Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  The whole tract is one of the most extravagant examples of this stamp of polemical satire. It is hardly possible to determine where exactly the “great doctor” ceases and the satirical rhetorician begins.

  In addition to the mistakes and the wilfulness of the translation, the character of the glosses appended by Luther, and still more his attitude towards the Canon of the Bible, laid his work open to objections of the most serious kind.

  In the glosses on many passages he shows wonderful skill in manipulating the text in favour of his wrong views. This is carried so far that, to the account of the anointing of Our Lord’s feet by the Magdalen (Mat. xxvi. 10), he adds the marginal gloss: “Thus one sees that faith alone makes the work good,” because only faith could transform this seeming waste into a good work. Of Mat. xvi. 18: “Thou art Peter and on this rock I will build my church,” he gives the following explanation, which plainly rests on his own partisan and anti-Papal standpoint: By Peter all Christians together with Peter are meant, and their confession is the rock. “All Christians are Peters on account of the confession which here Peter makes, which also is the rock on which Peter and all the other Peters are built. The confession is common to all; hence also the name.”

  It was partly the defects of the translation itself, partly the cleverly calculated and thus all the more dangerous marginal glosses, which called forth objections and warnings from Catholic writers as soon as the work was published.

  Hier. Emser complains that Luther “made Scripture to turn everywhere on faith and works, even when neither faith nor works are thought of.” Emser speaks of more than 1400 passages which Luther had rendered in a false and heretical sense, though many of the passages he instances are not of any great importance.

  Johann Hasenberg, the Leipzig Professor, even went so far as to enumerate three thousand passages badly rendered in the German Bible.

  The theological faculty at Leipzig had declared as early as Jan. 6, 1523, that Luther had introduced his erroneous doctrines into the German Bible, a verdict on which Duke George took his stand when issuing his prohibition. Emser now set to work to carry out the Duke’s further instructions, viz. that “he should revise anew the New Testament in accordance with the tenor and arrangement of the old, authentic text, and restore it and set it in order throughout.” His purpose was mainly to weed out the theological errors. His new edition of Luther’s text was revised according to the Vulgate and provided with notes on the Greek. He also bought from Cranach the blocks for the illustrations (see below, ), rejecting, however, such of the cuts as were too insulting, for instance, those in which the Papal tiara appears. The many excellencies of the language of Luther’s version, and almost all the fruits of his labours, thus passed into Emser’s edition, which appeared at Leipzig in 1527. Absence of copyright laws explains to some extent Emser’s action. Emser’s Bible, which was also made up to resemble Luther’s folio volumes, bore no translator’s name and was simply entitled: “Das Naw Testament nach Lawt der christlichen Kirchen bewertem Text corrigiert un wiederumb zurecht gebracht,” and thus made no claim to being a new or original translation. As, however, Luther, the original translator, had been severely censured in Duke George’s Introduction we can readily understand that he was much vexed at the revision of his work and accused the editor of plagiarism. As Kawerau, however, remarks, “had he (Emser) laid claim to being an actual ‘translator,’ then his work would indeed have deserved to be styled a piece of plagiarism, as it has even down to our own day; but this he did not do, and merely wished to be regarded as the corrector of the Lutheran translation; hence this charge may be dismissed as unfair.” The second edition, however, which appeared after his death, bore Emser’s name as the translator: “Das New Testament, so Emser säliger verdeutscht.” This second edition was brought out by Augustine Alveld, as recent research has proved. In it certain coarse expressions which Emser had borrowed from Luther’s Bible were supplanted by more “seemly” words “for the sake of the maidens and the pure of heart,” a circumstance which incidentally shows that even Luther’s more moderate style of writing, as we find it in his Bible, was felt to be unusual and not always quite proper.

  Johann Dietenberger, a Bible expert and contemporary of Luther’s, wrote: Although Luther constantly appeals to Holy Scripture, yet there is no one who takes away from or adds to it more than he. “Of the Bible he rejects and adds what he pleases in order to establish his errors.” Dietenberger, a Mayence Dominican, published a complete translation of Holy Scripture in 1534, making considerable use for this purpose of Luther’s German Bible. He says in his Preface, in explanation of this, that he had been urgently requested to “go through the recent German translation of the Bible (Luther’s) and remove all that was not in accordance with the faith.”

  Johann Eck, who undertook a new translation of the whole Bible (1537), acted more independently; but, however good as a critic of Luther’s Bible, his own work met with but little success. His stilted German translation found but few readers.

  Even to the followers of the new faith Luther’s translation gave offence owing to its want of fidelity. Bullinger, writing to Bucer on a certain question, remarks: “Luther admits that he has not been faithful in his translation of the Bible, in fact he is almost inclined to withdraw it.” J. L. Holler, who in 1654 wrote a pamphlet about his return from Protestantism to the Catholic Church, says that what moved him to take this step was his discovery of Luther’s dishonest rendering. He gave a long list of passages where Luther’s Bible departs from the true text.

