It is a fairly widespread opinion that Luther’s most significant work was his translation of the Sacred Scriptures into the German language, a circumstance that allowed many people of every condition to gain direct access to the knowledge of the Word of God. It is also an opinion, or rather a fairly widespread accusation –and Luther himself was one of those who most repeatedly propagated it– that the Catholic Church, moved by an excess of zeal, did not make it easy for its faithful to read the Bible, in order to prevent its message from being distorted if it were left to the free interpretation of each person.

We consider, nevertheless, that this accusation is somewhat unjust and unfounded if it is asserted indiscriminately. In the first place, it will be Luther himself who informs us that, upon entering the Augustinian monastery of the German city of Erfurt, moved by his desire to become a friar, the novice master of that monastery, Fr. Johann Greffenstein, placed in his hands “a Bible bound in red leather,” and the new novice became so enthusiastic in reading it that he almost learned it by heart. It must be remembered that the study and knowledge of the Sacred Scriptures was an obligatory rule in religious communities and constituted the fundamental source of inspiration for the friars of ascetic and contemplative life. At the same time, in the various libraries of the schools, universities and monasteries of the Middle Ages, there existed Bibles of several editions, since it was the basis of theological teaching and an essential element of preaching and of the liturgy. Testimonies of this biblical activity are the more than 8,000 ancient manuscripts of the Latin “Vulgate” that have been preserved, and between the years 1450 and 1522 the so-called “Biblia pauperum,” which was like the catechism of the less educated, was printed more than 160 times.

As for the publications of Bibles in the German language, it must be emphasized that, long before Luther’s Bible was published, no fewer than 18 translations had already been catalogued: 14 translated into High German and 4 into Low German. Among them one may highlight the complete translation of the Bible made in the 14th century in Bavaria, whose publication was so well received that the printer Johann Mentelin had it printed more than 13 times, turning it into a kind of German “Vulgate.” One could add to this balance the numerous partial editions of psalters, epistolaries and evangeliaries, many of them translated into different vernacular languages. One of the many popular poems existing in the Germany of the 15th century, titled “The Ship of Fools,” referred in one of its verses to this biblical dynamism: “All countries are at present full of the Sacred Scriptures, and of those things which affect the health of souls.”

If this body of data disproves the widespread accusation made against the Catholic Church regarding its supposed lack of interest in making the Bible known, it will be the historian Franz Falk who will clarify, still better, the lack of foundation of these accusations, by means of his book “Die Bibel am Ausgange des Mittelalters” (The Bibles produced in the Middle Ages), published in Mainz in the year 1905. In this work he describes that in the chronological span between the invention of printing around the year 1450 and that of 1520, more than 156 editions of Catholic Bibles were translated, which for that time was not bad at all. Let us also recall the translation of the Bible directed by Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros, published in six volumes in July 1517 under the name “Complutensian Polyglot Bible,” in whose making a prestigious team of humanists, philologists and orientalists took part, who among other things had the good judgment to transcribe in parallel the original texts in Greek, Hebrew and Chaldean with the corresponding Latin translation.

Returning to the question of Luther and his translation of the Bible, it is fitting to frame it within the social and technological situation of 15th-century Europe, since thanks to the invention of printing, translations of the Bible into the vernacular languages multiplied. This event made it possible to bring the common and barely lettered people into contact with the Bible, which increased the biblicist and anti-scholastic tendency that was manifesting itself in many German monasteries and universities of the 16th century. One of the most important promoters of this atmosphere was the famed Dutch philologist Erasmus, who in 1515 wrote in his “Paraclesis”: “I do not agree with those who oppose the ignorant reading the divine letters translated into the common tongue. I would wish that all the humble women read the Gospel and the Pauline epistles. And would that the farmer with his hand on the plough went along singing some passage of the Bible, and that the weaver did the same at his loom, and that the traveler relieved the tedious journey with such stories! Of that should the conversations of all Christians treat.”[1]

In the monastery of Wittenberg, Luther had read and made his own this exhortation of Erasmus, and, as the executing arm of the Dutch humanist, he set out to carry out the translation of the Bible in order to make it known to all Germans. He began this task first with the translation of the New Testament into the German language, taking advantage of the last months remaining of his stay in the well-provisioned castle of Wartburg, situated in the region of Thuringia, the place where he hid, fleeing the condemnatory sentence of the Edict of Worms. In this demanding task he displayed his capacity for work, for in the space of three months (from December 1521 until the beginning of March 1522, the date on which he left his hiding place to put in again at Wittenberg) he already had the translation of the New Testament practically finished.

