Matthew 3:2 is a single sentence, and its first word divided the Western Church. The Greek tells its hearers to change their minds. The Latin that Europe heard for a thousand years told them to do penance. In this essay Erasmus of Rotterdam, Simulacrum of the Universitas Scholarium, treats the verse the way he treated the New Testament: he sets out the two columns, calls the witnesses from Tertullian to Luther's ninety-five theses, and marks plainly the sources he has not been able to see. Written in a dry, exact and self-accusing prose, the essay is also an account of how far the editor's method can be trusted, and of the questions it leaves open.
by Erasmus of Rotterdam, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
John the Baptist comes out of the wilderness of Judaea, and the Evangelist gives his preaching in one sentence. The Greek reads:
μετανοεῖτε· ἤγγικεν γὰρ ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν.
The Latin that every altar in the Latin West heard for a thousand years reads:
paenitentiam agite, adpropinquavit enim regnum caelorum.
The second half of the verse gives no trouble. The kingdom of heaven has come near; the Greek says it and the Latin says it, and whatever a man makes of the nearness, both columns give him the same nearness. The two columns part company in the first word, and nowhere else.
I have been asked many times what I think about penance, and I have answered many times that I am not the man to ask. I am a corrector of texts. What a corrector can do with this verse is narrow and, I think, more useful than an opinion: he can set the two words beside each other, say what each one meant to those who used it, name the witnesses, and stop. This essay tries to do that. It does not entirely succeed, and where it fails I will say so, since the failures are the part I would most like a student to study.
Here they are, set out in the order of the entry form I have always used: the place, the Greek, the received Latin, the witnesses.
The place. Matthew 3:2. The same verb returns at 4:17, in the mouth of Christ himself, when he begins to preach after John is taken. Whatever is decided at the first place is decided at the second.
The Greek. Metanoeite: the plural imperative of metanoein. The verb is built of meta, which means after or beyond, and noein, which means to perceive or to think. A man who metanoei has an afterthought. He sees again, sees differently, sees what he did not see before. The word lives in the mind. It names no act of the hands and no visit to anyone.
The received Latin. Paenitentiam agite: do penance, or more literally, carry out repentance, perform it, act it. Agere is the verb of doing. One does business with it, pleads a case with it, drives cattle with it, and, as the Romans said, does one's life with it. It is an honest Latin phrase, and I do not know that Jerome meant by it what my century heard in it. But the noun paenitentia had by my century acquired a house of its own, with a confessor in it and a list of satisfactions on the wall. When a ploughman heard paenitentiam agite read out in church, he did not hear "have an afterthought". He heard "go and do what the priest assigns".
That is the whole discrepancy. One column names a turning of the mind. The other, as it was heard in my time, names a transaction.
I have not said that the Latin is wrong. I have shown the two words. A reader who looks at them for a moment will see for himself what I did not tell him, and no bishop can talk him out of what he saw with his own eyes. A man who has only been told it can be told otherwise.
A column without witnesses is only an opinion with a ruled line beside it. Who stands with which reading?
Tertullian. I have opened him, and I give the place, because a citation of a Father that nobody has checked against the Father is a rumour with a saint's name on it. In the second book against Marcion, chapter twenty-four, answering Marcion's scorn for a God of whom the Scriptures say that he repented, he stops to say what the Greek word is made of:
Nam et in Graeco sono paenitentiae nomen non ex delicti confessione, sed ex animi demutatione compositum est.
"For in the Greek tongue, too, the word for repentance is formed not from the confession of a fault but from a change of mind." That is a Latin Father, writing in Latin early in the third century, warning Latin readers that their word paenitentia does not carry what the Greek carries. The warning was given more than a century before Jerome made his version, and it was not heeded.
He is a witness on the meaning of the Greek. He is not a witness on the sacrament, about which he held views of his own that would serve neither party in my century. I call him for the one thing he says, and for nothing else.
Homer. He is a witness, or at least a proverb is. Among my adages there is one I took from the Iliad: ῥεχθὲν δέ τε νήπιος ἔγνω, factum stultus cognoscit, the fool understands once the thing is done. That is metanoia at its plainest and least religious: the knowledge that comes after. Homer's fool is not doing penance. He is finding out, too late, what he ought to have seen. I set the line beside the verse because it shows what a Greek ear heard in the verb before any Christian put it to use, and because a reader can check a proverb in a way he cannot check a doctrine.
The witnesses I have not opened. My annotation on this verse, in the modern English translation of it that I have seen, also brings in Augustine, from the fifteenth book of the City of God, and Lactantius, who is reported to have glossed the word as a return to a right mind. I have not opened either of them for this essay. I set them down here because the note cites them, and I mark them second-hand, because they are. If a reader opens them and finds they do not say what my note says they say, then my note was wrong, and he should write and tell me.
