Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  But, even apart from the “mind of Christ,” something else was wanting to the Papists which Luther could boast of possessing, viz. learning and a knowledge of the German language: “If I, Dr. Luther, could have felt sure,” so he wrote in his “Sendbrieff von Dolmetzscheñ” of 1530, “that all the Papists taken in a lump were sufficiently skilful to be able to translate even one chapter of the Bible into German faithfully and rightly I should in good sooth have been humble enough to beg their help and assistance in translating the New Testament into German. But because I knew and still see with my own eyes that not one of them knows how to translate or to speak German aright, I have not troubled about it.”

  It was now his intention, as he declares at the beginning of his preface to the German New Testament, that the great work he had produced should make an end of the “old delusion” in which the whole world was sunk, viz. “that men do not really know what is the Law or the Gospel, or what the New or the Old Testament.” He is determined, so he tells us, by popularising his New Testament to show the people that the Gospel is not to be turned into a “code of laws or a handbook,” as had “hitherto been the case and as certain earlier prefaces even by St. Jerome” had proposed. For the Gospel does not really require our works that we may become devout and thus be saved, nay, it condemns such works, but it does demand that we should believe that Christ has overcome sin, death and hell for us and therefore that He makes us pious, vivifies us and saves us, not by our own works but by His work, i.e. by His death and passion. “Hence it is, that, no Law is given to the believer whereby he may be justified before God.” It was his old antagonism to the importance of man’s co-operation with grace and to good works that made him place at the head of both his German Testaments his motto against works, so indicative of his tendency. In the beginning of the preface to the first part of the Old Testament (1523) we read that Moses, in his 1st Book, taught that “it was not by the Law or by our own works that sin and death were to be vanquished,” but only by the seed of the woman, that is Christ; “in order that faith may be exalted from the beginning of Scripture above all works, Law or merit. Thus the 1st Book of Moses contains hardly anything but examples of faith and unbelief, and of the fruits of faith and unbelief, and is thus almost an evangelical book.”

  That the German Bible was intended as a bulwark of the Evangel was also plain from the illustrations. For the New Testament contained, as Duke George complained when interdicting it, “many disgraceful pictures, ridiculing and deriding His Holiness the Pope and fortifying his [Luther’s] doctrines.” Emser, too, refers to these pictures in his protest: “How should Christians accept the work of one who has been openly branded as a heretic, a work which lacks the approbation of the church, and, moreover, insults and reviles the Pope in abusive figures, pictures, words and insinuations?” Thus, for instance, in the woodcuts appended to the Apocalypse the scarlet woman of Babylon and likewise the dragon, the monster from the pit, both wear the papal tiara. In Apoc. xiv. Babylon is depicted as Rome, Sant’ Angelo, St. Peter’s, the Belvedere of the Pope’s palace and Santa Maria Rotunda are all collapsing, whilst in chapter xviii. these same buildings are shown in flames.

  In Luther’s Bible the Catholic rulers were directly attacked in the heading chosen in 1529 for the book of Wisdom: “The Wisdom of Solomon for the Tyrants.” “The book should above all be read,” he here says, “by the big Johnnies who rage against their subjects and against the guiltless on account of the Word of God”; for “in this book the tyrants are violently taken to task and scourged.” “Hence this book is very much in place in our day.”

  The introduction to Romans (1522) not only exposes at length the doctrine of faith alone, which Luther supposed Paul to have taught in this Epistle, but also warns all against the “verminous medley of men-made laws and ordinances under which the whole world groans.” Rightly enough had Paul said of the makers of these laws, that their God is their belly.

  As we are here less concerned with the theological importance of Luther’s German Bible than with the spirit which inspired its composition, we shall only remind the reader briefly, that the work of translation was intended as a solemn expression of the author’s root ideas according to which the Bible was the only true source of faith. From the Bible alone, so he taught, all must derive their faith and find the way of salvation under the direct inspiration of the spirit from on high; it ought to be in the hands of all, even of the unlearned. Hence, in his “To the German Nobility” of 1520, he had declared that the Bible, and particularly the Gospel, ought to be in the hands of everybody, even of the boys and girls.

  We find Luther, says Risch, regarding the Bible and its use from “a new standpoint diametrically opposed to the Catholic, and which found its ripest expression in his German Bible.”

  O. Reichert likewise has it, that the “chief incentive to his translation of the Bible,” was the determination in which his whole life’s work centred, of unlocking for the German people by means of a thoroughly German translation, that book with the help of which “each one could live up to his faith and be assured of his salvation.”

  “Only now,” says Hausrath, speaking of the spread of Luther’s Bible, “could the burghers feel that they had attained to manhood in the matter of religion, and that the universal priesthood had become a reality. The head of each household had now the well-spring of all religious truth brought to his very door. To the Papists this seemed an abomination, as Cochlæus admits when he says, that every cobbler and old crony was poring over the New Testament as a source of all truth. Even the populace took part in the controversies of the learned, having now begun to see that the faith concerned them too. For a while this could lead to strange excesses, as the theology of the New Prophets showed.” Still, “the advent of the German Bible was the dawn of freedom.”

