But there is another writer whose influence on his age and the progress of free thought it is impossible to estimate too highly, and from whose teaching Servetus on his death-walk owned that he had had _something_. This is Erasmus. What Servetus had he does not say. Whatever it may have been, it was unaccompanied by the caution and cold discretion that distinguished the great scholar of Rotterdam. In the Scholia which Erasmus added to his Greek New Testament, however, we fancy we see heralds of the far bolder and more original exegetical annotations with which Servetus, under his assumed name of Villanovanus, accompanied his reprint of the Pagnini Bible, which we shall have to speak of by and by.
In addition to all he learned from his convent teachers, from the professors of Saragossa and Toulouse, from Sabunde, Luther, Erasmus, and others on the subject of theology, Servetus must further have been well read in general history and the works of travellers in foreign lands, as we shall find when we come to study his edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, and refer particularly to his biblical criticisms, in days when criticism of the kind he brought to bear on the text of the Scriptures was unknown. It was only in the early part of the sixteenth century that the Hebrew Bible and Greek Testament began to be appealed to by the learned, and made the subject of critical study in a way never thought of before. Long limited to the letter, the study was widened in its scope by Servetus, and, embracing general history, made to include a new and highly important element in its bearing on the Religious Idea. If Servetus of himself arrived at the interpretation he gives of the Psalms and Prophetical writings of Israel, he must indeed have been possessed of no ordinary share of natural sagacity informed by study, and of moral courage in addition; for it runs counter to all that had been assumed from the date of the New Testament writings almost to the present day. The free use he makes of his historical reading in its application to David, Cyrus, and Hezekiah, may have been that which led some of his biographers to imagine that he was of Jewish descent, and to say that he had visited Africa, and had had Mahomedan as well as Jewish teachers, from whom he imbibed his notions, hostile to the common orthodox interpretation of the Prophets, and the conception of a Triune God.