This volume completes the cycle of Erasmus’s New Testament Paraphrases translated in the Collected Works of Erasmus (CWE), where the books making up that work now follow one another in the (noncanonical) order of their original publication, beginning with the Paraphrase on Romans (1517; also the first published in CWE, as vol. 42, in 1984) and concluding with the book of Acts (1524; CWE 50). (Erasmus never made a paraphrase of Revelation.) Volumes 51–60 of CWE have been allocated to the Annotations, which—unlike the Paraphrases, conceived by Erasmus as a freestanding work, though not initially as one that would run all the way from Matthew to Jude—were always an integral part of his edition of the New Testament. To date, only the Annotations on Romans have appeared in CWE; the rest of the harvest of Erasmus’s tireless excogitation of textually and exegetically disputable points in the evangelicus sermo has still to be gathered in English. Meanwhile, CWE 41 (in press) will soon provide an introduction to the whole CWE subseries of New Testament scholarship, by its general editor (Robert D. Sider), along with commented versions of Erasmus’s own introductory and supplementary texts, including the Paraclesis, Apologia, and—his fullest statement of a combined biblical hermeneutic and rhetoric—the Ratio seu Compendium Verae Theologiae. The Paraphrases, Erasmus’s most sustained and eloquent work as an expositor of the Bible, the one where he claimed to be “in his own province,” thus comes to hand in a new English translation (the first since 1548/49) precisely as modern readers are about to have a further chance to consider his biblical projects in all their complexity, 500 years after the original scandal of the Novum Instrumentum (1516).

Jane Phillips’s translation of the Paraphrase on Luke 11–24 (CWE 48) appeared in 2003, the earlier part of the work having been assigned originally to another scholar. As the person also responsible for the Paraphrase on John in CWE 46, Professor Phillips probably has as acute a sense of the Paraphrases as any scholar now living, and she is an enviably assured navigator of the smooth-faced, deep-running waters of this copious text. (In volume 7 of Jean Leclerc’s 1703–06 edition of the Opera Omnia, the unannotated Paraphrases fill 1,200 folio columns.) Her classicist’s ear is alert to every harmonic of Erasmus’s réécriture. When Erasmus has Martha, sister of Mary, “scurry back and forth” to attend on Jesus and his disciples, where in the Vulgate she is merely “distracted,” Phillips picks up a strikingly exact parallel for his sursum ac deorsum cursitabat in the sneer of a villain’s servant in Terence’s Eunuchus directed at a better man’s attendant, then a further one in Horace’s description (Sat. 2.6) of the Town Mouse’s hospitality to the Country Mouse.

There are dozens of such aperçus sprinkled though her notes. She is no less sharp an observer of Erasmus’s often remarked upon biblical-historical realism. A note on the word stibium used for the eye makeup of the woman who anointed Jesus’s feet ranges from classical through biblical cosmetics to representations of the Magdalene in Renaissance painting, while another on the “perfume chest” (“myrothecium”) of the Virgin’s body turns into a miniature essay in the history of the senses. The annotator’s connoisseurship of the patristic and other biblical-exegetical intertexts of the paraphrase is just as impressive, and her notes there make a substantial contribution to this area of Erasmus studies. (Since the corresponding installment in the Amsterdam Opera Omnia has yet to appear, all Phillips’s annotation is her own.) The only danger is that the delights of such footnotes could prevent continuous reading of the main text, which in English achieves the strict literal fidelity required of CWE translators without losing the emphasis, variations in pace, and sheer energy of the original. The author of the Paraphrase on Luke evidently found the cultivated evangelist a pleasure to impersonate. There are several bravura passages, including a magnificently magnified Magnificat. Readers of this edition will miss none of Erasmus’s special effects. He and CWE have once again been admirably served by Jane Phillips.