Antonio Piñero on the Greek New Testament of the Complutensian Polyglot

In 2014, scholars marked the five-hundredth anniversary of the completion of the New Testament volume of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible. One of the commemorative conferences was held at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where I studied under Antonio Piñero and earned my PhD in Ancient World Studies (Greek Philology). A second, less widely known gathering took place at the Universidad de Alcalá in Alcalá de Henares. In fact, it was there that the editors of the Polyglot worked so diligently and ultimately produced the crown of Spanish philology.

That setting mattered. The term Complutensian derives from Complutum, the Latin name for Alcalá de Henares. Although the modern Complutense University is located in Madrid, the great polyglot project sponsored by Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros belonged historically to Alcalá. Five centuries later, scholars returned to that setting to reconsider the intellectual, linguistic, historical, and textual significance of the work.

The resulting conference volume, coordinated by Antonio Alvar Ezquerra, was published under the title La Biblia Políglota Complutense en su contexto. Among its contributions was Antonio Piñero’s essay, “La columna del Nuevo Testamento en la Biblia Políglota Complutense.”

Piñero’s study deserves greater attention than it has received. And so does the previous chapter by Luis Gil. But that for another day. 

The Complutensian Editors as Textual Scholars

A central concern of Piñero’s essay was the method followed by the scholars responsible for the Greek New Testament of the Polyglot. Older accounts sometimes portrayed the Complutensian editors as excessively dependent upon the Latin Vulgate or as willing to modify their Greek manuscripts in order to bring them into conformity with the Latin tradition.

Piñero argued for a considerably more careful assessment.

In his presentation, the Complutensian editors emerge as serious humanist philologists who sought the best manuscripts available to them, compared readings carefully, resisted unnecessary conjecture, and attempted to remain faithful to the textual evidence before them. Their aim was not simply to manufacture a Greek text that agreed with the Vulgate. They were attempting to print what they regarded as the best attainable form of the Greek New Testament. 

Piñero drew attention to their concern for ancient and reliable manuscripts, their distinction between better and inferior copies, and their reluctance to emend a reading without sufficient textual justification. He also emphasised that they did not mechanically harmonise the Greek with the Latin or alter readings merely because another form of the text appeared more familiar.

The result was an edition whose textual value, in Piñero’s judgement, had often been underestimated.

He illustrated this with familiar examples. The Complutensian editors did not print the doxology to the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:13 simply because it appeared in some Greek manuscripts and had a long history of ecclesiastical use. At the same time, they printed the longer form of the Lord’s Prayer in Luke 11:4 because it stood in the manuscripts available to them. In 1 John 5:7–8, they included the Comma Johanneum because their Greek and Latin evidence apparently agreed at that point. Whether one agrees with every editorial decision is not the issue. Piñero’s point was that their choices were not random. They followed identifiable principles and worked conscientiously with the evidence they possessed.

His overall assessment was strikingly positive. The editors were, in his words and argument, honorable, careful, collaborative, and intellectually serious. They discussed important variants and attempted to select the reading best supported by the manuscripts available to them.

I'm not so sure about the extent to which all of that is accurate though. There were significant discussions among the scholars about what to do with the Greek column of the New Testament volume and how to resolve issues in which the Greek and Latin diverged from one another. But whether they were wrestling with multiple manuscripts of the New Testament is still under question, as well as the extent and fervor. 

The Unresolved Question of the Underlying Manuscripts

One of the most persistent problems in Complutensian studies concerns the manuscripts used to establish the Greek New Testament text. The editors claimed to have consulted ancient and reliable copies, some of them borrowed from important libraries, but the exact manuscripts have never been identified with certainty.

Earlier scholars attempted to solve the problem by comparing the printed text of the Polyglot with known manuscripts and textual families. Piñero remained cautious about that approach. The New Testament manuscript tradition is too complex, and its books display too much textual variation, for easy conclusions based upon a few isolated agreements.

He therefore distinguished between two related but separate questions.

The first concerns the identity of the manuscripts used by the Complutensian editors. That question remains difficult to answer.

The second concerns the textual character and intrinsic value of the printed Greek text itself. That question can still be investigated, even when the precise manuscript sources remain unknown.

For Piñero, the Greek text of the Polyglot deserved to be studied on its own terms through detailed comparison with other editions and with the broader manuscript tradition.

Piñero’s Support of My Doctoral Research

It was at this point in his paper that Antonio Piñero discussed my doctoral research.

