Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  In the Old Testament, the Church’s Latin translation, viz. the Vulgate, and the Greek Septuagint were of great service to him, but he also made use of the Latin translation of Santes Pagninus (not to speak of that of the Protestant, Seb. Münster) and likewise of the Commentaries, as, for instance, of the “Glossa ordinaria” and the works of Nicholas of Lyra († 1340).

  An unkindly saying current at a later date in Catholic circles concerning Lyra’s widely-known Bible Postils declared: “Si Lyra non lyrasset, Lutherus non saltasset.” The saying is, however, met with under another form even before Luther’s day, and in this older guise serves to show the high esteem in which Lyra’s Commentary was held; here it runs: “Nisi Lyra lyrasset, nemo doctorum in bibliam saltasset.” Not only Lyra but many other Bible commentators stood in high favour among Catholic scholars at the close of the Middle Ages, nor was there before Luther’s day any such absence of respect for the Bible or ignorance of its contents, whether in the original text or in German translations as he would have us believe.

  The Bible in the Ages before Luther

  It would be to perpetuate a prejudice all too long current among Protestants, founded on Luther’s often false or at least exaggerated statements, were one to fail to recognise how widely the Bible was known even before Luther’s day and to what an extent it was studied among educated people. Modern research, not seldom carried out by open-minded Protestants, has furnished some surprising results in this respect, so that one of the most recent and diligent of the Protestant workers in this field could write: “If everything be taken into account it will no longer be possible to say as the old polemics did, that the Bible was a sealed book to both theologians and laity. The more we study the Middle Ages, the more does this fable tend to dissolve into thin air.” “The Middle Ages concerned themselves with Bible translation much more than was formerly supposed.”

  According to a careful summary recently published by Franz Falk no less than 156 different Latin editions of the Bible were printed in the period between the discovery of the art of printing and the year of Luther’s excommunication, i.e. from 1450 to 1520. To this must also be added at that time many translations of the whole Bible, many of them emanating from what was to be the home of the innovations, viz. 17 German, 11 Italian, 10 French, 2 Bohemian, 1 Belgian, 1 Limousine and 1 Russian edition, making in all, with the 6 Hebrew editions also known, 199 editions of the complete Bible. Of the German editions 14 are in the dialect of Upper Germany.

  Besides this the common people also possessed extracts of the Sacred Book, the purchase of the entire Bible being beyond their slender means. The Psalter and the Postils were widely known and both played a great part in the religious life of the Middle Ages. The Psalter, or German translation of the 150 Psalms, was used as a manual of instruction and a prayer-book for both clergy and laity. Twenty-two translations dating from the Middle Ages are extant, and the latter editions extend from the ‘seventies of the 15th to the ‘twenties of the 16th century. The Postils was the collection of lessons from both Old and New Testaments, prescribed to be read on the Sundays. This collection sufficed for the people and provided them with useful reading matter, with which, moreover, they were rendered even more familiar owing to the homilies on these very excerpts usually given on the Sundays. The early printers soon helped to spread this form of literature. We still have no fewer than 103 printed German editions of the Postils (often known as Plenaries) dating from the above period.

  Of the importance of the Plenaries Risch remarks very aptly: “In them the ideal of a popular exposition and translation of the Bible before Luther’s day finds its first actual expression. That these Plenaries — it would be interesting to know which kind — were the first incentive to Luther’s popular works of piety, and, at times, thanks to his good memory, supplied him with a ready-made German translation of the Bible, appears to me beyond question.” “Thanks to these Gospel-Books, as they were frequently called, a kind of German ‘Vulgate’ covering certain portions of the Sacred text may have grown up even before Luther’s day.” “Even a superficial glance at the Middle Ages,” says Risch, “cannot fail to show us the gradual upgrowth of a fixed German Biblical vocabulary. Luther here could dip into a rich treasure-house and select the best.... In laying such stress on Luther’s indebtedness to the past we have no wish to call into question the real originality of his translation.”

