March 1 came and went earlier this year, without much fanfare for more than the cacophony of current events vying for our attention. But that date marked the pentecentennial (March 1, 1516) of the book that changed the world—a book whose name is hardly known today. A Dutch scholar by the name of Desiderius Erasmus had worked night and day for several months with a famous publishing house in Basel to produce Novum Instrumentum omne—“a whole new instrument.” It was indeed a whole new instrument, a tool used by Luther and the Reformers to open up the New Testament to themselves and to all of Europe.It was indeed a whole new instrument, a tool used by Luther and the Reformers to open up the New Testament to themselves and to all of Europe.”
Why was this book so significant and what conditions allowed it to have this impact? It was the first published Greek New Testament. In 1453 Constantinople was overrun by the Ottomans, and the last vestige of the Roman Empire came crashing to an end. Monks and scribes fled to Europe before the fall and brought with them classical and biblical manuscripts, giving the Renaissance a shot in the arm and sparking the Reformation. In the very next year, Gutenberg invented the moveable-type printing press in Mainz, which resulted in the single greatest invention in book-production since the birth of the codex in the first century AD. A pent-up thirst for knowledge, left unquenched throughout the Dark Ages, began to get slaked. And Martin Luther capitalized on Erasmus’s publication, twenty months later fanning the flames of the Reformation in Wittenberg.
During Erasmus’s lifetime his Greek New Testament sold more than 300,000 copies! Over one thousand editions—some legal, some pirated—were eventually produced. This single publication not only gave birth to the Reformation but also was the initial catalyst for virtually all modern translations. It burst forth the dawn of modern biblical scholarship and began to break down the religious-political power structures of Europe. And it has been the material source of millions of lives transformed by the gospel of Jesus Christ for the past half millennium. Novum Instrumentum omne is indeed the book that changed the world five hundred years ago.