, which had never been entirely lost, to the discovery of the wisdom of the ancient Greek philosophers, much of which had survived only in Arabic translation. But though they knew that Greek monks possessed copies of the Scriptures in their own, Greek, language, they at first saw it as simply a local curiosity, a necessity for them, perhaps, because those monks had never acquired a knowledge of Latin, and so were unable to study Scripture in the authorised version, that of the Latin Vulgate.

But in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries a few Western scholars were coming to appreciate that the original languages of the Bible were Hebrew and Greek, and that Jerome’s Vulgate, however good a translation, was but a translation. They attempted to acquire a knowledge of the languages of Scripture, and as they pored over old texts, they began to be aware that there were major differences between the Faith of the New Testament Church, as witnessed by the Epistles, and the practices of the Church of their own time. They even began to discover that there were possible variations in the text in the original languages, as more and more Greek texts became available, helped by the flight of Greek scholars before the advance of Islam in the East. The Turks captured Constantinople in 1453 and Trebizond in 1461, thus acquiring control of the two most important fragments of the former Byzantine Empire; and, one by one, the Eastern possessions of the Genoese and the Venetian trading empires, and of the Knights of St. John, were being absorbed into the Turkish Empire.

The flight of these Greek scholars may have helped to condemn their own nation to four centuries of servitude, but the manuscript Bibles they brought with them were eagerly sought after by the schoolmen of the West, who compared their newly purchased Greek manuscripts with their Vulgate Bibles, and at first they enthused over their good fortune to possess at last the very words spoken by Jesus or written by Paul.

Of course, they soon reflected that the words of the Lord had been spoken in Aramaic, so the Greek texts of the Gospels in front of them were only a translation, an interpretation, of the words of Jesus, but still they had been written down during the first century of Christianity, by men who, it was assumed, had heard Jesus speak.

When such men as our Rector Kent came to read these Greek texts, they began to note that the Biblical warrant for all sorts of practices and beliefs which they had from child-hood taken for granted was rather sparse. By the time of Kent’s death in 1528, it seemed that every pillar of the temple of faith was being shaken if not thrown down.

Men queried the doctrine of the Trinity; the place of Mary, the mother of Jesus, in the devotional life of the Church; the invocation of the saints; the cult of relics; the value of indulgences; the use of “works” and of acquired merit in avoiding time in Purgatory, and in gaining access to Heaven; the very existence of Purgatory; the point of prayer, fasting and pilgrimages; the authority of the Papacy; the authority, for that matter, of the parish priest; the doctrine of transubstantiation; the sacrificial nature of the Mass; the validity of infant baptism; the efficacy and legitimacy of the other sacraments; and the necessity for almost every other type of rite and ceremony.

It might be asked whether or not these doctrines and practices could be sustained from the text of the Vulgate. Broadly, the answer would have to be “No”. By this time, much of what Jerome had written, had come to be misunderstood. He was a good and accurate translator (from both Hebrew and Greek into Latin), though he possibly made a few, very few, errors. However, the words of Jerome’s Vulgate had become so fully incorporated into the offices of the Latin, or Western, Church, that those who read it, and who were familiar with the words of the Mass (as presumably all who read it would be), would assume that the liturgical phrases that they heard read every day meant exactly the same as what the original authors of the Holy Scriptures had intended.

Now these Greek texts of the New Testament (as also Hebrew texts of the Old) were becoming available to scholars, and these scholars were beginning to realise that what they were reading in these manuscripts was not quite the same as what they heard read out in church, at the celebration of the Mass. But the several Greek texts available differed, each from each other. How was one to know which text was correct?

Where was the man who could lead the World of Learning out of the quagmire which seemed to be looming before it? - who could give an authoritative judgment, and pronounce which text was correct?

In 1500, about the time that Robert Kent was being inducted as Rector of Houghton-le-Spring, just such a man stepped forward. He was Desiderius Erasmus, a monk of obscure background, who was becoming prominent as the foremost Biblical scholar of his age.