  “That, during the Middle Ages,” says another Protestant scholar, “more particularly in the years which immediately preceded Luther’s appearance, the Bible was a well-spring completely choked up, and the entrance to which was jealously guarded, used to be, and probably still is, the prevailing opinion. The question is, however, whether this opinion is correct.” “We have before us to-day so complete a history of the Bible in the various modern languages that it can no longer be said that the Vulgate alone was in use and that the laity consequently were ignorant of Scripture. It greatly redounds to the credit of Protestant theologians, that they, more than any others, took so large a part in collecting this enormous store of material.” “We must admit that the Middle Ages possessed a quite surprising and extremely praiseworthy knowledge of the Bible, such as might in many respects put our own age to shame.” “We have to acknowledge that the Bible at the present day no longer forms the foundation of our knowledge and civilisation to the same extent as it did in the Middle Ages.”

  Who, however, was responsible for the prevalent belief that the Middle Ages knew nothing of the Bible? Who was it who so repeatedly asserted this, that he misled the people into believing that nobody before him had studied Holy Scripture, and that it was only through him that the “Word of God had been drawn forth from under the bench”? A Protestant quite rightly reproves the “bad habit” of accepting the estimate of ecclesiastical conditions, particularly of divine worship, current “with Luther and in his circle”; it is, however, to fall short of the mark, to describe merely as a “bad habit” Luther’s flagrant and insulting falsehoods against the ecclesiastical conditions at the close of the Middle Ages, falsehoods for which his own polemical interests were solely responsible.

  The psychology of Luther’s gradual approach to the statement that the Bible before his day lay under the bench, has already been described ( f.). As some Protestants have sought to clear him of the authorship of so glaring a fable and to insinuate that the expression belongs rather to his pupil Mathesius, we must here look a little more closely into the words.

  Luther himself uses the saying, for instance, when claiming credit in his Commentary on the Prophet Zacharias (chap, viii.) with having rendered the greatest possible service to Scripture. He says: “They [the Papists] are still angry and refuse to listen when people say, that, with them, Scripture lay under the bench, and that their mad delusions alone prevailed.” In this connection the Weimar editor of the Commentary refers to a work of the former Dominican, Petrus Sylvius, aimed at Luther and entitled “Von den vier Evangelein, so eine lange Zeit unter der Bank sein gelegen.” — Popery, Luther says in another passage, “kicked Scripture under the bench.” He speaks repeatedly in the Table-Talk of the “Bible under the bench,” which, since “it lay forgotten in the dust,” he had been obliged to drag again into the light of day.

  Elsewhere he describes in detail the trouble he had in pulling the Bible from “under the bench,” particularly owing to his theological rivals and the sectarians within the camp; on this occasion his black outlook as to the future of the Bible he had thus set free scarcely redounds to the credit of his achievement. He says in his tract against Zwingli (“That the words of Christ, ‘This is My Body,’ still stand fast,” 1527): “When in our own day we saw how Scripture lay under the bench, and how the devil was deluding us and taking us captive with the hay and straw of men-made prayers, we tried, by the Grace of God, to mend matters, and have indeed with great and bitter pains brought Scripture back to light once more, and, sending human ordinances to the winds, set ourselves free and escaped from the dev
il.” But then, so he goes on, others [on his own side] fell upon him, raised up an uproar and raged against him; Zwingli, in particular, had riddled a single line of Scripture “with ten holes,” “so that I have never read of a more disgraceful heresy”; which, even in the beginning, “comprised as many factions and divisions as it had heads.” There would, however, in future “be such a turmoil in Scripture, such dissensions and so many factions, that we might well say with St. Paul ‘the mystery of ungodliness is already at work’” (2 Thess. ii. 7). “He [the devil] will bring about factions and dissensions in Scripture so that you will not know what is Scripture, or faith, or Christ, or even where you stand.”

  Words of Luther’s such as these, which we meet with repeatedly under various shapes, point indirectly to the reason why the Church preferred to see, in the hands of people unversed in theology, only those extracts from Holy Scripture approved by herself, in particular the Postils and Plenaries; for the dangers of misunderstanding and disagreement were very real, especially in an age so prone to sectarianism.