  Johann Fabri, who had recognised Luther’s aims, was at one with Cochlæus and Emser in lending support to the prohibition issued against the German Bible. To Luther he said: “Your Testament works more harm than all the idolatrous books of Ephesus (Acts xix. 19), nay, than the hail in Egypt.” This was, as it were, his answer to the wish Luther had expressed to his friend Lang as early as Dec. 18, 1521: “Oh, that every little town had its translator! Oh, that this book might be found on the lips of all, in their hands, before their eyes, and in their ears and hearts.”

  A surprising psychological trait is the haughty self-satisfaction evinced by Luther with his grand achievement when objections were raised.

  He had repeatedly proclaimed that he intended everything solely for the honour of God. But woe to anyone who in any way attacked his own honour! For, by this work, Luther had vindicated his mission as the appointed preacher to the Germans; only at Wittenberg, where the Bible was taken really seriously, were people able to fathom the secrets of this sealed book.

  “What is needed,” he says in 1530, in his “Sendbrieff von Dolmetzscheñ,” speaking of the work of translation, “is a truly pious, faithful, God-fearing, Christian, learned, tried and experienced heart. Hence I hold that no false Christian or sectarian can translate faithfully.” Not only does he deem himself qualified for the task, but, as he declares in 1523, he knows nobody else who “can, within a twentieth part,” do as well as he, though many find fault with his Bible. “I know that I am more learned than all the Universities, those sophists by the grace of God.” True enough, “even if we all set to work with a will, we should still have enough to do to bring the Bible to light, one by means of his reason, another by his knowledge of languages.” But all these critics, “who blame me here and there,” “know that they themselves are unable to do it, yet they would fain make themselves out to be proficient in an art that is entirely foreign to them.” To him their objections were but “the mud that clings to the wheels.”

  Thanks to himself, he says, “the German language has now a better Bible than the Latin [the Vulgate]; in support of this I appeal to the reader.”

  Of the superiority of his Bible ov
er the Latin Vulgate in the matter of accuracy he had not the slightest doubt. “St. Jerome,” he wrote in 1533, “and many others from among the masses, have made more mistakes in translating than we, both in the Latin and in the Greek.” — Should anyone attempt to translate the Psalms and refuse to be guided in his work by Luther’s German Psalter, so he says in the same passage, “he would translate the Psalter in such a way that precious little would remain in it either of German or of Hebrew.” “But a man who is unable to do anything good himself likes to court praise and to appear an adept by abusing and crying down the good work of others.”

  Of Emser he remarked, that he had admitted by his amended edition of the German Bible that, “my German is good and sweet; he saw plainly that he could not better it, and yet he wished to dishonour it, hence he took my Testament and copied it almost word for word.” “I am glad to see even my very foes compelled to further my work.”

  “If anyone will translate me 72 or 73 verses aright,” he assures his friends, “I will give him 50 florins. But, for this, he must not make use of our translation.”— “Since the heathen Church has existed we have never had a Bible that could be read and understood so easily and readily as that which we have produced at Wittenberg, and, praise be to God, put into German.”

  To irritate (“irritare”) the Papists by his work, to rouse them to fury (“furiam concitare”) and to let loose their “calumnious attacks” on his translation, was a real pleasure to him. As in the case of the Papists, so also in that of rivals within his fold, his work for the Bible spelt their undoing. This it was which justified him against all opponents.

  People like Osiander, he told his friends in 1540, single out one word of my translation “in order to find a ground for disagreeing with us. They dispute about a single word but they are after more. They should be compelled to translate the whole Bible and then we should see what they are able to do. And Amsdorf said: If I were the sovereign I should clap these wiseacres into cells and order them to translate Holy Scripture without making use of Luther’s Bible. Then we should soon see what they could do.” “When we were at Marburg [at the religious Conference in 1529],” Luther once remarked, “Zwingli always spoke in Greek”; he declared he had studied the Greek Testament for thirteen years; “Oh, no, something more is needed than the mere reading of the Testament, but these people are blinded by ambition”; that was why Zwingli had used Greek and Hebrew when preaching at Marburg. Carlstadt, too, was always making a display of his Greek and Hebrew, but all of them were only able to “pick holes in the Scriptures” which Luther had translated.

  He was determined that nobody should be allowed to interfere in his Bible and protests in his own way against any alterations. He wrote in 1539: “I beg all my friends, foes, masters, printers and readers to look upon this New Testament as my own; if they have any fault to find with it, then let them make a new one for themselves. I know full well what I am about, and I can also see what others are able to do. But this Testament is to be Luther’s own German Testament! For of criticism and cavilling there is now no end.”

  Which of his rivals had ever had to contend with “temptations” when engaged on the Bible? He, however, had to thank his “combats” for having been his instructors. Münster, so Luther said in 1536, accused him of making certain mistakes in his translation of the book of Jonas. “Yes, dear Münster, you have never been through these temptations. I, like Jonas, have looked into the belly of the whale where all seemed given over to despair.” “The pious are like unto Jonas; they are cast into the sea of despair, nay, into hell itself.”

