The Luther Bible () is a German language Bible translation by the Protestant reformer Martin Luther. A New Testament translation by Luther was first published in September 1522; the completed Bible contained 75 books, including the Old Testament, Apocrypha and New Testament, which was printed in 1534. Luther continued to make improvements to the text until 1545. It was one of the first full translations of the Bible into German that used not only the Latin Vulgate but the original Hebrew and Greek.C. Burger, "Luther's Thought Took Shape in Translation of Scripture and Hymns", in The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther's Theology (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Luther did not translate the entire Bible on his own; he relied on a team of translators and helpers that included Philip Melanchthon, a scholar of Koine Greek who motivated and assisted Luther's New Testament translation from Greek, and Matthäus Aurogallus, a linguist and scholar of Hebrew. One of the textual bases of the New Testament translation was the bilingual Latin and Greek version, with its philological annotations, recently published by the Dutch Catholic humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam and called the Novum Testamentum omne (1519).
The project absorbed Luther's later years.Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: Shaping and Defining the Reformation, 1521–1532, Minneapolis: Fortress, p. 46. The publication of Luther's Bible was a decisive moment in the spread of literacy in early modern Germany, promoting the development of non-local forms of language and exposing all speakers to forms of German from outside their own areas.Birgit Stolt, "Luther's Translation of the Bible." Lutheran Quarterly 28.4 (2014): 373–400. Thanks to the then recently invented printing press, the result was widely disseminated and contributed significantly to the development of today's modern High German language.
It is a common misconception that Martin Luther removed certain books from the Bible; rather, "Luther collected the apocryphal books and placed them at the end of the Old Testament, rather than have them interspersed among the other books." The Luther Bible influenced the production of Bibles used by the Evangelical-Lutheran Churches worldwide. In the present-day, the official Evangelical-Lutheran Bible translations (such as Bibel 2000) in the Nordic-Baltic region continue to include the Old Testament, Apocrypha, and New Testament, for a total of 77 books in a full Evangelical-Lutheran Bible.
Previous German translations The Luther Bible was not the first translation or printing of the Bible into German. A number of Bible translations into German, both manuscript and printed, were produced prior to Luther's birth. Historian Margaret O'Rourke Boyle has claimed: "there was no causation between the Lutheran Reformation and the popular reading of Scripture.""Although schooling, thus literacy, significantly increased, bibles were scarcely assigned, so that there was no causation between the Lutheran Reformation and the popular reading of Scripture. It was the spiritualists who favoured personal reading and judgement of the Bible; Luther condemned that as heresy."
There are still approximately 1,000 manuscripts or manuscript fragments of Medieval German Bible translations extant, mainly from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In total, there were at least eighteen complete printed German Bible editions (fourteen in Upper German and four in Low German), 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.
Translation approaches These previous translations were coupled to the Latin Vulgate and typically word-for-word or literal translations that were not idiomatic in any German dialect, nor necessarily intended to be. One previous word-for-word translation from 1350, printed by Johann Mentelin in 1466, has been called linguistically clumsy and partially incomprehensible.
Luther adopted more of a free phrase-by-phrase or dynamic equivalence translation approach and made key use of some of Erasmus' Greek and philological annotations in his Novum Testamentum omne, where it fitted his theology of law versus faith. However, at least some of Luther's passages can be explained as translations from the Vulgate.
Contemporaneous
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, 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.
A Catholic revision of Luther's New Testament was issued in 1526 by Hieronymus Emser, and in 1534 Johann Dietenberger released a complete Bible based on Emser's New Testament and the Zwingli/Jud Old Testament.
Johannes Bugenhagen published a Middle Low German version of Luther's New Testament in 1534.
"September Bible" New Testament (1522) While he was sequestered in the Wartburg Castle for ten months (May 4, 1521 – March 3, 1522),21. Luther the Translator of the Bible Luther prepared a translation of the New Testament from Latin and Greek and previous German. Vedder also notes (p170) the implausibility of Luther completing the initial New Testament draft in only "10 weeks" without reference to existing vernacular translations.Luther had in the immediate six months been writing his Christmas Postil (), which included many free translations of the Vulgate into German. Such plenaria were printed free translations of the church readings and fairly common around this time; they were read out in services after the Latin had been read out. into Saxon German. He produced the initial version in eleven weeks.
One of the textual bases of Luther's New Testament translation was Erasmus' second edition (1519) of the Latin New Testament with Greek (later developed into the Textus Receptus) and annotations. After leaving the castle, Luther revised passages obscure to him with the assistance of Greek specialist Phillip Melanchthon. 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. 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, six months after he had returned to Wittenberg. Luther also published the Bible in the small octavo format.
In the opinion of the 19th-century Protestant theologian and church historian Philip Schaff:
Luther's translation was "remarkably free for its time" as Luther's translation goal was to produce idiomatic Saxon German rather than a literal translation. Schaff notes:
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.
Furthermore, historian Euan Cameron has noted the strong theological agenda:
Complete Bible 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, Philip 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 Old Testament was translated using a Jewish Masoretic Text of Soncino, the Vulgate of Jerome, the Septuagint, and, later, Latin versions by Santes Pagnino and by Sebastian Münster.
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.Carl C. Christensen, "Luther and the Woodcuts to the 1534 Bible", Lutheran Quarterly, Winter 2005, Vol. 19 Issue 4, pp 392–413
According to Biblical historian W. Gordon Campbell, Lufft's printing of the Bible was introduced for sale at the Michaelmas fair in Wittenberg."Martin Luther's 1522 September Testament as the Epoch-Making Foundation for a Quarter-Century of Wittenberg Bible Publication", by W. Gordon Campbell, in Martin Luther's Bible, ed. by W. Gordon Campbell (James Clarke Company, Ltd., 2024) p.45 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.
Editions during Luther's lifetime 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.
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.
Editions after 1546 Even though the translation and revision work on the Luther Bible ended with Martin Luther's death in 1546, this does not mean that the text of the Luther Bible was no longer changed. It was reprinted and distributed in various places. New adaptations were made time and again. Text changes were part of the everyday business for printers and typesetters. Depending on the region, dialectal idiosyncrasies were incorporated and unfamiliar expressions replaced. Due to its fundamental importance for Protestantism, voices were soon raised that wanted to regulate the content of the Luther Bible, but such initiatives were regionally limited. Three regional versions came to prominence.
In central Germany, the Normalbibel imposed by Augustus, Elector of Saxony, was the standard text for decades from 1581 onwards. The Kurfürstenbibel (Elector's Bible), printed in Nuremberg in 1641, was compiled by a committee of the theological faculty in Jena with the aim of producing an exact reprint of the 1545 edition. By this time, however, everyday language had already clearly moved away from Luther's language. For this reason, more and more Bible editions tried to make the text easier to understand by adding glossaries. In 1690, a carefully edited version of the text was also published in northern Germany in the form of the Stader Bibel (Stade Bible), after translations of the Luther Bible into Low German had been common in northern Germany until then. Johannes Diecmann, who studied philology in Bremen, had compared numerous editions of the Bible and was thus able to publish the most reliable edition of the Luther Bible to date. The Stader Bibel also formed the textual basis for the first printing of the Canstein Bible Society. This "Canstein Bible" was the most widely used Luther Bible until the end of the 19th century.