  “To put into the people’s hands the complete Bible,” says Franz Falk bluntly enough, “was to give them something both dangerous and superfluous. The Postils were amply sufficient for the Christian people. Even in Protestant circles to-day people are deciding in favour of an expurgated Bible for use in the school and the home.” W. Walther in his “Deutsche Bibelübersetzungen des Mittelalters” gives a favourable account of the Catholic practice: “According to what we have stated the attitude of the mediæval Church to the German Bible appears to have been quite definite. Janssen seems perfectly right when he says, ‘The Church opposed no resistance to its spread so long as strifes and divisions within her own body brought no pet abuses to light.’” “Men of insight,” continues Janssen, “such as Geiler von Kaysersberg and Sebastian Brant doubted from the beginning the advisability of putting the entire Scriptures in the hands of the people. They feared, and rightly feared, that the Bible would be grossly and wilfully perverted by the ignorant and the light-minded, and be made to uphold all sorts of doctrinal and moral teaching. God Himself had not placed His Divine Word indiscriminately in the hands of all, for He had not made the reading of it a condition of salvation. All errors had sprung out of false interpretation of Holy Scripture. Even to learned commentators the Scriptures presented difficulties enough, how much more to the ignorant masses?”

  No one to whom it might prove of use was debarred access to the complete German translation or to the Sacred Text in the original languages; in their case restrictions were waived. The large number of complete editions would in fact be inexplicable except on the assumption of a certain freedom in this respect. Numerous instances might also be cited where educated people during the Middle Ages made use of the complete Bible.

  Sebastian Brant says in the “Narrenschiff”: “Every country is now filled with Holy Scripture.” “The rapidity with which the different editions followed each other,” wrote Janssen, “and the testimony of contemporary writers point to a wide distribution of German Bibles among the people.”

  As regards other countries, too, there is no lack of sufficient data for arriving at a like conclusion, viz. that the Bible was already widely disseminated before the religious revulsion came. We may instance the recent works of A. C. Paues and A. Gasquet on England and those of the Dominican Mandonnet on his own Order’s relations with the Bible during the Middle Ages, from which we may see how familiar the Bible must have been in certain circles.

  The honest admission made by a Protestant, viz. “that, so far as outward acquaintance with the Bible went, it would be untrue to say that it lay under the bench before the Reformation,” does not, however, sufficiently counter what Luther says, for his grievance in reality was, that, among the Papists, it was rather the true meaning of the Bible that “lay under the bench.”

  It is plain that they “abuse and revile Scripture, thrust it under the bench, pretend that it is shrouded in thick fog, that the interpretation of the Fathers is needed and that light must be sought in the darkness.” Thus did he write against Emser in 1521. A recent champion of Luther has also thought it worth while to write: “The Bible before Luther’s day was not regarded as in Luther’s opinion it should have been regarded, or treated as it should have been treated; it was indeed studied by the learned but only in the same way as people studied Augustine, Jerome and Thomas Aquinas — and, moreover, not with the same zeal or to the same extent.”

  Did one wish to deal adequately with the standing thus taken up by Luther and his defenders there would be a whole book to be written full of interesting facts; for what Luther presupposes in such repeated statements is that his theology was right and that of the Church all wrong. Sufficient light has, however, already been thrown in this work on the value of this assertion of Luther’s.

  Denifle, who, thanks to his expert acquaintance with the material, was able to examine so many of Luther’s theological assertions concerning the Middle Ages, deals amongst other things with the question, whether Luther was really the first to advance the theory, “that Christ is the whole content of Scripture,” the enunciation of which had been claimed as “the greatest service rendered by Luther to the Church and to theology.” — The truth is, however, that the Church of old was so full of the idea that the “Holy Scriptures before Christ were written only to proclaim Him and His Church,” that it was an easy task for Denifle to overwhelm his adversaries beneath a mass of quotations, for instance, from Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and J. Perez of Valencia (the latter representing Luther’s older contemporaries).