Before the conference, Antonio had generously suggested that I present my own work on the Complutensian Greek New Testament. The organisers understandably wished to hear Antonio himself, and I agreed with them. My research was still in its early stages, and his broad knowledge of the Polyglot, Spanish humanism, and the history of the Greek New Testament made him the right person. Remember what Jesus said? –"A student is not above his teacher." 

What Antonio did in the presentation was especially valuable to my developing work. He situated the project within the longer history of Complutensian scholarship and identified it as one possible way forward in the study of the Greek New Testament column. He explained that I was undertaking a systematic comparison of the Complutensian text with the Erasmian tradition and with the modern critical text represented by Nestle-Aland.

He also reported some preliminary results from Matthew 1–4. The comparison had identified 107 places of variation among the Complutensian text, the Erasmian text, and NA28. Of these, only eight appeared relatively significant in relation to the modern critical text, while in thirty-four places the Complutensian edition agreed with NA28.

Piñero interpreted those preliminary results as evidence that the Complutensian text was not merely another form of the Erasmian text and that, at least in these chapters, it stood closer at a number of points to the modern critical text. He therefore judged the Complutensian edition textually preferable to Erasmus in certain respects, while carefully stopping short of describing it as a modern critical edition.

That conclusion should not be reduced to the simple claim that agreement with NA28 automatically makes a reading superior. The importance of the comparison lay instead in what it called into question: the common tendency to treat Erasmus as the natural textual benchmark for the earliest printed Greek New Testaments and the Complutensian edition as little more than an historical curiosity. Erasmus’s edition appeared first and exercised the greater influence, but priority of publication and subsequent influence do not themselves establish textual superiority.

As the dissertation developed, the project was narrowed to the Gospel according to Matthew and took on a more specific historical focus. I examined the extant Vatican manuscripts containing Matthew and compared their readings with the Complutensian text. The purpose was to test a longstanding possibility: could the manuscripts used for the Complutensian New Testament actually have come from Rome, as statements associated with the project have often been understood to imply?

The comparison revealed a degree and pattern of divergence that made direct dependence upon the extant Vatican manuscripts highly improbable, at least for Matthew. This did not permit an absolute conclusion about every manuscript once available in Rome. Manuscripts may have been lost, relocated, or left unidentified, and the Complutensian editors may have consulted copies no longer extant. Nevertheless, the surviving Vatican evidence did not support the hypothesis that the Greek text of Matthew in the Polyglot was derived from the manuscripts now known to have been there.

That finding also raised a broader historical possibility. References to manuscripts supplied from the papal library may have served, at least in part, to honour papal support and to strengthen the perceived authority of the edition. That possibility remains more difficult to demonstrate than the negative textual conclusion. The collation can show that the extant Vatican manuscripts are unlikely sources for the Complutensian Matthew; it cannot by itself prove why claims concerning Roman manuscripts were made.

A Neglected Contribution

Piñero’s conference paper remains valuable for at least two reasons.

First, it offers a forceful reassessment of the Complutensian editors. They should not be dismissed as uncritical defenders of the Vulgate or as printers who casually reshaped the Greek text. They were Renaissance philologists working with the manuscripts, resources, and critical assumptions available to them. Their decisions must therefore be evaluated historically and textually rather than reduced to later caricatures.

Second, Piñero recognized that the Greek New Testament of the Polyglot still required sustained and systematic investigation. Even if the precise manuscripts underlying the edition cannot now be identified with certainty, the printed text itself can be collated, classified, and evaluated. Its relationship to the wider Greek manuscript tradition and to the modern critical text remains a legitimate and important field of inquiry.

I remain grateful for the generosity with which Antonio discussed my developing research before that audience. I'll never forget it. His support did not settle the questions in advance, nor did it lessen the need for careful work. It did something more useful: it affirmed that the questions themselves were worth pursuing.

When Antonio Alvar later gave me a copy of the published volume, he inscribed it:

A Thomas W. Hudgins, con todo mi afecto, porque él hará mejor uso que nadie de estas páginas.

“To Thomas W. Hudgins, with all my affection, because he will make better use of these pages than anyone.”

I have tried to honour that encouragement by continuing to investigate a text whose place in the history of the Greek New Testament is more significant than is commonly recognised.

The Complutensian New Testament never exercised the influence that Erasmus’s edition did. Yet influence, chronological priority, and textual quality are not identical categories. The fact that one edition shaped the subsequent history of the printed Greek New Testament does not mean that the other should be treated merely as a bibliographical curiosity.

The Greek New Testament produced at Alcalá still deserves to be read carefully, collated systematically, and judged on its own evidence.

Here's the presentation if you want to read it for yourself.