  In his treatment of the Canon of the Bible Luther proceeds with his customary licence. Those books of the Bible in which he thought he found his own doctrines most clearly enunciated he speaks of in the Prefaces as “the best,” viz. the Gospel and 1st Epistle of St. John, the Epistles of St. Paul, particularly those to the Romans, the Galatians and the Ephesians, and the 1st Epistle of Peter; the remaining books he arbitrarily ranks below these, and sometimes goes so far in depreciating them that their biblical character is jeopardised (below, , n. 6).

  “The standard by which the greater or lesser value of each book is determined,” says Adolf Hausrath, is the degree of clearness with which the doctrine of justification by faith is proclaimed. “Protestant Bible criticism had its originator in Luther, only that his successors shrank from persevering in his footsteps.”

  Of 2 Machabees he had said even at the Leipzig Disputation that it did not belong to the Canon, simply because of the difficulty presented by the passage quoted by Eck concerning Purgatory which Luther denied. Of this book and the book of Esther, which also found no favour in his eyes, he said later in the Table-Talk, that “they were too much inclined to judaise and contained much heathen naughtiness.” The so-called deuterocanonical books, though they are found in the Septuagint, were practically denied the status of inspired books by the very way in which he grouped them; in his translation they appear as a mere appendix to the rest of Scripture. According to the Preface, they were “not to be regarded as equal to the Bible, though good and profitable to read.”

  He denied that the Epistle to the Hebrews emanated from an Apostle; it was “a made-up Epistle,” consisting of fragments amongst which, “mayhap, there is wood, hay and chaff.”

  The Apocalypse he regarded as neither “apostolic nor prophetic.” “Let each one judge of it as he thinks fit; my spirit cannot find its way in the book.” In the Preface to the Epistle of Jude he is very unfair to this portion of Holy Scripture. He regards it as merely an excerpt from the 2nd Epistle of Peter and says it was “an unnecessary missive and should be ranked below the main books [of the Bible].” The words of approval he elsewhere bestows on these books do not avail to undo his criticism in this instance.

  As regards his animosity to the Epistle of James; Luther questions its authenticity chiefly because, so he says, this Epistle, “in direct contrast to St. Paul and the rest of Scripture, attributes righteousness to works.” As further grounds for doubting its genuine
ness, he points out, that, though “it undertakes to teach Christian people, yet throughout its whole length it never once considers the sufferings, the resurrection and the spirit of Christ,” further, it uses the language of the apostolic writings in such a way, “that it is plain that he [the author] lived long after St. Peter and St. Paul.” — On these grounds, at the close of his preface to the New Testament of 1522, he characterised it as an epistle of straw compared with the other canonical writings: “Hence the Epistle of James is nothing but an epistle of straw in comparison with them, for it has nothing evangelical about it.” — In 1515 and 1516, when he wrote his unprinted commentary on Romans, he had as yet no objection to raise against the canonical character of the Epistle of James. On the contrary he sought to combine the doctrine of this epistle on good works with that of St. Paul; he wrote: “When James and Paul say a man is justified by works, they are refuting the false views of those who imagine that faith suffices without its works.” But as early as the Leipzig Disputation in 1519 he expressed himself unfavourably concerning the Epistle of James. He repeats his condemnation in the commentary on Genesis and even goes so far as to remark bitterly, that James was mad (delirat) with his crazy doctrine of works; in the same way, in the marginal notes to his private copy of the New Testament he says, in 1530 for instance, of James ii. 12: “Oh what a chaos!” That he eventually altered his opinion, as has been asserted, cannot be proved merely from the circumstance that the later editions of his translation of the Bible do not contain the above words concerning the Epistle of straw. Although he occasionally expresses himself more favourably to this Epistle, still, against this, must be set other unfavourable utterances, nor did he ever retract his severe public condemnation.

  Even in his own day many who favoured the innovations spoke out against his condemnation of the Epistle of James. Carlstadt in his “De canonicis scripturis” objected in the strongest terms to the attacks on the Epistle, though he refrains from naming Luther. Luther’s opinion at that time, viz. that Jerome might be the author, was characterised quite openly by Carlstadt as “a baseless supposition,” and his proofs as “frivolous arguments by which he sought to discredit the Epistle of James.” Zwingli, Calvin and H. Bullinger also disclaimed Luther’s views. “In the 17th and 18th centuries James stood in high favour with Protestants,” and they even sought to exonerate Luther as best they could, sometimes on very strange grounds. The following is the final judgment of a Protestant critic of modern times who had also vainly tried to excuse Luther’s action: “It remains an act of injustice no less natural than regrettable.”

  Says Carlstadt’s biographer: “What lent Carlstadt a decided advantage in his polemics (against Luther’s attitude towards the Epistle of James) was the utter inconsistency of Luther’s critical attitude towards Holy Scripture at that time.” Luther “read his theology into the Bible,” remarks another Protestant critic, “just as his mediæval predecessors had done with theirs.” “With a wondrous pertinacity he pitted his theology and his Christ against everything that did not accord with it, against Popery, against Tradition, yea, against the Bible itself.”

