Chapter XXXIV: End of Luther’s Literary Labours. the Whole Reviewed (5)

“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.”[2042]

“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.[2043]

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.”[2044] 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.”[2045] 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,[2046] 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?”[2047]

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 to 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?”[2048] Since the Papists will not join those who had rediscovered the “mind of Christ”[2049] and revealed it to humanity, let them keep their hands off the Bible. Another will interpret it for them.

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.”[2050]

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.”[2051] 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.”[2052] 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.”[2053]

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.”[2054] 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?”[2055] 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.[2056]

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.”[2057]

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.[2058]

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.[2059]

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.”[2060]

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.”[2061]

“Only now,” says Hausrath, speaking of the spread of Luther’s Bible,[2062] “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.[2063] 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.”[2064] 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.”[2065]

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.[2066] 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.”[2067] 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.”[2068]

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.”[2069]

Of the superiority of his Bible over 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.”[2070]—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.”[2071]

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.”[2072]

“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.”[2073]—“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.”[2074]

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.[2075] 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.”[2076] “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.[2077] Carlstadt, too, was always making a display of his Greek and Hebrew,[2078] but all of them were only able to “pick holes in the Scriptures” which Luther had translated.[2079]

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.”[2080]

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.[2081] 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.”[2082] “The pious are like unto Jonas; they are cast into the sea of despair, nay, into hell itself.”[2083]

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.”[2084] 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.”[2085]—“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.”[2086] “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.”[2087]—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,”[2088] 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.”[2089]—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.”[2090] “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.”[2091]

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.”[2092] 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.”[2093] 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.[2094]

To begin with, he merely claimed to have discovered the true meaning of Scripture on the controversial points he himself had raised.[2095] 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.”[2096]

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.

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_.”[2097] 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.”[2098]

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.[2099]

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.[2100]

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.”[2101] “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.”[2102]

“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.”[2103]

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”;[2104] 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 (p. 534 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.”[2105]—Popery, Luther says in another passage, “kicked Scripture under the bench.”[2106] He speaks repeatedly in the Table-Talk[2107] 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.[2108]

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 devil.” 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.”[2109]

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.”[2110] 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.’”[2111] “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.[2112]

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,[2113] “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.[2114]

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,”[2115] 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.[2116] 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,”[2117] 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[2118] 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”[2119] 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.[2120] 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 (p. 536) as dating from the years 1450-1520, the oldest is the so-called Mendel edition of Strasburg, probably dating from 1466,[2121] in which year the copy was purchased which now lies in the Munich State Library. The German Plenaries commence with the year 1470. We hear, for instance, of a printed German Bible being bought for nine florins.[2122] 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.[2123] 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.[2124] 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.”[2125] 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.

As for the slight difference shown in the seventeen printed editions of this translation still extant, they are easily explained. The printers, out of consideration for their readers, were pretty free in introducing dialect forms.

If we glance at the language, we shall find here some good points, but as the original manuscripts of which Johann Rellach made use were not all equally good, the same holds of all the printed translations. Of the different varieties which never appeared in print at all, Walther praises some on account of their excellent German, for instance, the one he places second on his list, and which may date from the second half of the 14th century. As a whole, however, particularly in the printed translation, the language suffers from a too slavish adherence to the style of the Latin text. A more exact classification, according to the excellence of the language, is, however, impossible until the whole field has been explored by our German philologists.[2126]

* * * * *

Owing to the matter not having yet been sufficiently investigated, we cannot determine accurately what influence the earlier translations had on the German Bible published by Luther. Luther himself says never a word of having used them.

It would, however, be just as bad to say, on the one hand, that Luther made no use whatever of the older version and had not even a copy of it to refer to in the Wartburg during his work on the New Testament or, on the other, as some have done, that Luther stole the best part of his work from earlier German translators.

When he wrote from the Wartburg that now he knew what it was to translate, and why, hitherto, no translator had dared to put his name to his work,[2127] he proves that he was aware that all previous German translations were anonymous, a fact which presupposes some acquaintance with them. Older translations cannot have been inaccessible to him at the Wartburg, and might well have been sent him by friends at Eisenach or Wittenberg, who, as we know, did occasionally send him books; when he had returned home, moreover, he could easily have found copies in his old monastery or at the University. Portions of the Bible, viz. the Plenaries, were doubtless within his reach from the first, and since he finished his translation of the New Testament in so short a time as three months, though all the while engaged on a number of other works, it is only natural to suppose that he lightened his labours by the use of other versions within his reach as any other scholar would have done, though undoubtedly he used his own judgment in his selection. That, in the work of revision at Wittenberg at a much later date, the mediæval text was employed, appears quite plain from the alterations introduced by Luther.

