Discerning the Letter: Erasmus and Luther on the Literal Sense of Psalm 2

Abstract This comparative study will examine the ways Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther understood the literal sense of Scripture in their expositions of Ps 2. Building off of G. Sujin Pak’s book, The Judaizing Calvin: Sixteenth-Century Debates over the Messianic Psalms, this study seeks to incorporate Erasmus and compare his exegesis and hermeneutic to the early Luther’s expositions of Ps 2. The article aims to demonstrate how these two exegetes converged (and diverged) in their understanding of the literal sense and to explore what part the literal sense played in their interpretation of Scripture. Further, it will consider the relationship these exegetes have to their antecedent exegetical tradition as well as the role history and philology played in their exegesis and how Christ was related to the literal sense of Scripture. The final section of this study ends with a recommendation for contemporary biblical scholars and theologians in the task of biblical interpretation today.