  The halo of learning that had so long surrounded Luther’s German Bible seemed to threaten to fade when, after long preparation, the revised edition was published at Halle in 1883 (and, with new emendations, in 1892). A commission of learned Protestant theologians “of various shades of opinion” was entrusted by the German-Evangelical Conference of Eisenach with the work. Out of too great respect for Luther the alterations made were, however, all too few; veneration for his memory explains why the translation was not raised to the present standard of learning. The result was that many Protestant congregations, more particularly in North Germany, looked askance at the new edition and it was not generally introduced. A proposal was made, but to no purpose, that an exact counterpart of the Luther Bible of 1545 should be reproduced as a literary monument which would best serve to honour the author’s memory. The severe objections which scholars have brought against the revised edition cause it to resemble already a ruin, which, having had the misfortune to date from a period when the demands made by learning were less insistent than to-day, now towers lonely and forsaken in our midst.

  It is true that the revised Bible, with its heavy type showing exactly where it departs from the wording of the old Luther Bible, exhibits a huge number of freshly hewn stones built into the old, crumbling fabric. Nevertheless De Lagarde could say of the scholars who had taken part in the work:

  “These theologians of acknowledged standing have given us a Bible in a language which is not our own, a Bible in which one seeks in vain for the indispensable emendations with which the revisers were familiar, a Bible the revisers of which have of set purpose ignored the labours of their most painstaking and self-sacrificing colleagues, a Bible which passes over in silence all the essential developments in theology and religion.”

  “A language that is not ours,” is also the main complaint of the Protestant theologian S. Oettli concerning this Bible; he also numbers among its failings its retention of certain old German words and of Luther’s German rendering of the Divine names and the expressions Scheol, Hades, Daemon, etc. The principles which ruled the revision were “anything but unexceptionable,” and the result of the work seemed “unsatisfactory.” Oettli demonstrates the “backwardness” of the church Bible by comparing portions of the Bible taken from the revised text with exact translations of the same passages.

  All the surreptitious alterations and ambiguities we have alluded to above, for which Luther’s theology was responsible, have been left untouched, save for the few exceptions already mentioned. And yet the introduction which tells the story of the revision and is printed at the beginning of the edition of 1883 admits, though with extreme caution, that, in places, Luther “had been led to put his own explanations into his translation of certain passages.” In spite of the admitted incorrectness of the renderings in question the revisers chose to be governed by the strange principle, that “texts to which the people have become attached under the form given them by Luther, owing to their use in the church and in works of piety, are, as far as possible, to be retained unchanged, or only to undergo slight alteration.” Owing to their laxity in this respect they were to hear from their co-religionists that, in the new Bible, they had “sacrificed their understanding” to Luther, and again: “If the [Lutheran] Church after three and a half centuries, with the help of her best-esteemed theologians, can produce nothing better than this revision of her principal treasure, then sentence has already been passed on her. What can flourish in the Lutheran Church if the study of the Word of God does not?”

  We may add: How much better would not the results have been, and with what emulation would not the work have been undertaken had Protestant scholars been summoned to labour in unison to supply the members of their communion with a brand new translation, quite independent of Luther’s, which should tally with the best present-day knowledge? In asking this question we are, of course, ignoring the inward difficulties presented by the difference of standpoint. In any case, however, the unprejudiced observer will see in the history of this revision and of similar attempts at revision made in the past, how heavily the burden of a single great name may weigh on whole generations.

  A result of greater importance for the present subject is, however, that Luther’s German Bible, in spite of all the pains taken by its author, falls far short of the ideal of scholarship and impartial fidelity. For these defects the real merits of its German garb cannot compensate.

  Psychological Aspects of Luther’s Work on the German Bible

  In Protestant works on Luther written in a pious vein we often find him depicted as animated solely by the desire to enjoy the heavenly consolation of the holy Word of God and to make it known to his fellow Germans. In such works all his secondary, personal and polemical motives tend to disappear from view, and his guiding star during the three and twenty long years during which he was busy on the Bible seems t
o be nothing but the desire to satisfy the soul that craves for God and the glory of the Master.

  Were this the case, then the task chosen was certainly of an eminently peaceful and religious character. Yet we find often enough in Luther allusions to purposes of a different kind to which too little attention is generally paid in Protestant literature of the sort we are referring to. Indeed the question arises whether, psychologically, the secondary aims are not to be regarded as quite as powerful as his supposed leading motive.

  The tendencies which his statements betray are various; first and foremost we have those of a polemical nature, also his desire to enhance his own personal position. As we are here dealing with the German Bible, which a recent writer has described as the “crown of Luther’s creations,” we are amply justified in looking into these psychological motives, the more so since they throw a new light on the alterations in the sacred text referred to above which Luther undertook in the interests of his theology.

  The Bible, so he declares in his “Von den letzten Worten Davids” in 1543, could not be interpreted by Papists or Jews but only by those who “truly and rightly” possess Christ. Speaking from the standpoint of his own teaching he says: “Whoever does not really and truly hold, or wish to hold, this man Who is called Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Whom we Christians preach, let him leave the Bible alone.... What else did the Pope lack? Had they not the sure, bright and mighty word of the New Testament? What else is wanting to our sects at the present time?” Since the Papists will not join those who had rediscovered the “mind of Christ” and revealed it to humanity, let them keep their hands off the Bible. Another will interpret it for them.