Six months later, specifically in September 1522, this translation of the New Testament came off the press, with the title “Das Newe Testament Deutzsch, Wittemberg,” in which neither the year nor the name of the printer appeared, nor that of its author, perhaps to achieve a greater diffusion of the book. In this first edition 3,000 copies were printed, which sold out quickly, for by the end of the following year the second edition was already published. According to the calculations of one of Luther’s biographers, Hartmann Grisar, up to the year 1537, 16 editions were made in Wittenberg, not counting the more than 50 editions in other German cities. Luther made the Germanic version of the New Testament using the ordinary procedures of that time, which consisted in starting from the Latin “Vulgate,” from the Greek original of the Septuagint –despite the fact that Luther was not a specialist in the Greek language– and also from the earlier German translations of the Bible.[2]

Carried away by his evangelical fervor, which was nourished by his subjective inner experiences, Luther considered that the earlier translations of the Bible did not reflect the theological sense he wished to give them, and, attending more to the sense than to the letter of the texts, he used a language so lively, natural and popular that any reader could understand him without excessive difficulty. With the translation of the New Testament, Luther sought to corroborate his own doctrines, and he took the opportunity to accuse the Church of not having understood the authentic Gospel, and, in passing, to discredit and revile the papacy and the Roman See, especially through the polemical illustrations that accompanied some pages of the edition, made by the famed draftsman Lucas Cranach “the Elder.”

As for the translation of the Old Testament, its edition was delayed for some time, due in part to Luther’s insufficient knowledge of the Hebrew language. This obliged him to request the collaboration of a team formed by learned reformist collaborators and by some recognized linguists.[3] Just as he had done with the New Testament, he again made use of the Greek translation of the Septuagint, of the Latin “Vulgate,” and of the old German versions. He did not have the complete translation of the Bible finished and printed until the year 1534, and it was divided into six parts. This first edition was accompanied by prefaces and marginal notes, together with several engravings, many of them made by unknown artists, which were highly offensive to Catholics. This edition was well received in all the regions of Germania, which made it necessary to produce a new edition the following year. It is estimated that between the years 1534 and 1584 some 100,000 copies were sold, a considerable figure in that era.

In an attempt to improve these translations, Luther continued revising his Bible in successive years, aided by his customary collaborators. By this means he achieved that the linguistic correctness of his Bible surpassed that of many editions of the old Germanic Bibles, for these used a rather coarse and rudimentary German, which depended on the existing dialects. Moreover, these old translations copied almost literally from the “Vulgate,” reproducing a series of Latinisms and Hebraisms of difficult comprehension that no longer adapted sufficiently to the popular language of the Germania of the 16th century.

There is no doubt that Luther brought to bear all the forces of his spirit, and also of his body, in the translation of the Bible into the German language, so that it would lose nothing of its typical nuances and of its syntactic structure. This required him to translate literally and to give many of the original phrases of the Sacred Scriptures turns different from the traditional ones, obliging him to introduce terms that did not correspond to the original texts and modified their conceptual meaning, whereby the Word of God took on a suspiciously subjectivist sense. Luther describes for us the plain and direct method on which his peculiar translation was based: “One must not ask the syllables of the Latin language how one is to speak in German; the one to ask is the mother of the family in her house, the children in the street, the common man in the square, and to look at their mouth to see how they speak, and to translate according to all this.”[4]

Impressed by the great diffusion of Luther’s Bible, the Catholics tried to counteract this influence by publishing different editions of the Bible. Perhaps the best known were those of the Dominican Johann Dietenberger, published in Mainz in 1534, which was well received. Although it conforms to the Latin “Vulgate,” it must be noted that it benefits considerably from the Lutheran translation. Another edition of the Bible was that of the prestigious theologian Johann Eck[5]: “Bibel auf hochteusch verdolmetsch, Ingolstadt,” 1537. This translation is more exact and independent than Dietenberger’s, although it did not enjoy as much success, perhaps because of its more erudite, harsh and difficult language. Some years earlier, Hieronymus Emser, who died in 1527, had published a New Testament using a clear and accessible language, which in some respects was inspired by the popular style of the Lutheran New Testament.

