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The Luther Bible
Between the publishing of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses in 1517 and the realization of the Reformation by the time of his death in 1546 stretched a long road. Luther’s translation of the Bible into German was one of the most significant steps along that road, and one that continues to resound 500 years later. Luther’s New Testament, published in 1522, and his complete Bible, published in 1534, infused the Reformation as they made the Scriptures accessible to ordinary people. The energy Luther devoted to the work of translation gave birth to his reputation as the father of modern German. Luther started work on the Bible soon after his clash with imperial authorities at the Diet of Worms in April 1521. He was ordered to leave the city, and at his prince’s command, he was spirited to the Wartburg, a castle above Eisenach in what is now Thuringia. In a plot fit for an adventure novel, he changed his appearance and took on the identity of a landowner, Junker Georg. But even while living incognito, Luther was hardly one to remain silent. By the time of his stay at the Wartburg, he had been excommunicated and outlawed. What did Luther have to lose by now setting out not merely to explain the Bible to people, but to give it to them in their own language? A month into his stay, he had already begun to translate the Epistles and the Gospels. That winter he devoted himself fully to the job, and by March 1522, when he emerged from hiding, he had completed it. Luther’s first New Testament translation was published in September 1522, and has come to be known as the Septembertestament. It sold 5,000 copies in its first two months in print. After working on this first translation in virtual isolation, Luther formed a translation committee of colleagues, visiting scholars and rabbis as he revised the first draft and turned his attention to the Old Testament. The Wittenberg Bible, containing the complete Old and New Testaments, was published in 1534. Luther’s last revision of this mammoth work was published a year before his death, in 1545.
Luther’s was not the first German translation of the Bible. Anonymous scholars had completed a Middle High German translation based on the Latin Vulgate in the 14th century. Subsequent German versions (the first printed German Bible, the Gutenberg Bible, appeared in 1466) were also largely based on the Latin Vulgate, and so were at least two steps removed from the Bible’s original languages. Luther hoped to surpass these works in conveying the spirit of the original text. But he was not a scholar of Greek and Hebrew as much as a master of the German language, and his first aim was to make the Scriptures widely accessible. To accomplish this, he drew on his knowledge of official government language as well as the everyday speech of the common people. He consulted not only religious colleagues, but printers and publishers to find a middle road through the orthography, word choice and syntax of existing written German dialects. He also shared with the reader a glossary of less familiar terms, many of which were later to become common features of the German vocabulary. Luther’s German was easy to understand. This, together with its poetic imagery, conversational diction, folksy style and clear, rhythmic syntax, set it apart from the German found in most late-medieval texts, and helped his Bible set the framework for what would become modern High German. Luther acknowledged taking liberties with word choice in order to provide a clear, useful translation. Writing from Nuremberg in September 1530 in response to critics who argued his use of a particular word did not appear in the Latin version, Luther responded, “We do not have to ask about the literal Latin or how we are to speak German – as [these papists] do – Rather we must ask the mother in the home, the children on the street, the common person in the market about this. We must be guided by their tongue, the manner in their speech and do our translating accordingly.” Luther’s belief in the power of the German word to inspire religious faith was revolutionary in itself. In 1486, Archbishop Berthold of Mainz had banned all unauthorized printing of sacred and learned books, including the German Bible. Berthold had argued not only that the German language was incapable of properly conveying the true sense of the Greek and Latin originals, but that lay men and women could not understand the Bible in any case. As it happened, Luther’s translation became a bestseller for the times. The Wittenberg Bible sold about 100,000 copies between 1534 and 1574 and was likely read by millions. It helped shape the way people spoke and wrote German for generations to follow. And just as it attracted readers then, Luther’s translation remains the most widely used version of the Bible in the German-speaking world today. Links
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