In May 1521, on his way home from the Imperial Diet at Worms, where he had refused to recant his writings, Martin Luther was seized by armed horsemen. The “kidnapping” had been arranged by his protector, the Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony. Luther was taken to the Wartburg, a castle above Eisenach, where he lived in disguise as “Junker Jörg,” a knight, grew a beard, and wrote.

There, in roughly eleven weeks in the winter of 1521–22, he translated the whole New Testament from Greek into German. It became one of the most influential books ever printed in German.

German Bibles before Luther

Luther did not give the Germans their first Bible. Parts of the Bible had been translated into German since the early Middle Ages, and complete German Bibles circulated in manuscript in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The first Bible printed in any modern European language was a German Bible printed by Johann Mentelin in Strasbourg in 1466. By one common count, eighteen complete printed German Bibles appeared before Luther’s New Testament: fourteen in High German and four in Low German.

These earlier Bibles were translated from the Latin Vulgate and were based on an old translation that had been revised over time. Their German was often stiff, and by Luther’s day it sounded old-fashioned. Historians have debated how widely they were read; some older Protestant accounts implied that the Bible was unknown before Luther, which is not true, while the real popularity of the earlier versions is hard to measure.

The September Testament

Luther translated from the Greek. He used the second edition (1519) of Erasmus’s Greek New Testament, which printed the Greek alongside Erasmus’s own Latin translation (see From manuscripts to printed Bibles). He also knew the Vulgate thoroughly, having used it all his life as a monk and professor.

Back in Wittenberg, Luther revised the translation with his colleague Philip Melanchthon, a fine Greek scholar. It was published in September 1522, without the translator’s name, and is known as the September Testament. The book of Revelation was illustrated with woodcuts from the workshop of Lucas Cranach. The first printing is usually estimated at about three thousand copies. It sold quickly, and a corrected second edition, the December Testament, followed within three months.

Luther added prefaces to the books, and these were part of what readers received. The best known, his preface to Romans, became a classic of Protestant teaching. More controversially, in his 1522 prefaces he ranked the books of the New Testament by how clearly they proclaimed Christ, famously calling James “an epistle of straw” compared with books such as John and Romans. He placed Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation at the end of his New Testament. Later editions dropped the “straw” remark, though the order remained.

The whole Bible, 1534

The Old Testament took much longer. Luther published it in parts from 1523 onward, working from the Hebrew text. For this he relied on a team of Wittenberg colleagues, including Melanchthon, the Hebrew professor Matthäus Aurogallus, the pastor Johannes Bugenhagen, and others such as Caspar Cruciger and Justus Jonas, with Georg Rörer as corrector. They met regularly to go through the text verse by verse, sometimes, according to Luther, spending days on a single word.

The complete Bible was published in 1534 by the Wittenberg printer Hans Lufft. Luther placed the books of the Apocrypha in a separate section between the Testaments, describing them as not equal to holy scripture but useful and good to read. He kept revising the translation for the rest of his life; the last edition he supervised appeared in 1545, the year before his death.

“Look at their mouths”

In 1530, while he waited at Coburg castle during the Diet of Augsburg, Luther wrote a short book defending his translation, the Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen, or Open Letter on Translating. It is vigorous, often rude to his opponents, and full of practical wisdom.

Luther argued that a translator must not ask the Latin letters how to speak German. Instead, he said, you must ask the mother in the home, the children in the street and the common man in the market, and “look at their mouths” to hear how they speak. One of his examples is Jesus’ saying:

For out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. (Matthew 12:34)

A literal German rendering, Luther said, would sound strange, as if the heart had too much of something. A German would say instead something like Wes das Herz voll ist, des gehet der Mund über: “when the heart is full, the mouth runs over.” Similarly, in the angel’s greeting to Mary (Luke 1:28), he objected that a literal rendering of the Latin “full of grace” would make a German think of a barrel full of beer or a purse full of money.

Luther did not always translate freely. He said that where a passage depended on its exact words, he had kept to them, even at the cost of smoothness. His method was a balance between faithfulness to the original and natural German, a debate traced in Word for word or meaning for meaning?.

