Luther Bible

A number of Bible translations into German, both manuscript and printed, were produced prior to Luther's birth. Starting around the year 1460 at least eighteen complete German Bible editions, ninety editions in the vernacular of the Gospels and the readings of the Sundays and Holy Days, and some fourteen German Psalters were printed, sometimes in multiple editions. These were all translations from the Latin Vulgate not influenced by the emerging Hebrew and Greek scholarship.^[9]

The Zürich Bible was released in stages from 1525 to 1530, made by Zwingli and Leo Jud. It was a High Alemannic (Swiss German) revision of Luther's New Testament altered in word order and vocabulary,^[10] with a new Old Testament: the books of the prophets were derived from the 1527 translation of the Anabaptists Ludwig Haetzer and Hans Denck. The publication of the complete Zwinglibibel pre-dates the complete Lutherbibel by four years.

While he was sequestered in the Wartburg Castle for ten months (May 4, 1521–March 3, 1522),^[11][12] Luther began to translate the New Testament from Latin and Greek^[13][14] into German in order to make it more accessible to all the people of the "Holy Roman Empire of the German nation".^{[This quote needs a citation]}

Luther used Erasmus' second edition (1519) of the Latin New Testament with Greek (later developed into the Textus Receptus) and annotations. After leaving the castle, he revised passages obscure to him with the assistance of Greek specialist Phillip Melanchthon.^[15]: 56 Like Erasmus, Luther had learned some Greek at the Latin schools led by the Brethren of the Common Life (Erasmus in Deventer, the Netherlands; and Luther in Magdeburg, Germany). These lay brothers had added Greek as a new subject to their curriculum in the late 15th century.^[16] At that time Greek was seldom taught even at universities.

Known as the "September Bible", this translation included only the New Testament and was printed in September 1522. Luther also published the Bible in the small octavo format.

To help him in translating into contemporary German, Luther made forays into nearby towns and markets to listen to people speaking.^{[citation needed]} He wanted to ensure their comprehension by translating as closely as possible to their contemporary language usage. This translation, known as the "September Bible", was published in September 1522, six months after he had returned to Wittenberg.^{[citation needed]} In the opinion of the 19th-century theologian and church historian Philip Schaff,

The richest fruit of Luther's leisure in the Wartburg, and the most important and useful work of his whole life, is the translation of the New Testament, by which he brought the teaching and example of Christ and the Apostles to the mind and heart of the Germans in life-like reproduction. It was a republication of the gospel. He made the Bible the people's book in church, school, and house.^[17]

The same writer notes

Wikiquote has quotations related to Philip Schaff on Luther's Bible.

He adapted the words to the capacity of the Germans, often at the expense of accuracy.

— § 63. A Critical Estimate of Luther's Version

For example, he translated δίκαιος -forms with gerecht -words to refer to divine righteousness, but with frum -words in contexts which refer to human goodness, with billig for what is fitting or appropriate, and with recht -words when referring to lawful conduct, to create distinctions that reflected his theological view.^[18]

The Old Testament was translated using a Masoretic text of Soncino, the Vulgate of Jerome, the Septuagint, and, later, Latin versions by Santes Pagnino and by Sebastian Münster.^{[17]: § 63}

The translation of the entire Bible into German was published in a six-part edition in 1534, a collaborative effort of Luther and many others such as Johannes Bugenhagen, Justus Jonas, Caspar Creuziger, Philipp Melanchthon, Matthäus Aurogallus, and Georg Rörer. Luther worked on refining the translation up to his death in 1546; he had worked on the edition that was printed that year.

The 1534 edition issued by the Hans Lufft press in Wittenberg included 117 original woodcuts. This reflected the recent trend (since 1522) of including artwork to reinforce the textual message.^[19]

According to Biblical historian W. Gordon Campbell, Lufft's printing of the Bible was introduced for sale at the Michaelmas fair in Wittenberg.^[20] The work, was printed on 1,824 pages in two volumes with the addition of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha to Luther's 1522 New Testament]], and included woodcut illustrations. Luther's Bible was a bestseller in its time. About 200,000 copies in hundreds of reprinted editions appeared before Luther died in 1546. However, the book remained too expensive for most people; an unbound copy of the complete 1534 Bible cost the equivalent of a month's wages for the average laborer. Instead, the Bible was bought by churches, pastors, and schools.^[21]

Johannes Bugenhagen published a Middle Low German version in 1534.

