Novum Instrumentum omne

Novum Instrumentum Omne, later called Novum Testamentum Omne, was a bilingual Latin-Greek New Testament with substantial scholarly annotations, and the first printed New Testament of the Greek to be published. It was prepared by Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) and printed by Johann Froben (1460–1527) of Basel.

Five editions were published, in 1516, 1519, 1522, 1527, and 1536. Though written for theologians not the masses,^[1]: 607 an estimate of up to 300,000 copies of Erasmus' New Testament were printed in his lifetime.^[2]

The first edition (1516), titled Novum Instrumentum Omne, provided Erasmus' revision of the Latin Vulgate as more classical Latin; this evolved in subsequent editions as an independent Latin rendition informed by the Greek. The Greek text is a Byzantine text-type.

The work was relaunched with a new title Novum Testamentum Omne in a second edition (1519),^[3] which notably was used by Martin Luther for his translation of the New Testament into German, the so-called "September Testament". The third edition (1522), was used by William Tyndale for the first English New Testament (1526).

The Erasmian editions, and the subsequent 16th century revisions thereof, fed into the Geneva Bible (1560), the King James Version (1611)^[4] and Textus Receptus which was the basis for the majority of modern translations of the New Testament in the 16th–19th centuries.