  Discontent and vexation — temptations of another kind — frequently overwhelmed him whilst engaged on his Bible. Even his unprecedented success did not satisfy him; the Bible did not seem to him to be selling quick enough, nor to be made use of to the extent he wished; again, he feared, that in the future, it would lose its interest.

  “I fear,” he said in Nov., 1540, “that the Bible will not be much read, for people are very weary of it and no one reprints it now.” His views regarding the future were even more gloomy: “When I die there will not be a curate, teacher or sacristan who will not set to work to render the Bible on his own. Our version will no longer be valued. All our works will be thrown aside, yea, even the Bible and the Postils, for the world ever yearns for something new.”— “I am sick of Holy Scripture; see that you make a good use of it after my death. It has cost us enough toil yet is but little regarded by our own people.” “So profitable is the German Bible that no one knows how to esteem it high enough; no one sees what knowledge it has unlocked to the world. What formerly we sought with much trouble and constant study and even then were unable to find, is now offered to us in the plainest language; though we looked for it in vain in the obscurity of the olden version.” — He does not tell us whether it is the Vulgate or the mediæval German Bible which he here refers to as so obscure in comparison with his own Bible.

  What appears to have afforded him most satisfaction was that he had been able to counteract the false translations and commentaries of the Jews. Often does he mention this as one of the advantages of his Bible, and it is perfectly true that his felicitous and correct exposition particularly of the Messianic predictions based on the Hebrew text is deserving of all praise.

  He pointed out incidentally to his friends, that, in his Bible, he had “protested very strongly against the Rabbis,” and, in his “On the Last Words of David,” he congratulated himself when comparing his own interpretation with that of the Jews: “The Jews, because they do not accept Christ, cannot know or understand what is said by Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.... Scripture must seem to them as an epistle does to a man who cannot read.” “Unless we devote our energies to bringing the Hebrew Bible, wherever this is possible, into touch with the New Testament in a sense contrary to the Rabbinists, then it would be better to keep to the old version [the Vulgate] which, after all, is the best.” — His statement here, provided of course that the proviso “wherever this is possible,” be rigidly observed, is not altogether devoid of truth.

  In spite of this, however, his conscience often told him that his acquaintance with Hebrew was not equal to that of the Jewish commentators. He admitted even in later years that he was no “grammatical or regular Hebraist.” “His familiarity with the language of the Old Testament was due, for the most part, as he himself says, to his constant reading of it and to his comparing together the different passages in order to arrive at their true meaning.”

  Julius Köstlin, Luther’s best-known biographer, from whom the words just quoted are taken, declares, that, in his translation of the Bible, Luther “bestowed on his German people the greatest possible gift”; Luther wished to make of the Book of Books “an heirloom of the whole German nation.” Similar enthusiastic allusions to “the gift to the nation” are often met with in Protestant writers. They, however, overlook the fact that it was only to a fraction of the German nation, viz. to his co-religionists, that Luther offered this gift; moreover, they seem forgetful of a remark once made by Luther to a very intimate friend, which is far from enthusiastic and anything but complimentary to his German fellow-countrymen. The remark in question occurs in a letter of Luther’s dated Feb. 4, 1527, and addressed to Johann Lang of Erfurt; evidently he was extremely annoyed at the time. It runs as follows: “I am busy with Zacharias [the translation of which was then in the press] and have begun the translation of the Prophets, a work that is quite in keeping with the gratitude I have hitherto met with from this heathenish, nay, utterly bestial nation.” Even so severe a stricture must not be lost to sight by the historian desirous of tracing a psychological picture of the author’s feelings at the time he was engaged on the translation.

  Finally it is instructive from the psychological standpoint to trace the development in Luther’s mind of the fable — to be dealt with more fully below — that, under Popery, the Bible had been discarded and that he, Luther, had brought it once more to light.


  To begin with, he merely claimed to have discovered the true meaning of Scripture on the controversial points he himself had raised. It was the more easy for him to attribute to his Catholic contemporaries ignorance of the Bible, seeing that in those years the exegetical side of sacred learning had been to some extent neglected in favour of the discussions of the schoolmen. When afterwards he had been dazed by his great success with his translation of the Bible he was led to fancy that he was the first to open up the domain of Holy Scripture. This impression is closely bound up with the arbitrary pronouncements, even on the weightiest questions of the Canon, which we find scattered throughout his prefaces to the books of the Bible. He frequently repeats that he had forced all his opponents to take up the study of the Bible and that it was he alone who had made them see the need of their devoting themselves to this branch of learning — so as to be able to refute him. Here of course he is exaggerating the facts of the case. Accustomed as he was to hyperbole, we soon find him declaring, first as a paradox and then as actual fact, that the Bible had been buried in oblivion among the Catholics. The Papal Antichrist had destroyed all reverence for the Bible and all understanding of it; only that all men without exception might not run headlong to spiritual destruction had Christ, as it were by “force,” preserved the “simple text of the Gospel on the lecterns” “even under the rule of Antichrist.”

  Luther utterly discarded the principles of antiquity concerning the Bible, but nevertheless he made abundant use in his translation of the literary assistance afforded him by the Catholic past.