Erasmus had begun life as the illegitimate son of a lady of Rotterdam. When he was a few years old, she sent him away to be a boarding pupil at a school run by the Brethren of the Common Life, a stolid Dutch religious order, whose spiritual life tended towards common-sense rather than enthusiasm. Then, in 1486, when he was about seventeen years old, his mother managed to place him with the Augustinian Canons, perhaps as a penance for her own sin in conceiving him. He hated the life of a canon, finding it a mass of petty regulations, with no real spiritual meaning, and with no real understanding of the Latin texts that were repeated parrot-fashion at every Mass and office.

A good-hearted bishop eventually managed to have him, at his own request, laicised, and Erasmus went off to university, to study the Greek Scriptures. Paris, and soon won fame for his work in collating the texts, and working out the probable wording, of the original Greek manuscript versions of the Gospels and Epistles. He travelled from one centre of learning to another, spending much time at Paris, at Louvain, at various Italian universities, and at Oxford and Cambridge.

He soon came to have a particular affection for the English universities. This was partly because he met in England a prince who really seemed to understand and to appreciate what Erasmus was doing. That prince was Henry, Duke of York, the second son of King Henry VII.

Henry VII (Henry ap Tudor o Penmynydd) has been mentioned before. He was the grandson of Queen Catherine, who had by an earlier marriage been the wife of King Henry V, the hero of Agincourt. If that doesn’t sound like much of a title to the English Throne, it wasn’t. But he was ambitious, and a capable warrior, and that was more to the point. Living in exile in Brittany, he sought the approval and backing of the French king, Charles VIII, for an invasion of Wales and England, and in 1485 King Charles advanced him some money and men for the enterprise.

England had at that time been ruled by King Richard III for a couple of years. Richard was the brother of King Edward IV, the only king of the Yorkist dynasty to enjoy a comfortable and secure reign. Edward IV had achieved this comfort and security by eliminating all the members of the House of Lancaster whom he could find, together with Warwick “the Kingmaker”, who had been killed opposing Edward in the Battle of Barnet (1471). Then, in 1483, Edward IV died, leaving two sons; the older son, only thirteen years of age, was proclaimed as King Edward V, while the boy’s uncle, Duke Richard of Gloucester (brother to the late king) very kindly agreed to act as Regent and Protector for the lad. Richard protected the young king so well that, a few weeks after the death of Edward IV, he locked him up in the Tower of London, along with his younger brother, so that no·one could harm him. Then he proclaimed himself King as Richard III. The two boys were never seen alive again.

Richard III still has his admirers, who point out that there is no proof of Richard’s complicity in the boys’ murder (if it was murder that befell them). However, contemporary opinion appears to have thought otherwise. After all, three previous English kings - Edward II, Richard II and Henry VI - had, in the last two centuries, disappeared when in the hands of their enemies, and had never been heard of again : and nobody doubted what had happened to them. King Charles of France denounced King Richard as a scheming, bloody-handed regicide, and used that as an excuse for lending money to Henry Tudor to seize the English Throne.

In 1485 Henry killed Richard, at the Battle of Bosworth, and became king as Henry VII. He gradually established himself, and the new Tudor dynasty, firmly on the English Throne. His wife bore him two sons. The elder, Prince Arthur (possessing a name intended to appeal to both his Welsh and his English subjects), was betrothed to a Spanish princess, known to the English as Catherine of Aragon. It seemed that, with such an important match, the new House of Tudor had really arrived on the European social scene.

Prince Arthur was born to be king, and his interests lay in hunting and warfare. He was not the sort of prince whose conversation would be likely to interest Erasmus. But Arthur’s younger brother, Henry, was intended to “enter the Church”, and to become Archbishop of Canterbury. His tutors were learned theologians, and when Erasmus was presented at the English Court, and met the prince, he found Henry to be a man of almost as much learning as himself. Increasingly, Erasmus came to spend time in England, at London as well as at Oxford and Cambridge, and was much in the company of young Henry, as well as other great scholars, such as Thomas More, whom Henry was later to send to the block, to be one of the first of the Catholic martyrs of England.

All this time, Erasmus was working away at his great project, the establishment of an accurate Greek text of the New Testament, as near as possible to the very words written down by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Paul and James, Peter and Jude. It was finally sent to the printer’s in 1516. The following year, 1517, is the year from which the Reformation is traditionally dated.

Dick Toy

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