Jenkins and Preston examine the issue of authority in relation to the translation and interpretation of the Bible based on the premise that the early Church's use of scripture in translation opened up questions concerning authority that remained unresolved and resurfaced in Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century. Reverberating throughout the seven chapters, the authors' thesis is that the sixteenth-century preference (revived by Erasmus) for the biblical text in its original languages as the dominant basis of interpretation challenged the medieval Church's reliance on the Vulgate and consequently the authority of the Church. The book's premise is based on an overview of selected early Christian writers and three key debates between: (1) Erasmus and the scholastics; (2) Thomas More and William Tyndale; and (3) Cardinal Cajetan and Archbishop Catharinus. The early Church approaches to the Septuagint in the works of Origen, Jerome, and Augustine revealed the roots of translation and interpretation questions. Six factors in establishing the authority of a translation of the Bible were: (1) royal patronage; (2) quality of the original text; (3) sanction of the religious authority; (4) religious credentials of the translators; (5) scholarly credentials of the translators; and (6) approval of the religious community. For Origen, the Septuagint stood as the Church's Old Testament and had the supreme authority of divine inspiration. In interpreting scripture, he recognized a dual authority in which the godly scholar held the greatest authority while maintaining the Church's authority to determine canonical status. Meanwhile as a lone voice, Jerome espoused an ad fontes method favoring the text in its original language. In preferring the Hebrew to the Septuagint as the basis for a revised Latin Old Testament (which provided the basis of the Vulgate), Jerome stood at odds with Augustine who defended the authority of the Septuagint. One of the important factors concerning the authority of a translation was Augustine's view that the work of a single translator needed to be tested by a wider body of scholars acting on behalf of the Church and similarly that the weight of authority was accorded by the religious community.

Erasmus adopted Jerome's ad fontes approach of granting primacy to the original languages of scripture and the philological principle of interpreting a text as understood in its historical context. In 1516 his New Testament, called the Novum Instrumentum, demonstrated places where the Vulgate differed from the original Greek. His revisions resuscitated the early Church question of the relationship between the authority of a translation and that of the original. By resisting the position of the scholastic theologians who claimed supreme authority over the interpretation of scripture (46), Erasmus's work was seen as a threat to the authority of the Vulgate and consequently to the authority of the Church itself. Unlike Latomas who defended the scholastic method and understood scripture as subordinate to theology, Erasmus rejected the subordination of scripture to philosophical schemes and argued that scripture properly interpreted in relation to its original language and context should form the basis of Christian theology.

William Tyndale and Thomas More embraced the philological method and ad fontes principle of Erasmus but assumed two fundamentally different epistemologies. While they shared some similar views about translation, such as favoring the vernacular translation and appealing to the early Christian writers, More offered laity only a limited access to parts of scripture rationed by educated clergy because More understood the Church to be inerrant in matters of salvation, doctrine, and practice. Meanwhile Tyndale denied the absolute authority of the institutional Church in the interpretation of scripture. Because Tyndale believed in the transforming experience made possible through the gospel revealed in scripture, his understanding of scripture focused on its function as an instrument encouraging faith and the working of God's Spirit. Although Tyndale was executed in 1536, his translation formed the basis of successive English versions.

In Italy, Tommaso de Vio Cajetan, a noted Thomist, a legate to the Diet of Augsburg, and a trusted adviser of Clement VII, produced commentaries on the Bible from 1524 until his death in 1534. Complaints about Cajetan's commentaries resulted in the compilation of a list of erroneous propositions in which the Sorbonne condemned twenty-four propositions taken from his commentaries on the Psalms and the New Testament. Although Ambrosius Catharinus was no better equipped than Cajetan for the task of biblical exegesis, he echoed the traditional stance that condemns the search for and the independent discovery of new meanings for this charge of novelty—namely, believing other than the Church believes—signals the departure from the meaning of the holy fathers and from the Catholic Church itself.

The strength of this book is its comparison of three different debates in the first half of the sixteenth century that illustrate the close relationship between the interpretation of the scripture and the struggle for authority. What is noteworthy of this choice of debates is that they potentially offer different kinds of comparisons, which provide a multifaceted method of inquiry into the subject of interpretation. Erasmus and traditionalists claimed loyalty to the same late medieval Catholic Church but represented humanist and scholastic learning which were often at odds with each other. In England, More represented the reforming Catholic, versus Tyndale, who sided with the reforming Protestant perspective. Meanwhile in Italy, the controversy erupted between the stances of two Dominicans—Cajetan, the reforming Catholic was willing to depart from tradition and question previous interpretations, thereby challenging the authority of the pope and the Church's magistrates and Catherinus, the traditional Catholic whose views supporting the Church's ultimate authority in the interpretation of scripture was upheld at the Council of Trent. Within the scholarship in the history of biblical interpretation, this book's thesis is most applicable for historical contexts in which the political and religious authorities were intricately linked so that the enforcement of a supreme authority over biblical interpretation was at least conceptually conceivable. This book reiterates the sixteenth-century reality that the scriptures became a contested text, which resulted in a crisis of authority.