In 1516 Johann Froben, a printer in Basel, put on sale the first printed Greek New Testament to reach the market, with a new Latin translation beside it and notes showing where the Vulgate, the Latin Bible of the Western Church, had drifted from the Greek. Theologians attacked it almost at once. In the old Latin of Matthew, John the Baptist tells his hearers to do penance; in the new version he tells them to repent. And a verse in the First Letter of John, used to prove the Trinity, was missing, because the editor had found it in no Greek manuscript. That editor, Erasmus, held a doctorate in theology from Turin granted without the usual residence or examinations, and the professionals treated him as an intruder: Noël Beda, the leading theologian at Paris, dismissed him as a humanist dabbling in theology. Erasmus answered that restoring a text was work for philologists, and that no degree was needed for it.
The edition stood at the centre of an argument he made for the rest of his life, in satire, schoolbooks, treatises and letters. Christianity, he held, had sunk into ceremonies and into the hair-splitting of the schools, and the way back led to the sources: the Gospels, the letters of Paul and the early Fathers, read in their own languages and then put into practice. He called the result the philosophia Christi, the philosophy of Christ, and meant a way of life open to anyone, not a university subject. He wished every woman would read the Gospel, and that the farmer would sing it at his plough.
He reached that position through institutions that had failed him. The illegitimate son of a priest, orphaned in his teens, he was persuaded by his guardians to enter the Augustinian monastery at Steyn, near Gouda, and he later said he had been pushed into his vows. In 1495 his employer, the bishop of Cambrai, sent him to study theology in Paris, at the Collège de Montaigu, a college known for its harsh discipline. By his own account, the scholastic theology taught there repelled him, and he supported himself by tutoring wealthy young men. One of them, William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, took him to England in 1499. There John Colet, later dean of St Paul's, turned him toward the Bible, and the scholars William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre toward Greek.
The Manual of the Christian Knight (1503) told laymen that devotion lives in the heart, that fasts, pilgrimages and relics are worth nothing without the inner change they exist to serve, and that wearing a monk's habit makes no one devout. In Praise of Folly (1511), written in Thomas More's house in London, made the same case as a joke in the mouth of Folly, and when critics protested, Erasmus replied that the two books had one subject. In advice to princes he urged rulers to take their quarrels to arbitration rather than to war.
Then the Reformation began. Contemporaries took Erasmus for Martin Luther's forerunner, and a saying went round that Erasmus had laid the egg and Luther hatched it. He had attacked many of the same abuses, but he wanted the Church reformed, not divided, and for years he refused to take a side. In 1524, reluctantly, he published On Free Will. Its method was his own: he set the passages of Scripture for and against free will side by side, found that they did not settle the question, admitted that he would gladly suspend judgement like the ancient sceptics, and deferred to the Church, which affirmed free will. Luther replied in The Bondage of the Will (1525) that the Holy Spirit is no sceptic. When Basel went over to the Reformation in 1529, Erasmus moved to Catholic Freiburg; two years later the theology faculty at Paris condemned passages from his works as unorthodox.
In 1559 the first papal Index of Prohibited Books banned everything he had written. His Greek text, revised in four further editions, had meanwhile become the basis of the New Testaments of Luther and of William Tyndale, the English Bible translator, and later of the King James Bible. Enlightenment readers claimed him as a forerunner of reason, and twentieth-century readers as a man of peace. Scholars still disagree about whether his thought amounts to a philosophy, and about whom among the ancients it owes most to: Plato, Epicurus, the Stoics or the sceptics. The historian Richard Popkin dated the revival of scepticism in modern Europe to the quarrel over free will.