Bible of John Calvin

Calvin demonstrated familiarity with Erasmus’s Greek New Testament and his New Testament Paraphrases[1], which served as a primary resource for his exegetical work. For the Greek Testament, scholars of Calvin’s era had access to multiple editions: Erasmus’s five editions (Basel, 1516–35), the Complutensian Polyglot (1520), Colinaeus (Paris, 1534), and Stephens (Paris and Geneva, 1546–51)[2].

Beyond the Greek New Testament itself, Calvin’s interpretive framework drew from a rich tradition of earlier sources. In his commentaries on Paul’s letters, Calvin showed acquaintance with earlier commentary writers including Origen, “Ambrosiaster,” Jerome, and Augustine—both Augustine’s Expositio Quarundam Propositionum ex Epistula ad Romanos (his 84 sets of short exegetical comments on Romans 5–9) and his Epistulae ad Romanos Inchoata Expositio (his aborted commentary on Romans 1:1–7), as well as Augustine’s many other comments throughout his writings[1]. Calvin also knew well contemporary commentaries on Romans by Melanchthon, Bullinger, and Bucer[1].

Calvin applied the methods of humanistic scholarship to the Bible to discover the exact meaning of words in a text and the circumstances of the history involved[3]. This methodological approach, combined with his access to Erasmus’s Greek editions and the patristic tradition, enabled him to produce commentaries that had vast circulation and remain of great use[3] even today.

Footnotes

[1] Richard N. Longenecker, Paul, Apostle of Liberty (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2015), 312–313.

[2] Philip Schaff and David Schley Schaff, History of the Christian Church (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), 8:529.

[3] R. S. Wallace, “Calvin, John (1509–64),” in New Dictionary of Theology: Historical and Systematic, ed. Martin Davie et al. (London; Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press; InterVarsity Press, 2016), 144.