The Uses of <i>Resipiscere</i> in the Latin of Erasmus: In the Gospels and Beyond
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The subject of this paper is the conflict over language and meaning which surrounded Erasmus of Rotterdams attempt to create a new Latin translation of the New Testament. In the 1519 edition of the Novum Instrumentum, Erasmus chose to translate a Greek verb rendered almost universally in English as repent with the Latin resipiscere. In part, this was controversial simply because Erasmus had replaced the traditional Latin poenitentiam agere, one the chief scriptural sanctions for the sacrament of penitence. But the debate over penitence is only a beginning. Taking contemporary responses to the translation as a starting point, this paper explores the larger role of resipiscere in Erasmuss prose. In his educational works, satires, and correspondence, Erasmus employs resipiscere in contexts that give the word a burden of meaning much broader than anything in either medieval or classical standards of usage. Where Cicero and Livy use resipiscere to describe a recovery from an irrational state of mind or even from unconsciousness, Erasmus goes beyond this. In Erasmus’s prose, resipiscere characterizes a recovery from active deception and a process of questioning authority which tests the boundaries of the classical usage. By comparing the range of values Erasmus bestows on resipiscere, this paper demonstrates how his distinctly humanist approach to language reflects much more than his re-evaluation of classical Latin. It sets Erasmus’s use of the word in the larger context of his tendency to equate sin with error and refer to the teachings of Christ as a sort of heavenly wisdom or divine philosophy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".