Luther’s adversaries accused him of a lack of doctrinal orthodoxy and of forcing the sacred texts to fit them to his own subjective theological opinions. The aforementioned Hieronymus Emser affirms that in the Lutheran translation of the New Testament he had found more than 1,400 errors and falsehoods of every kind. In the face of these attacks, Luther responded with defiant arrogance: “My doctrine is that of Christ, and Christ’s is none other than that contained in the Bible; if they argue against me with a text of Scripture, I will answer them with Christ, against the letter of Scripture.”[6] From the theological and doctrinal point of view, the accusations concerning the arbitrary selection he made of the Canon of the biblical books are of greater gravity, in such a way that those in which he found sufficient support to confirm his doctrines he exalts as true, divine and prophetic, whereas those that did not express this concordance merited his rejection. The prophet of Wittenberg will have no scruple in maintaining that his own interpretation of the Bible stands even above the authority of the Apostles: “That which does not favor the knowledge of Christ is not apostolic, even if Peter or Paul says it; on the contrary, that which preaches Christ is apostolic, even if Judas, Annas, Pilate and Herod say it.”[7]

For Luther, the New Testament was constituted mainly by the Gospel of Saint John and by the letters of Saint Paul and Saint Peter; on the other hand, the three synoptic gospels did not earn much of his esteem. In the prologue to one of his editions of the New Testament he writes: “One must distinguish between books and books. The best are the Gospel of Saint John and the epistles of Saint Paul, especially that to the Romans, the Galatians and the Ephesians, and the 1st epistle of Saint Peter; these are the books that show you Christ and teach you everything you need for salvation, even if you know no other book. The epistle of James, compared to these, is nothing but straw, for it presents no evangelical character.”[8] Furthermore, he denies that the epistle to the Hebrews belongs to Saint Paul; and of the epistle of Saint Jude he says that it is an extract of that of Saint Peter and that it is therefore unnecessary. Regarding the Apocalypse, he will express his rejection, for it displeases him that Christ should act as a severe Judge: “I find in this book nothing that is apostolic or prophetic.”[9] As for the books of the Old Testament, he will use the same arbitrarily selective procedure of accepting or rejecting them according to whether or not they coincide with his own theological interpretations.[10] In spite of this, the Bible of Wittenberg will continue its unstoppable course, and will continue to be accepted by a broad sector of the people.

Author: Lluís Pifarré

NOTES

  1. Opera Omnia, VI 3 ↩
  2. The Greek text that served as its basis was the Novum Testamentum graece of Nikolaus Gerbel, which depended on the Novum Testamentum of Erasmus. He also made use of the Annotations of Lorenzo Valla, and of the Postils of Nicholas of Lyra. ↩
  3. This team, which was a kind of Lutheran Academy, was formed by the Hellenist Philipp Melanchthon, the professor of biblical exegesis Kaspar Cruciger, the professor of Hebrew J. Jonas, that of the humanist and Hebraist of Leipzig, Bernhard Ziegler, that of the preacher J. Bugenhagen, and the outstanding disciple of Reuchlin, Johann Forster, author of a Hebrew dictionary. The deacon J. Rörer acted as corrector and editor of the protocol. ↩
  4. Sendbrief, 637. Luther’s quotations correspond to the Complete Works of the Weimar Edition. ↩
  5. Johann Eck, known as “the theologian of Ingolstadt,” successfully confronted Luther in the famous theological disputation that took place in Leipzig, in the month of July 1519, in the great hall of the castle of Pleissenburg, then governed by the Duke of Saxony, George the Bearded. ↩
  6. WA 39, 1. ↩
  7. Prologue to the epistles of James and Jude (Bibel VII, 384). ↩
  8. Prologue to the New Testament of 1546 (Bibel VI, 10). ↩
  9. (Bibel VII, 404). ↩
  10. From the Old Testament he will reject as apocryphal books that of Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, that of Tobit, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, the first and second book of Maccabees, some parts of the book of Esther, and other fragments. ↩