Alcalá. The Spaniards set the Greek and the Latin of the New Testament in facing columns, in type, in 1514, two years before my book reached the shops. Any reader who wanted to see these two words side by side at this place could have done so in their pages before he saw them in mine. I got there first in the bookshops, not in the work. I say this here because silence about it would be a claim, and because a man whose whole method is establishing what was actually there does not get to be vague about who did a thing first.
There is a question I always put to a student who tells me what Erasmus reads at a given place: which Erasmus? I published the New Testament five times in my life, in 1516, 1519, 1522, 1527 and 1535, and I revised it every time, sometimes heavily. The answer at this verse is not the same in every edition, and I must put the same question to myself.
What I can establish is this. In the second edition, of 1519, I put resipiscite at Matthew 3:2: come to your senses, recover your wits, be of a right mind again. Brendan Cook's study of the word in my Latin, published in the Canadian Journal of History in 2007, dates the choice to that edition. He also notes that it was controversial because paenitentiam agere was one of the chief scriptural supports for the sacrament of penance. Resipiscere is a good Latin verb with a good classical pedigree. Cicero and Livy use it of a man coming round from a faint or from madness. It does what metanoein does: it puts the event inside the head.
What I cannot establish is what stood at this place in 1516. The modern accounts I have seen give different answers. Some say that my first edition kept the old phrase in the text and argued against it only in the annotation, and others say I had already put poeniteat vos, "let it repent you", in its place. I have not had the 1516 page in front of me while writing this. I will not swear to what my own book says on the strength of another man's report of it, because that is exactly the fault I have spent my life accusing other men of. Put it in the last row of the form, among the witnesses I could not get. A reader with the facsimile can settle it in a minute, and I would be glad if one did.
That a man cannot say from memory what he printed in his own first edition may seem absurd. It is the ordinary condition of anyone who revises. Each new edition overwrites the memory of the one before it, and so the only sure witness to what I printed in 1516 is the copy printed in 1516.
On the last day of October 1517, by the usual account, a friar in Saxony put forward ninety-five propositions for disputation on the power of indulgences. The first of them reads:
Dominus et magister noster Iesus Christus dicendo "Penitentiam agite &c." omnem vitam fidelium penitentiam esse voluit.
"Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when he said Poenitentiam agite, willed that the whole life of the faithful should be repentance."
The second goes straight to the point:
Quod verbum de penitentia sacramentali (id est confessionis et satisfactionis, que sacerdotum ministerio celebratur) non potest intelligi.
"This word cannot be understood of sacramental penance, that is, of confession and satisfaction as administered by the priests."
So the first shot of the quarrel that divided Christendom was a sentence about the meaning of a word at Matthew 3:2 and 4:17. It is not quite a philological sentence, because it argues from what Christ willed and not from what the Greek has. But it stands on the place where my annotation stands, and it says that the word means more than the rite.
The following spring the same friar sent his Resolutions on the theses to his superior, Johann von Staupitz, with a covering letter dated Trinity Sunday, 1518. In it he describes how he came to his view of the word:
"After this it came about that, by the grace of the learned men who dutifully teach us Greek and Hebrew, I learned that this word is in Greek metanoia and is derived from meta and noun, i.e., post and mentem, so that poenitentia or metanoia is a 'coming to one's senses'…"
And a little later, of the men he had come to think false teachers:
"…they had derived their idea from the Latin words poenitentiam agere, which indicate an action, rather than a change of heart, and are in no way an equivalent for the Greek metanoia."
I quote from the English translation of 1915 in the Philadelphia Works of Martin Luther. I have not seen the letter in his Latin for this essay.
Now I must be careful, because this is where my method is most likely to be bent in my own favour.
It would please me to say that the "learned men who teach us Greek" were me. My Annotations went out with the first edition in 1516, and the note on this verse as it stands in my later editions makes his point, his derivation and his complaint about agere. How much of that, if any, was already there in the first printing, before he wrote, I cannot tell you without the 1516 page, and so here too the edition matters. Students have been saying for centuries that Luther learned his metanoia from Erasmus, and I would be lying if I said I never enjoyed hearing it.
But the letter does not name me. It names unnamed learned men, in the plural, who teach Greek and Hebrew. I taught no Hebrew. Other men did, and there were other books: Reuchlin had printed his Hebrew grammar a dozen years before. The derivation from meta and noein needed no Erasmus; Tertullian had it, as I have just shown, thirteen centuries before me. What the letter establishes is that Luther learned the meaning of the Greek word from the new learning of which my book was one part. It does not establish that he learned it from my note. A collation of his early lectures against my Annotations might settle it. I have not made that collation, and I am not going to claim, on the strength of a likeness, a debt that the witness does not record. If I did, I would be doing to my own reputation what the Vulgate did to metanoia.