Revisions were made during and after Luther's lifetime, sometimes with multiple editions in a single year. The 1530 edition is regarded as his most thoroughgoing revision of the New Testament. The successive revisions were less constrained by Latin and Greek.^[22]

In 2017, a revised version was published for the 500th anniversary of the posting of the Ninety-five Theses.^[23]

The complete 1534 edition of the Luther Bible contains a total of 75 books, including 39 books of the Old Testament, 9 books of the Apocrypha, and 27 books of the New Testament:^[24]

Luther controversially added the word "alone" (allein in German) to Romans 3:28 so that it read: "So now we hold, that man is justified without the help of the works of the law, alone through faith".^[27] The word "alone" does not appear in the Greek texts,^[28] but Luther defended his translation by maintaining that the adverb "alone" was required both by idiomatic German and the apostle Paul's intended meaning according to his interpretation,^[29] and that sola had been used in Western theological tradition before him.

Many Protestant scholars have noted the bias in Luther's translation, including Anglican apologist Alister McGrath:^[30]

Luther insisted that Paul's doctrine of "justification by faith" was definitive for Christianity. And to make sure that there was no understandings about this, he added the word "alone" lest anyone see faith as one among a number of causes of justification-including works.This addition caused a furor. Catholics pointed out that the NT nowhere taught "justification by faith alone"; indeed, the Letter of James explicitly condemned the idea. Luther responded by making the point that his slogan encapsulated neatly the substance of the NT even if it did not use precisely its original words. And as for the letter of James, was it not "an epistle of straw" that ought not to be in the NT anyway? This second argument caused considerable unease within Protestant circles and was not maintained by Luther's successors.

— Alister Mcgrath

The 2017 version has added footnotes on Romans 1:17, Romans 2:13, Romans 3:21, and Romans 3:28 that warn about the deliberate mistranslations Luther committed. For example, while the text of the 2017 version retains the disputed word "alone" (So halten wir nun dafür, dass der Mensch gerecht wird ohne des Gesetzes Werke, allein durch den Glauben), the footnote gives a "literal" translation (Wörtlich: »dass der Mensch aus Glauben gerechtfertigt wird, ohne Werke des Gesetzes«) for the second half of the verse.^[31]

Another controversial translation in the 1522 New Testament is 1 Timothy 2:4, which translates that God wills that all men "be helped" (German: geholfen werden) rather than the expected "be saved" for Greek: σωθῆναι.^[32]: 484

Karl-Heinz Göttert, a professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Cologne, in reference to his book Luther's Bible - History of a Hostile Takeover noted:^[33]

Luther developed a certain theology and now he wants to prove this theology. He wants to show it... You can call that awesome and you can call it wrong. In any case, it does not offer a philologically clean translation of the Bible.

— Karl-Heinz Gottert

Luther did not know ancient Greek well, and when he referenced the Greek New Testament, he relied on his friend Melanchthon and a number of other philologists. Significant changes correcting Luther's translations were made in the 2017 version of the Luther Bible.^{[citation needed]}

Luther also added German legal terminology which is not found in the original text, for example Denkzettel in Matthew 23:5.^[34] There were also many understandable mistranslations due to a lack of knowledge, such as in Psalms 104 where he mistranslated chamois as "rabbit" because he did not know what a chamois was.^{[citation needed]}

Initially Luther had a low view of the Old Testament book of Esther and of the New Testament books of Hebrews, James, Jude, and the Revelation of John. He called the Letter of James "an epistle of straw", finding little in it that pointed to Christ and his saving work. He also had harsh words for the Revelation of John, saying that he could "in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it".^[35] In his translation of the New Testament, Luther moved Hebrews and James out of the usual order, to join Jude and the Revelation at the end, and differentiated these from the other books which he considered "the true and certain chief books of the New Testament. The four which follow have from ancient times had a different reputation."^[36] His views on some of these books changed in later years, and became more positive.^[37]

Luther chose to place the books he considered Biblical apocrypha between the Old and New Testaments. These books and addenda to Biblical canon of the Old Testament are found in the ancient Greek Septuagint but not in the Hebrew Masoretic text. Luther left the translating of them largely to Philipp Melanchthon and Justus Jonas.^[38] Though included, they were not numbered in the table of contents of his 1532 Old Testament, and in the 1534 Bible they were given the well-known title: "Apocrypha: These Books Are Not Held Equal to the Scriptures, but Are Useful and Good to Read".^[38] See also Development of the Christian Biblical canon.

