Martin Luther and the German Bible

A Bible for German Homes

Martin Luther (1483–1546) translated the New Testament into German from the Greek during the winter of 1521–22, while he was hidden in the Wartburg, a castle near Eisenach. It was printed at Wittenberg in September 1522, and twelve years later, in 1534, the whole Bible followed. Luther's German Bible was read in German homes for the next four centuries, and the language it was written in became the common written German of the German-speaking lands.

It was not the first German Bible. More than a dozen German Bibles had been printed before Luther's, beginning with Johann Mentelin's at Strasbourg in 1466. All of them were translated from the Latin Vulgate, and their German followed the Latin closely, often word by word. Luther's was new in two ways. He translated from the Hebrew and the Greek in which the prophets and apostles wrote, and he wrote the kind of German that ordinary people spoke, so that a ploughman or a housewife could understand what was read to them.

The reason he gave so much of his life to the work lay in his own conversion. Luther was a monk and a professor of the Bible at Wittenberg, and for years he could find no peace with God. He found it in Paul's letter to the Romans, where the gospel reveals a righteousness that God gives and the sinner receives by faith. The story is told in Reformation Day: Sola Scriptura. Once Luther had found the gospel in the Scriptures, he wanted every Christian to be able to read them.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.

Romans 1:16-17
KJV

From Worms to the Wartburg

By 1521 Luther's writings had brought him before the emperor Charles V at the imperial diet in the city of Worms. In April he was ordered to take back what he had written, and he refused unless he could be shown from Scripture that he was wrong. A few weeks later the emperor declared him an outlaw, which meant that anyone could seize him and no one was allowed to shelter him.

Luther had been promised safe conduct to Worms and back, but his prince, Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, knew that he would be in danger once it ran out. In early May, as Luther travelled home through the Thuringian forest, a band of horsemen stopped his wagon and carried him off. To his friends it looked like a kidnapping, and many feared he was dead. In fact the riders were Frederick's men, and they took Luther to the Wartburg, which stands on a hill above Eisenach, where he could be kept out of sight.

Luther lived there for about ten months as a knight called Junker Jörg, which means Squire George. He let his hair and beard grow and dressed as a nobleman, so that visitors would not know him. He suffered from illness and loneliness there, but he wrote steadily. In December 1521 he made a secret visit to Wittenberg, and when he came back to the castle he began the work that would outlast everything else he wrote.

Eleven Weeks with the Greek New Testament

Luther translated the whole New Testament in about eleven weeks, between December 1521 and the end of February 1522. He worked from the second edition of the Greek New Testament published by the Dutch scholar Erasmus in 1519, which printed the Greek beside Erasmus's own Latin translation. A few years later William Tyndale would make his English New Testament from the Greek New Testament of Erasmus in the same way.

Early in March 1522 Luther left the Wartburg and went home to Wittenberg. There he went over the translation with his colleague Philip Melanchthon, a gifted scholar of Greek, who helped him with the difficult passages. The printing was done at Wittenberg in the press of Melchior Lotther, and the book went on sale in September 1522. It has been called the September Testament ever since.

It carried no translator's name on its title page. It had prefaces to the books, notes in the margins, and twenty-one full-page woodcuts for the book of Revelation from the workshop of the painter Lucas Cranach, who was also one of its publishers. The first printing is usually reckoned at three to five thousand copies. They were gone within weeks, and a corrected second edition, the December Testament, appeared before the year was out. The book was not cheap. A copy cost about a gulden, which by one reckoning was two months' pay for a schoolmaster, and still it sold faster than the presses could print it.

Listening to the Mother in the Home

Luther explained how he translated in a pamphlet of 1530, the Open Letter on Translating, which he wrote while his critics were attacking his New Testament. A good translator, he said, should not ask the Latin how to speak German. In Gary Mann's English translation, he wrote that "we must ask the mother in the home, the children on the street, the common person in the market about this." The translator must listen to how such people talk and translate so that they will recognize that someone is speaking German to them. Luther's German phrase for this is to look at their mouths as they speak, and Germans still quote it as a saying.