  Catholics have rightly gone even further, and asked whether it was not Luther himself, who, by his arbitrary treatment of some parts of Scripture, and its actual words, — to say nothing of its interpretation — thrust the Bible under the bench? Surely, his destruction of the Canon of Scripture, his alterations in the text and the liberty he arrogated to himself in his glosses are but little calculated to qualify him to be called the saviour and liberator of the Bible. — It is nothing more than an appeal to the imagination of the populace, when, in connection with this, popular works on Luther refer to the Bible, which the youthful Luther when still a student in the world, found chained in the library at Erfurt (though this itself is a matter of history). To hear of the Bible having been “bound in chains before Luther’s day” may sound very dreadful, but, as all should know, the only reason why valuable books were chained in those days was to guarantee their preservation for the use of the reader. Scholars are well aware that the printed works which were then so costly, and still more the manuscripts, were usually kept chained in the libraries in order to prevent visitors carrying them off; the custom still obtains in Rome to-day in the parlours of some of the convents, where books are displayed for the perusal of those waiting. Wattenbach in his “Schriftwesen des Mittelalters” enumerates a whole series of instances from earlier centuries. One of the most remarkable which goes back to about Luther’s day, is that of the Medicean library of manuscripts, the so-called Laurentiana at Florence, where, even to-day, the valuable MSS. in their splendid book-cases are fastened by chains and have to be unlocked when called for for use in the Reading-Room. In his catalogue of the Greek Codices in the Laurentiana Bandini gives an interesting sketch of these curious book-cases. Even under the Elector Johann Frederick of Saxony, in 1535, in Luther’s own time, the books belonging to the Princely Library at Wittenberg were chained. On the other hand, the copy of Holy Scripture which Luther was given during his student years at the Erfurt monastery, and the diligent study of which was enjoined upon him both by the rule of his Order and the words of his Superior, was evidently not thus chained.

  Finally as regards the German translations of the Bible before Luther’s day. Of the seventeen printed editions of the whole Bible referred to above () as dating from the years 1450-1520, the oldest is the so-called Mendel edition of Strasburg, probably dating from 1466, in which year the copy was purchased which now lies in the Munich Stat
e Library. The German Plenaries commence with the year 1470. We hear, for instance, of a printed German Bible being bought for nine florins. The lower price of the Plenaries, on the other hand, made them easier to obtain. Thus according to the data collected by Franz Falk, Johann Schöffer, a printer, in 1510, sent from Mayence to the Easter fair at Leipzig, amongst other books, seventy-three German Postils (Plenaries), priced at five copies a florin. In the following year Schöffer’s agent had to render an account after the Michaelmas fair for the sale of seventy-two postils. The German postils in those days served much the same purpose as Goffine does to-day.

  Besides the printed editions, the manuscript translations still preserved must also be taken into account. Some twenty years ago Wilhelm Walther, the Protestant theologian, devoted a study to this particular branch of research. The results he then arrived at have since been amplified and corrected by Franz Jostes and others, and still await further additions. Walther examined 202 MSS. German Bibles, or portions of Bibles, and came to the conclusion that they represented no less than thirty-four various forms of translation. They have indeed much in common, though they differ slightly according to the dialect of the locality they hail from, or the alterations made by their writers. The translations are, in every case, made on the Latin Vulgate.

  Yet all the printed German Bibles dating from before Luther’s time resemble each other so much in the translation that we can, in reality, speak only of one German Bible. They all sprang originally from a single MS. translation and practically constitute a sort of German vulgate. The type was not, however, of Waldensian origin, as some formerly thought owing to the fact that the Tepler Bible, which had been placed first on the list, shows traces of that heresy. The earliest German translation is, on the contrary, as orthodox as the printed editions. This is probably the fragmentary Bible translated by Master Johann Rellach. It seems to be older than the Tepler Bible, and the first Mendel edition and all the others might well go back to it. Franz Jostes was the first to suppose that “the pre-Lutheran printed version of the Bible is the work of Master Johann Rellach.” The translator was, so he opines, a Dominican belonging to a convent in the diocese of Constance. He happened to be in Rome in 1450, the Jubilee year, and, hearing from Bishop Leonard of Chios of the destruction of the magnificent library at Constantinople he and his brethren were led to vow to make good this loss to the best of their ability by translating the Bible into German. They doubtless made use of even older translations in their work.