A large part of Luther's significance was in his influence on the emergence of the German language and national identity. This stemmed predominantly from his translation of the Bible into the vernacular, which was potentially as revolutionary as canon law and the burning of the papal bull.^[39]

The Luther Bible was not the first translation or printing of the Bible into German.^[40] There are still approximately 1,000 manuscripts or manuscript fragments of Medieval German Bible translations extant, mainly from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.^[41]: 116 In total, there were at least eighteen complete printed German Bible editions, ninety editions in the vernacular of the Gospels and the readings of the Sundays and Holy Days, and some fourteen German Psalters by the time Luther first published his own New Testament translation.^[41]: 116

Historian Margaret O'Rourke Boyle has claimed: "there was no causation between the Lutheran Reformation and the popular reading of Scripture."^[42]

Although Luther was not the first to attempt such a translation, his has been called superior to all its predecessors, as a more thought-by-thought translation. Previous translations had contained poor German, and had been from the Latin Vulgate versions only without reference to any Greek versions.^[39] One previous word-for-word translation from 1350, printed by Johann Mentelin in 1466, has been called linguistically clumsy and partially incomprehensible.^[40] However, at least some of Luther's passages can be explained as translations from the Vulgate.^{[14]: 230, 231}

Luther sought to translate as closely to the original text as possible,^{[citation needed]} and adopted the officially-promoted bureaucratic dialect Saxon Chancery.^[43] Some writers claim his translation was guided by how people spoke (presumably in the Upper Saxon dialect),^[39] and that Luther's faithfulness to the language spoken by the common people was to produce a work which they could relate to.^[44] This led later German writers such as Goethe and Nietzsche to praise Luther's Bible.^[45]

Moreover, because Luther's Bible was printed, it could spread rapidly and could be read by or to all. Hans Lufft, the Bible printer in Wittenberg, printed over 100,000 copies between 1534 and 1574, and these were read by or to millions.^[46] Luther's vernacular Bible came to be present in virtually every German-speaking Protestant's home, and increased the Biblical knowledge of the German common masses.^[47] Luther even had large-print Bibles made for those who had failing eyesight.^[45]

Luther's goal was to equip every German-speaking Christian with the ability to hear the Word of God,^{[citation needed]} and his completing his translation of the Old and New Testaments from Hebrew and Greek into the vernacular by 1534 was one of the most significant acts of the Reformation.^[48]Catholic German humanist Johann Cochlaeus complained that

Luther's New Testament was so much multiplied and spread by printers that even tailors and shoemakers, yea, even women and ignorant persons who had accepted this new Lutheran gospel, and could read a little German, studied it with the greatest avidity as the fountain of all truth. Some committed it to memory, and carried it about in their bosom. In a few months such people deemed themselves so learned that they were not ashamed to dispute about faith and the gospel not only with Catholic laymen, but even with priests and monks and doctors of divinity."^[49]

Luther's German Bible and its widespread circulation facilitated the emergence of a standard, modern German language for the German-speaking people throughout the Holy Roman Empire, an empire extending through and beyond present-day Germany. It is also considered a landmark in German literature, with Luther's vernacular style often praised by modern German sources for the forceful vigor ("kraftvolles Deutsch")^{[50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58]} with which he translated the Holy Scripture.

The spread of Luther's Bible translation had implications for the German language. The German language had developed into so many dialects that German speakers from different regions could barely understand each other. This led Luther to conclude that "I have so far read no book or letter in which the German language is properly handled. Nobody seems to care sufficiently for it; and every preacher thinks he has a right to change it at pleasure and to invent new terms."^[59] Scholars preferred to write in the Latin which they all understood.

Luther's Bible translation, based primarily on Saxon Chancery language used in royal courts and his native Upper Saxon dialect^[60] and enriched with the vocabulary of German poets and chroniclers, was a step on the path to a standardized German language,^[59] as Early New High German developed into modern "neuhochdeutsch." A contemporary of Luther's, Erasmus Alberus, labeled him the German Cicero, as he reformed not only religion but the German language also.

Luther's Bible has been hailed as the first German "classic", comparable to the English King James Version of the Bible. German-speaking Protestant writers and poets such as Klopstock, Herder, and Lessing owe stylistic qualities to Luther's vernacular Bible.^[61] Luther adapted words to the capacity of the German public and through the pervasiveness of his German Bible, created and spread the modern German language.^[61]

Luther's vernacular Bible also had a role in the creation of a German national identity based on language. Because it penetrated every German-speaking Protestant home, the language of his translation became part of a German national heritage.^[62] Luther's program of exposure to the words of the Bible was extended into every sphere of daily life and work, illuminating moral considerations for Germans. It gradually became infused into the culture of the whole nation and has occupied a permanent space in German history.^[62]

According to some hagiographers, the popularity and influence of his translation gave Luther confidence to act as a spokesperson of a nation and as the leader of an anti-Roman movement throughout Germany.^[63] It made it possible for him to be a prophet of a new German national identity^[64] and helped form the spirit of a new epoch in German history.^[65] The existence of the vernacular Bible was a public affirmation of empowerment and reform, such as might deprive any elite or priestly class of exclusive control over words, as well as over the word of God.^{[39][dubious – discuss]}

Through the translation, Luther was intending to make it easier for "simple people" to understand what he was teaching.^{[citation needed]} In some major controversies of the time, even some evangelicals, let alone the commoners, did not understand the reasons for disagreement;^{[citation needed]} and Luther wanted to help those who were confused to see that the disagreement between himself and the Roman Catholic Church was real and had significance.^[66] So the translation of the Bible would allow the common people to become aware of the issues at hand and develop an informed opinion.^{[dubious – discuss]}