J. Geffcken was probably not far wrong when he wrote in 1855 in “Der Bilderkatechismus des 15. Jahrhunderts,” “that the similarity between Luther’s version and the old translations could not be merely fortuitous.”[2128]

The same was repeated with still greater emphasis by Krafft in 1883 after he had instituted fresh comparisons: “Whoever compares these passages can no longer doubt that the agreement between Luther’s work and the mediæval German Bible is not merely accidental.”[2129] The result of further research will probably be to confirm the guarded opinion expressed as long ago as 1803 by G. W. Meyer of Göttingen in his “Geschichte der Schrifterklärung”: to assume that “the older translation was not unknown to him,” “that he consulted it here and there,” and even “made his own some of its happy renderings,” is quite compatible with a high esteem for Luther’s translation.[2130]

Modern Protestant writers in this field are also somewhat sceptical about the theory of Luther’s complete ignorance of the older translation of the Bible, and the assertion that he made no use whatever of it. O. Reichert, for instance, in his new work “Luthers deutsche Bibel” makes the following remarks on Luther’s work in the Wartburg, with which we may fittingly conclude this section: “Although he probably was able to make use of Lang’s translation of 1521 in his rendering of Matthew, and as a matter of fact did have recourse to it, and though he most likely also had the old German translation at his elbow, as is apparent from many coincidences, nevertheless, what Luther accomplished is an achievement worthy of all admiration.”[2131]

4. Luther’s Hymns

Amongst the means to be employed for the spread and consolidation of the new Evangel Luther included, in addition to his Bible, German hymns for use in public worship.

In 1523 and 1524 especially, he busied himself in the making of verses. In his _Formula Missæ_ (1523) he expresses the wish that as many German hymns as possible be introduced into the revised service of the Mass and sung, not only by the choir, but by the whole congregation, though, for the nonce, the customary Latin hymns might be used.[2132] With his wonted energy and industry he at once entrusted the work of composing hymns to some of his Wittenberg friends, and despatched letters so as to obtain help even from afar. He was particularly anxious to see the Psalms in a German dress. His translation of the Psalter, which he had just completed, naturally drew his thoughts to the Psalms which so admirably express all the religious emotions of the soul, especially its trusting reliance upon God. He was not very confident of his own powers of composition: “I have not the knack of doing this as well as I wish to have it done,” he writes to his old friend Spalatin at Nuremberg.[2133] He asks him and his other friends for an eminently simple, popular versification of the Psalms, in pure German, “free from the new-fangled words used at Court”; it should keep as closely as possible to the sense and yet not be stilted. For this Spalatin was qualified by “a rich flow of eloquence, and by many years’ experience.” Luther sends him at the same time a poetic effort of his own.

In view of the beauty and the deep albeit simple grandeur of the olden Catholic hymns the task Luther had undertaken of composing something new was naturally not an easy one. He himself had much to say in praise of the magnificent old hymns in which the faithful praised their Creator or poured forth their griefs before Him. “In Popery,” he once said in a sermon, “they used to sing some fine hymns: ‘He who broke the might of Hell,’ item ‘Jesus Christ to-day is risen.’ This comes from the heart.”[2134] “A beautiful sequence is also sung in Advent,” he says, thus paying tribute even to a Latin hymn, viz. the _Mittitur ad Virginem_. “It is well done and not too barbarous.”[2135]

Luther nevertheless persevered in his own efforts in spite of his misgivings, especially as the contributions of his assistants failed to reach his standards. Of the eight hymns contained in the so-called Wittenberg “Achtliederbuch” four were composed by Luther, while of the twenty-five in the Erfurt “Enchiridion” eighteen were his; the collection, however, which he characterised as having been started by himself, the “Geistliche Gesangbüchlein” of Johann Walther, consisting chiefly of translations or adaptations, contained thirty-two hymns, twenty-four of them being written by Luther. This was the result of his efforts up to the end of 1524.[2136]