Published in Mirabilia Journal 31 (2020/2)  

Keywords: Keywords: Erasmus, Fathers of the Church, Humanism, Saint Jerome.

The biblical and patristic project of Erasmus began in 1516, after a long maturation period of at least 15 years (from 1500 to 1516), with the publication in that annus mi-rabilis of the Novum Instrumentum and the Opera omnia of Saint Jerome –two milestones in his biblical and patristic project that will continue for twenty years with the edition of more than a dozen Fathers of the Church, both Greek and Latin–. At this time he had already discovered that the Sacred Scripture and the Fathers of the Church (espe-cially Saint Augustine, Chrysostom, Basil, Origen and Saint Jerome) could renew what he understood by theology: he does not want a scotist, nominalist, thomisttheology, that is, that of the recentiores, but a true theology, the vetus theologia or later the bibli-cal philosophia Christi, centered on the gospels and apostolic letters. But to reach this, we not only have the texts of the Scripture, but also the Fathers of the Church –and among them the greatest Latin Father, Jerome–, from which to take in the purest mes-sage of the Scripture, a redditio ad fontes, which he will defend throughout his life as the foundation of the theological renewal that he perceived as profoundly necessary in his time. The study deals with his herculean nine-volume edition of Saint Jerome’s Opera omnia –the first and most important of his many editions of the Fathers of the Church–. Because we anticipate that, with Erasmus, “the first patrology” was born. Its great editorial and translating task will facilitate the dissemination of patristic thought that will influence studies on New Testament philology as well as the development of dogmatic theology and Christian piety itself.