The word “alone”

The Open Letter was largely a reply to one criticism. In Romans 3:28, Luther had translated Paul’s statement that a person is justified by faith apart from works of the law as justified allein durch den Glauben, “by faith alone.” The World English Bible, following the Greek more closely, reads:

We maintain therefore that a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law. (Romans 3:28)

The word “alone” is not in the Greek, and Catholic critics said Luther had added it to support his doctrine. Luther answered that he knew perfectly well it was not in the text, but that German idiom requires “alone” when one thing is affirmed and another excluded, and that it expressed Paul’s meaning. He also pointed out that earlier Christian writers had spoken of justification by faith alone, a point later documented in detail by the Catholic scholar Joseph Fitzmyer, who lists such uses from the early church and the Middle Ages in his commentary on Romans.

The debate has two sides that are worth stating fairly. Luther’s defenders argue that the word makes explicit what “apart from works” already implies. His critics reply that a translation should not supply a word that settles a disputed question of doctrine, and that “faith alone” in the sense of the Reformation debates was exactly what was in dispute. Many modern translations, Protestant and Catholic, render the verse without “alone,” leaving such interpretation to notes and commentaries.

The Bible and the German language

Luther’s Bible had an enormous influence on the German language. Germany in the sixteenth century had many dialects, and Luther chose a form of German based on the language of the Saxon chancery, which he said was understood across both northern and southern Germany. Through the wide reach of his Bible, catechisms and hymns, many of his words and phrases entered common German.

Historians now caution against saying Luther “created” modern German. Standard German developed over centuries, through printers, chanceries, schools and many other writers. But his Bible was one of the most important single influences on it.

The Bible also spread fast. Contemporary claims and modern estimates vary, but historians agree that hundreds of thousands of copies of Luther’s Bible and New Testament, in whole or in part, were printed during his lifetime, making them among the bestsellers of the age.

Other German Bibles

Luther’s was not the only Reformation Bible in German. In Zurich, a complete Bible was published by the printer Christoph Froschauer in 1531, three years before Luther’s, translated by Huldrych Zwingli’s colleagues and drawing in part on Luther’s work. Catholic scholars produced their own versions: Hieronymus Emser published a New Testament in 1527 that corrected Luther’s text but kept much of its wording, and complete Catholic Bibles by Johann Dietenberger (1534) and Johann Eck (1537) followed.

Luther’s Bible, revised many times, remains in use in German Protestant churches today. It also influenced other translations, including William Tyndale’s English New Testament (see William Tyndale and the English New Testament).

Showing the reasoning

The Open Letter on Translating is valuable precisely because Luther explained himself. Readers who disagreed could see his reasons and argue with them. Most translations since have offered much less.

Open Word Bible tries to make that kind of explanation routine. Every sentence carries a record of the decisions made in translating it, with the alternatives considered and the reasons for the choice. A disputed rendering, such as whether to add a word like “alone,” is the kind of decision such a record is meant to bring into the open. The project translates from the Hebrew and Greek, releases everything under a CC0 licence, and is AI-assisted; none of its text has yet been approved by named human reviewers. See Showing our work.

Sources

  • Luther, Martin. “On Translating: An Open Letter” (1530). Translated by Charles M. Jacobs, revised by E. Theodore Bachmann. In Luther’s Works, vol. 35, Word and Sacrament I. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1960.
  • Bluhm, Heinz. Martin Luther: Creative Translator. St. Louis: Concordia, 1965.
  • Brecht, Martin. Martin Luther: Shaping and Defining the Reformation, 1521–1532. Translated by James L. Schaaf. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990.
  • Cameron, Euan, ed. The New Cambridge History of the Bible. Vol. 3, From 1450 to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
  • Fitzmyer, Joseph A. Romans: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Anchor Bible 33. New York: Doubleday, 1993.
  • Pettegree, Andrew. Brand Luther: 1517, Printing, and the Making of the Reformation. New York: Penguin Press, 2015.
  • Roper, Lyndal. Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet. London: Bodley Head, 2016.
  • Volz, Hans. Martin Luthers deutsche Bibel: Entstehung und Geschichte der Lutherbibel. Hamburg: Wittig, 1978.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article quotes a historic translation or gives its own literal rendering.