His best-known example is a saying of Christ in the Gospels. Rendered word for word from the Latin, it speaks of the "abundance of the heart," and Luther said that no German talks that way, any more than he would speak of the abundance of the house or of the stove. A German mother would put the same truth as a homely proverb, and Luther used her proverb in his Bible. The table further down sets his wording beside the King James Version.

O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.

Matthew 12:34
KJV

Luther took great pains to find such words. In the same letter he wrote that he had "sometimes searched and inquired about a single word for three or four weeks," and that while translating Job with Melanchthon and the Hebrew scholar Matthäus Aurogallus they had sometimes managed barely three lines in four days. His aim was a translation that said exactly what the Hebrew and Greek said, in words a German family would use at the table.

Scripture itself pictures the word of God at home in just this way. Moses told Israel to keep God's words in their hearts and to talk of them in the house and on the road, so that children would grow up hearing them.

And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

Deuteronomy 6:6-7
KJV

The Word "Alone" in Romans 3:28

One word in Luther's New Testament drew more criticism than any other. Where Paul writes that a man is justified¹ by faith² without³ the deeds of the law, Luther's German says that a man is justified without the works of the law, by faith alone. His critics said that he had added a word to the text of Scripture to support his own teaching.

Luther answered them in the same Open Letter, and he did not deny that the word was his. He granted that the Latin word for alone is absent from the Greek and the Latin of this verse, and wrote plainly that "the letters s-o-l-a are not there." His defence had two parts. The first was the nature of German, which, he said, adds "allein" whenever one thing is affirmed and another denied, as when a farmer brings grain and no money. The second was Paul's meaning. Paul sets aside every work of the law, even circumcision in the case of Abraham, and if works have no part in justification, Luther argued, then faith alone justifies. He added that Ambrose and Augustine had said the same thing before him.

Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.

Romans 3:28
KJV

Christians have weighed that defence differently ever since. Its critics hold that a translator should not supply a word the original does not have, however true the doctrine may be. Its defenders reply that Luther gave the verse its full sense in German without changing what Paul taught. The King James translators, working from the Greek, kept closer to the letter and wrote "without the deeds of the law." The commentary that bears Matthew Henry's name, whose notes on Romans were completed after his death by the minister John Evans, sums up the apostle's argument in words very close to Luther's: Paul infers "that it is in vain to look for justification by the works of the law, and that it is to be had only by faith." The doctrine itself is set out in Justification by Faith Alone and The Forensic Nature of Justification.

The Whole Bible, 1534

The Old Testament took far longer, because Hebrew was harder than Greek for Luther and because he would not hurry it. It came out in parts from 1523 onwards, and the complete German Bible was printed at Wittenberg by Hans Lufft in 1534. By then Luther was no longer working alone. A circle of Wittenberg colleagues met with him to go through the text verse by verse: Melanchthon for the Greek, Aurogallus for the Hebrew, the town pastor Johannes Bugenhagen, Caspar Cruciger, Justus Jonas, and Georg Rörer, who kept the record and corrected the proofs. They compared the Hebrew with the Greek Septuagint and the Latin, argued over each difficulty, and left the final word to Luther.

The 1534 Bible had more than a hundred woodcuts from Cranach's workshop. Luther placed the books of the Apocrypha in their own section between the Old and New Testaments, under a heading that described them as books not held equal to Holy Scripture, though useful and good to read. Why Protestant Bibles treat them this way is explained in The Apocrypha: Why Isn't It in Protestant Bibles?

Luther went on revising the text for the rest of his life. The edition of 1545 was the last printed before his death, at Eisleben in February 1546, and it became the standard text of the Luther Bible for centuries. Hans Lufft's press is reckoned to have printed about a hundred thousand Bibles in the forty years after 1534, and printers in other German cities issued many more editions of their own. Even so, a Bible was costly. By one estimate an unbound copy of the 1534 edition cost about a month's wages for a labourer.

