June 27, 2017
Devotions: Timeline of the Reformation: The German Bible 1522

Perhaps one of Luther’s greatest achievements was translating the scriptures to form the German Bible. No other work has had as strong an impact on a nation’s development and heritage as has this Book. In Luther’s Germany, there were several regional dialects that impeded the efforts for a unified language. Through the rise of the middle class, trade and the invention of the printing press, the scene was set for Luther’s German Bible – all of which helped to unify the language. Following the Diet of Worms in 1521, Luther’s territorial ruler, Frederick the Wise, had Luther hidden away for safekeeping in the castle at Wartburg. Luther settled down and translated Erasmus’s Greek New Testament in only eleven weeks. This is a phenomenal feat under any circumstances, but Luther contended with darkened days, poor lighting, and his own poor health.

In September of 1522, Luther published his Das Newe Testament Deutzsch – the German New Testament. His Bible contained woodcuts from Lucas Cranach’s workshop and selections from Albrecht Durer’s famous Apocalypse series. His edition sold an estimated five thousand copies in the first two months alone. With the success of his New Testament, and still under the threat of excommunication, Luther turned his attention to the Old Testament. Though knowledgeable in both Greek and Hebrew, he would not attempt it alone. “Translators must never work by themselves,” he wrote. “When one is alone, the best and most suitable words do not always occur to him.”
Luther thus formed a translation committee, which he dubbed his “Sanhedrin.” His translation committee included scholars such as Philipp Melanchthon, Justus Jonas, John Bugenhagen, and Caspar Cruciger. Never before, and not for many years after, was the scholarship of this body equaled. Luther would be the principal translator. Before any word or phrase could be included, it had to pass the ear test for Luther. In other words, it had to sound right. This was the German Bible’s greatest asset, but it meant Luther had to straddle the fence between the literal and the paraphrase.

“It is not possible to reproduce a foreign idiom in one’s native tongue,” he wrote. “The proper method of translation is to select the most fitting terms according to the usage of the language adopted. To translate properly is to render the spirit of a foreign language into our own idiom. I try to speak as men do in the market place. In rendering Moses, I make him so German that no one would suspect he was a Jew.”
Luther, a relentless perfectionist who might spend a month searching out a single word, talked at length with old Germans in the different regions. To better understand the sacrificial rituals in the Mosaic law, he had the town butcher cut up sheep so he could study their entrails. When he ran into the precious stones in the “new Jerusalem” that were unfamiliar to him, he had similar gems from the elector’s collection brought for him to study. Luther longed to express the original Hebrew in the best possible German, but the task was not without its difficulties. “We are now sweating over a German translation of the Prophets,” he wrote. “O God, what a hard and difficult task it is to force these writers, quite against their wills, to speak German.” (adapted and adopted in part from christianitytoday.com, The Bible Translation That Rocked the World: Luther’s Bible introduced mass media, unified a nation, and set the standard for future translations, by Henry Zecher)

Luther did some of his most important work while he was hiding out in the Wartburg castle. He could have sat there sulking about his situation, but instead he continued to do work that would benefit the society and change the world. Even when we feel that we cannot be useful to our family or society, we can still do things that make a difference. We may not change the world, or translate the bible into another language, but staying positive when life turns negative can lead to good things.

Pastor Dave