Lorenzo Valla This is Me

 Web References

1. 1. streetsofgold.org

   streetsofgold.org/streets/page - [Cached]

   Published on: 7/5/2007   Last Visited: 11/27/2007

   The Church orchestrated the end of the Merovingian Dynasty in a failed attempt to secure the title of "King of Jerusalem" for the Pope.6 Papal authority was then greatly enhanced in 750 with the so-called "discovery" of a document known as the "Donation of Constantine" (this document was proven to be a forgery by Lorenzo Valla in 1440).7 This alleged 312 AD document officially gave the Bishop of Rome the Emperor's imperial symbols and regalia, which became the Church's property.

2. 2. CHAPTER 20: FROM THE DIVINE ORACLES TO THE HIGHER CRITICISM.

   www.human-nature.com/reason/wh - [Cached]

   Published on: 7/28/2001   Last Visited: 4/17/2002

   Then it was that Lorenzo Valla brought to bear on biblical research, for the first time, the spirit of modern criticism. By truly scientific methods he proved the famous "Letter of Christ to Abgarus" a forgery; the "Donation of Constantine," one of the great foundations of the ecclesiastical power in temporal things, a fraud; and the "Apostles' Creed" a creation which post-dated the apostles by several centuries. Of even more permanent influence was his work upon the New Testament, in which he initiated the modern method of comparing manuscripts to find what the sacred text really is. At an earlier or later period he would doubtless have paid for his temerity with his life; fortunately, just at that time the ruling pontiff and his Contemporaries cared much for literature and little for orthodoxy, and from their palaces he could bid defiance to the Inquisition.
   
   While Valla thus initiated biblical criticism south of the Alps, a much greater man began a more fruitful work in northern Europe. Erasmus, with his edition of the New Testament, stands at the source of that great stream of modern research and thought which is doing so much to undermine and dissolve away the vast fabric of patristic and scholastic interpretation.
   
   Yet his efforts to purify the scriptural text seemed at first to encounter insurmountable difficulties, and one of these may stimulate reflection. He had found, what some others had found before him, that the famous verse in the fifth chapter of the First Epistle General of St. John, regarding the "three witnesses," was an interpolation. Careful research through all the really important early manuscripts showed that it appeared in none of them.
   ...
   [469] For Valla, see various sources already named; and for an especially interesting account, Symond's Renaissance in Italy, the Revival of Learning, pp. 260-269; and for the opinion of the best contemporary judge, see Erasmus, Opera, Leyden, 1703, tom. iii, p. 98. For Erasmus and his opponents, see Life of Erasmus, by Butler, London, 1825, pp. 179-182; but especially, for the general subject, Bishop Creighton's History of the Papacy during the Reformation. For the attack by Bude and the Sorbonne and the burning of Berquin, see Drummond, Life and character of Erasmus, vol. ii, pp. 220-223; also pp. 230-239. As to the text of the Three Witnesses, see Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. xxxvi, notes 116-118; also Dean Milman's note thereupon. For a full and learned statement of the evidence against the verse, see Porson's Letters to Travis, London, 1790, in which an elaborate discussion of all the MSS. is given. See also Jowett in Essays and Reviews, p. 307. For a very full and impartial history of the long controversy over this passage, see Charles Butler's Horae Biblicae, reprinted in Jared Sparks's Theological Essays and Tracts, vol. ii. For Luther's ideas of interpretation, see his Sammtliche Schriften, Walch edition, vol. i, p. 1199, vol. ii, p. 1758, vol. viii, p. 2140; for some of his more free views, vol. xiv, p. 472, vol. vi, p. 121, vol. xi, p. 1448, vol. xii, p. 830; also Tholuck, Doctrine of Inspiration, Boston, 1867, citing the Colloquia, Frankfort, 1571, vol. ii, p. 102; also the Vorreden zu der deutschen Bibelubersetzung, in Walch's edition, as above, vol. xiv, especially pp. 94, 98, and 146-150.
   ...
   To strengthen this feeling and to intensify the stimulating qualities of this new atmosphere came, as we have seen, the researches and revelations of Valla regarding the forged Letter of Christ to Abgarus, the fraudulent Donation of Constantine, and the late date of the Apostles' Creed; and, to give this feeling direction toward the Hebrew and Christian sacred books, came the example of Erasmus.[474]

3. 3. TwinCentral.com - True Church

   twincentral.com/site/pages/art - [Cached]

   Published on: 2/23/2004   Last Visited: 4/13/2006

   The Church orchestrated the end of the Merovingian Dynasty in a failed attempt to secure the title of "King of Jerusalem" for the Pope.6 Papal authority was then greatly enhanced in 750 with the so-called "discovery" of a document known as the "Donation of Constantine" (this document was proven to be a forgery by Lorenzo Valla in 1440).7 This alleged 312 AD document officially gave the Bishop of Rome the Emperor's imperial symbols and regalia, which became the Church's property.