Deutsch / German Bible History (2)

**List: German Ministry

the Bible ( die Bibel )
German...
   "Few vernacular Bibles in the major tongues of Europe are to
the same degree a "one-man Bible" as the German Bible of Mar-
tin Luther.   To add to this, there is the enormous influence this
Luther version had on the translators into other languages who
followed him.   The place of leadership he held in the Reforma-
tion of the [traditional] Church doubtless contributed to this influence, but
it does not account for all of it.   For the men and women of the
sixteenth century read Luther’s rendering of the sacred writers and
pronounced it "good."
   A mere recital of the dates, places, printers, formats and types
of a Scripture edition can never tell the heart of the story of its
making.   Least of all could this be so in the story of Luther’s
earliest German Scriptures.   A mighty personality was wrought
into them.   The man to whom the [religious] world was so real and
near, and to whom the struggle between good and evil, truth and
falsehood so actual, that it could credibly be told of him that he
threw his inkpot at the devil when hindered in his greatest task
with pen and ink,--such a man can scarcely be judged by cold
standards of literary criticism when his output is compared with
that of other men.
   Even a foreigner with but small knowledge of the German
tongue can sense the homely forcefulness of Luther’s Bible.   To
the men of his own race it appealed with a power that must have

been comparable to the effect on the ancient churches when they
first read Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians or the Gospel of John.
The German scholar Fritzsche gives this verdict on Luther as a
translator: "As far as the German language is concerned, Luther
was just the man to achieve remarkable results.   Himself a Ger-
man through and through, sprung from the people and planted
in their midst, he mastered, as no one else of his time, the very
stuff of the language as it then lay at hand, and could therefore
give free play to his own creative genius."
  The Historical Cata-
logue of Printed Bibles
, which gives (p. 492) this quotation, pic-
tures as follows some of those "remarkable results:" "As Luther’s
Bible at once became the most widely read book in Germany, it
naturally exerted a commanding influence on the development of
the German language.   At first the editions which appeared in
South Germany . . . required numerous dialectic changes or expla-
nations of words.   But a hundred years later Luther’s High Ger-
man was everywhere dominant in schools as well as churches."

   It was no vacuum into which this version was projected.   To
say nothing of the manuscripts of Scripture in German dialects,
which had circulated for centuries, there were at least eighteen
editions of the whole Bible, besides numerous Psalters and other
Portions
, that had been printed before Luther issued his New
Testament in 1522.   Since printing was first achieved by a Ger-

man on German soil, it is no surprise to see that the earliest Bible
printed in any modern language was the German Bible of 1466,
at Strassburg, editor unknown.   But [some, not] all these texts, of manuscripts
and of printed books alike, were rendered from the Latin Vulgate.
Luther’s New Testament was the first to make use of the Greek
text of Erasmus: he used the second edition of it, which had been
issued only three years before his own book was finished and only
a year before he had begun it.
   Three folio volumes appeared two years later, in 1524, as the
earliest instalments of the Luther Old Testament.   These con-
tained only the books from Genesis to the Song of Solomon.   It
was eight more years before the rest of the canonical books (the
Prophets) were issued.   And in 1534--only one year before Miles
Coverdale’s first English Bible appeared--the first complete Bible
of Marin Luther was printed at Wittemberg.   So popular, how-
ever, were the parts separately issued, that there are many Bibles
listed as "combined Bibles," because they used Luther’s version
as far as it was available and drew the rest from other sources or
rendered anew for themselves.   Such for example was the Swiss
Bible of 1529, in six volumes, published by the Reformed Church
of the city of Zurich, and reissued in a single volume two years
later, with some revisions and with a preface by the celebrated
Reformer Zwingli."
--1000 Tongues, 1939   [Info only: ?]

   "Painstaking study of these early Bibles of Central Europe,
whose appearance coincided with the progress of the Reforma-
tion, has revealed much of interest in the interlocking literary and
doctrinal relationships between the translators, the editors, the
printers and the artists who united to produce them.   None of
them can be safely studied or judged as a separate undertaking.
And the center of such study lies in the career of Martin Luther,
not only as a Biblical scholar but also as a leader of European
thought in the first half of the 16th century."
--1000 Tongues, 1939   [Info only:
No endorsement of M. Luther's soteriology.]

   "Most German Bibles printed in the centuries since have been
revisions of the Luther text.   Some have been official, some pri-
vate.   Some have been issued by State Churches, with "approba-
tion" such as that enjoyed by the first edition from the Elector of
Saxony.   Many, especially in recent years, have been planned and
circulated by Bible Societies.   In very recent times numerous
German Scriptures, chiefly New Testaments, have made their
appearance, giving the German reader as many independent ver-
sions, based on modern texts of the Greek New Testament, ... with
or without comparison of the original text.   All these afford a wide
choice to the German reader, according to his preference for free-
dom or literalism and the measure of his loyality to the now tradi-
tional phrases of Luther’s "classical" German."
--1000 Tongues, 1939   [Info only:
Many German bibles after 1912 are Critical Text.]

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