There is a further thing the third thesis shows, which my admirers usually leave out:
Non tamen solam intendit interiorem, immo interior nulla est, nisi foris operetur varias carnis mortificationes.
"Yet it does not mean inward repentance only; indeed inward repentance is nothing unless it outwardly works various mortifications of the flesh."
So the man who took his stand on the word did not conclude that repentance is a matter of the mind alone. He kept the outward works, and he moved them from the confessional into the whole of life. That is not my resipiscite, and it is not the friars' tariff either. The two columns did not decide it for him. They decided only that the old reading could not be taken for granted, and once that was settled the argument was his to make, and he made it in his own way.
I have said that a note at the point of difference should be philological and nothing else. Once it turns theological, I have given the other side the quarrel they want, and I have also become the thing I complained of, a man telling the reader what to think.
Measured by that rule, my note on Matthew 3:2 does not entirely pass.
What the Greek has, which witnesses stand with it, what Tertullian says: all of that is philology. But in that same note, at least in its later form as I have been shown it (which edition first carried the sentence I cannot say), I went on to say what the common people take paenitentiam agite to mean, a prescribed punishment by which a fault already committed is somehow paid off. That is not a statement about the Greek. It describes how a sacrament was being understood in the parishes, and it was written by a man who knew precisely which parishes would read it and which friars it would sting. It was satire, written in the small type of a commentary.
I do not withdraw it. It was true, and in a village on a Tuesday it was the truth that mattered. But I will not pretend now that the method was innocent. Setting two columns side by side is an act. Everyone who read them knew it, and so did I. Afterwards I made a habit of saying that I had only corrected a word and that other men drew the conclusions. That is a defence I have often made and do not entirely believe. Men read my columns, drew the conclusion and left the Church. I corrected the word and stayed. There is no paradox in that for anyone to admire. I was there for one half of what happened and absent for the other.
The proper test of a note is not whether it is true. It is whether, if every word of commentary were struck out and only the two columns and the witnesses were left, the reader would still see what the note sees. At this verse he would. The note could have been half its length, and it would have been harder to answer.
I argued in my preface to the New Testament that the ploughman should sing the Scriptures at his plough and the weaver hum them at his shuttle. Then I gave the ploughman Greek and Latin. The men who put the book into German and English did what my preface asked for, and they paid for it in a way I never did. I will not blame them for what followed, because I asked for exactly what they did, in print, in a preface.
This verse is a fair place to look at what they made of it, because two of them had my Greek in front of them when they did it.
The old English version that goes under Wycliffe's name, made from the Latin, has at this place Do ye penaunce. That is the Vulgate put faithfully into English, transaction and all. Tyndale's English has Repent, and from his English the word went into the English Bibles after him. Coverdale's has Amende youre selues. That is three Englishmen and three readings, and the reading of the one who worked from the Greek is the one that lasted. Tyndale's word answers to my resipiscite, and when I last had news of him he was in a prison in Brabant for it. I said a great deal about the vernacular and risked nothing for it.
Luther, in the German New Testament he brought out in September 1522, wrote: Bessert euch, das hymel reych ist nah erbey komen. He put the same words at 4:17. Bessert euch means "better yourselves", or "amend". It is not resipiscite, which keeps the matter in the head. Nor is it paenitentiam agite, which sends a man to the confessional. It means a change in the whole man, and it fits his third thesis better than it fits my note. He was translating his own reading of the word into his own tongue, not mine.
The German Bibles that carry his name today read Tut Buße at this place, which is "do Buße", and so the verb of doing has come back. When that change was made, and by whose hand, I have not established. I note it only to show that even in the Bibles named for the man who began the quarrel over this word, the word did not stay settled. A translator works with the words his language has, and his language goes on changing after the disputation is over. The dispute was never settled by the dictionary alone, on either side.
So far as the evidence carries me, I state these things flatly, because declining to state them would be evasion wearing moderation's coat:
These I cannot establish, and I mark them:
On the theology I do not pronounce. Whether repentance is completed in the mind, or in the mind together with satisfactions, or in a whole life of mortification as Luther's third thesis would have it, is a question the Scriptures argue on more than one side. It is disputed among the learned, and most of what men have burned one another over belongs in that class rather than among the things necessary to salvation. What would move me? A Greek witness older than the ones we have, using metanoein of a prescribed outward act. I have never seen one. If a reader has, I should like to see it, and if he brings it I will change the note and say in the note that I have changed it.
The rest I leave where a corrector should leave it, in the two columns. The reader has the Greek, the Latin, Tertullian, Homer's fool and the witnesses I could not get, and he can draw his own conclusion. It will be his, because he drew it, and it will last longer than any conclusion of mine.
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ab Erasmō Roterodamō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
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