Luther's Prefaces and the Order of the Books

Luther wrote a preface for the New Testament as a whole and for most of its books, to help ordinary readers find their way. In the September Testament he also changed the order of the books. He numbered twenty-three of them in the table of contents and set Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation apart at the end without numbers, because he doubted whether they belonged with the others in authority.

He spoke most sharply about James. In his general preface of 1522 he compared it with John's Gospel and first epistle, Paul's letters and the first epistle of Peter, and called it an epistle of straw beside them, because he could not see how it agreed with Paul on faith and works. That line was left out of later printings, and Luther printed James in full in every edition. The churches have received all twenty-seven books of the New Testament as Scripture since long before Luther, and they belong with the sixty-six books of the whole Bible, as The Canon of Scripture explains. Read together, James and Paul teach one gospel: the faith that justifies is a faith that works, as James 2: Faith Without Works Is Dead shows.

A Common Written German, and the Bible at Home

In Luther's day the German lands spoke many dialects, and a man from the north could hardly understand a man from the south. Luther chose the written German used by the chancery of the Saxon court, which officials in many parts of the empire already read, and he filled it with the plain words of ordinary speech. Because his Bible was printed so many times and read so widely, its German became the model that printers, preachers and schoolmasters followed. The standard German written today grew in large part from the language of Luther's Bible.

Luther also gave German families two other books to sit beside the Bible. In 1529 he published the Small Catechism, a short guide to the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer and the sacraments, written so that the head of each household could teach it to the children and servants. He also wrote hymns in German for congregations to sing, setting psalms and the truths of the gospel to music. The best known of them, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, is based on the forty-sixth psalm.

To the chief Musician for the sons of Korah, A Song upon Alamoth. God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

Psalms 46:1
KJV

Bible, catechism and hymnbook together brought the word of God into daily life, in the house as well as in church. Paul describes the same kind of household when he tells the Colossians to let the word of Christ dwell in them richly and to teach one another in psalms and hymns.

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.

Colossians 3:16
KJV

From Wittenberg to England

Luther's New Testament reached England through William Tyndale. Whether Tyndale went to Wittenberg himself is uncertain. The university's register for May 1524 lists an Englishman whose name may be Tyndale's written in disguise, but the record is too slight to prove it. What is certain is that Tyndale had Luther's German New Testament in front of him while he made his English New Testament in Germany. His edition begun at Cologne in 1525 opened with a prologue drawn from Luther's preface, took many of its margin notes from Luther, and placed Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation at the end, as Luther had.

Tyndale translated from the Greek himself, and his English is his own. Even so, the pattern Luther set, a Bible from the original languages in the words of ordinary people, crossed into English with him. Through Tyndale it shaped the English Bibles that followed, down to the King James Version. Miles Coverdale, who finished the first complete printed English Bible in 1535, also drew on Luther's German directly.

Every Man in His Own Tongue

On the day of Pentecost, people from many nations heard the apostles speak of the wonderful works of God, each in his own native language. It was a sign that the gospel was meant for every nation, in the words of its own people.

Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language. And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans? And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?

Acts 2:6-8
KJV

The crowd at Jerusalem had come from Parthia, Egypt, Rome, Crete and Arabia, and none of them had to learn another language to hear the gospel. Matthew Henry drew the lesson from that day plainly. He wrote that it showed "the mind and will of God, that the sacred records of God's wonderful works should be preserved by all nations in their own tongue; that the scriptures should be read, and public worship performed, in the vulgar languages of the nations." By vulgar languages he meant the everyday tongues of the people, and how the Scriptures went on into the languages of the world is told in In Our Own Tongue. Luther's Bible brought that gift to the German-speaking lands, and he laboured for it because faith comes from hearing the word of God.

So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

Romans 10:17
KJV

Luther's German has been revised many times since 1545. The word of God he put into German is the word the Lord promised would never pass away.

Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.

Matthew 24:35
KJV