The prologue of the Gospel of John: patristic argumentation in Erasmus’ “Apology”

The paper aims to analyze Erasmus’ “Apology” written in defense of his Latin translation of the New Testament. Instead of traditional rendering “In principio erat verbum” (“In the beginning was the Word”) Erasmus suggested “In principio erat sermo”, and provoked the storm of criticism from Roman clergy members who accused him of blasphemy and correction of the inspired text. In response to this Erasmus published his “Apology”, in which he provided a few reasons in defense of his choice. First, he makes it clear that his translation has never been intended for public reading, much less for replacing the Vulgate, but for private study only. Then he provides grammatical explanation and shows that the Greek logos which means “discourse”, “speech”, “oration” is better translated in Latin as sermo, rather than as verbum, which mostly signifies a single word. But the main line of his reasoning goes back to centuries-long tradition of the Church. Erasmus provides numerous testimonies from Church fathers defending the use of sermo referring to the Son of God. Erasmus’ translation had a major impact on Protestant translations of the New Testament, both Latin and vernacular. The scientific originality of the paper lies in the fact that the author, unlike previous researches, highlights the role of the Church tradition in the process of rendering Greek text of the New Testament into Latin. The research findings are as follows: the author analyzes the reasons Erasmus provides against Vulgate’s translation of the Greek logos as verbum, and the role of the Church tradition and the humanistic approach to the problem of the New Testament translation.