Luther's vernacular Bible broke the domination and unity of the Roman Catholic Church in Western Europe.^{[dubious – discuss]} He had claimed Holy Scripture to be the sole authority, and through his translation every individual would be able to abide by its authority, and might nullify his or her need for a monarchical pope. As Bishop John Fisher put it, Luther's Bible had "stirred a mighty storm and tempest in the church".^[67]

Although not as significantly as on German linguistics, Luther's Bible also made a large impression on educational reform throughout Germany. Luther's goal of a readable, accurate translation of the Bible became a stimulus towards universal education, since everyone should be able to read in order to understand the Bible.^[39] At the time, only 5% of Germans had good literacy, 30% in the cities,^[68] though estimates vary from 1% to 17%.^[69] Luther followed Erasmus, who followed Thomas More, on the benefits of educating girls.^[70]

Luther believed that mankind had fallen from grace and was ruled by selfishness, but had not lost moral consciousness: all were sinners and needed to be educated. Thus his vernacular Bible could become a means of establishing a form of law, order, and morality which everyone could abide by, if all could read and understand it. The possibility of understanding the vernacular Bible allowed Luther to found a State Church and educate his followers into a law-abiding community.^[71] The Protestant states of Germany became educational states, which encouraged the spirit of teaching which was ultimately fueled by Luther's vernacular Bible.

Finally, Luther's translated Bible also had international significance in the spread of Christianity. Luther's translation influenced the English translations by William Tyndale and Myles Coverdale, who in turn inspired many other translations of the Bible such as the Bishops' Bible of 1568, the Douay–Rheims Bible of 1582–1609, and the King James Version of 1611.^[45] It also inspired translations in Scandinavia and the Netherlands.^{[citation needed]} Luther's Bible spread its influence for the remolding of Western European culture in the ferment of the sixteenth century. The worldwide implications of the translation far surpassed the expectations of even Luther himself.^[72]

• Elector Bible
• German Bible translations
• Protestant Bible
• Permanent Exhibition Luther and the Bible at Lutherhaus Eisenach

• Antliff, Mark. The Legacy of Martin Luther. Ottawa, McGill University Press, 1983
• Atkinson, James. Martin Luther and the Birth of Protestantism. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1968
• Bindseil, H.E. and Niemeyer, H.A. Dr. Martin Luther's Bibelübersetzung nach der letzten Original-Ausgabe, kritisch bearbeitet. 7 vols. Halle, 1845–55. [The N. T. in vols. 6 and 7. A critical reprint of the last edition of Luther (1545). Niemeyer died after the publication of the first volume. Comp. the Probebibel (the revised Luther-Version), Halle, 1883. Luther's Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen und Fürbitte der Heiligen (with a letter to Wenceslaus Link, Sept. 12, 1530), in Walch, XXI. 310 sqq., and the Erl. Frkf. ed., vol. LXV. 102–123.] Free open access edition with new English translation by Howard Jones for the Taylor Institution Reformation Pamphlet Series with an introduction by Henrike Lähnemann.
• Bluhm, Heinz. Martin Luther: Creative Translator. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1965.
• Brecht, Martin. Martin Luther. 3 Volumes. James L. Schaaf, trans. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985–1993. ISBN 0-8006-2813-6, ISBN 0-8006-2814-4, ISBN 0-8006-2815-2.
• Dickens, AG (1974), The German Nation and Martin Luther, New York: Harper & Row.
• Edwards, Mark (1975), Luther and the False Brethren, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Gerrish, B.A. Reformers in Profile. Philadelphia: Fortpress Press, 1967
• Green, V.H.H. Luther and the Reformation. London: B.T. Batsford, 1964
• Grisar, Hartmann. Luther: Volume I. London: Luigi Cappadelta, 1914
• Lindberg, Carter. The European Reformations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996
• Lyons, Martin. Books: A Living History. Thames and Hudson: 2011.
• Reu, [John] M[ichael]. Luther and the Scriptures. Columbus, OH: The Wartburg Press, 1944. [Reprint: St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1980].
• ——— (1984) [Columbus, OH: The Lutheran Book Concern, 1934], Luther's German Bible: An Historical Presentation Together with a Collection of Sources, St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House.
• Ritter, Gerhard. Luther: His life and Work. New York: Harper & Row, 1963

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Luther Bible

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• Luther Bible (1912 Edition).
• Luther's Translation of the Bible in Philip Schaff's History of the Christian Church.
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• Standard German Bible at World Bibles Archived 2021-11-29 at the Wayback Machine
• 1912 Luther Bible at Word Project