Section VI: On Luther’s German Translation
Section VI: On Luther’s German Translation
§ 522. Gratefully we acknowledge and proclaim the outstanding blessing that God has given the German churches in Luther’s German translation. It expresses faithfully the meaning of the original text; it consists of perspicuous language; it protects linguistic purity; and in the more difficult passages it provides paraphrases and the help of commentary. Consequently, it is by all means right for us to count the undertaking of this translation among the other blessings that God has given the Church through the ministry of Luther in these latter days. Luther himself testifies quite often that he and his colleagues spent the greatest effort and perspiration on that work. (Cf. Mathesius, Concio. 13. de Luthero, year 1540, p. 142.) Johannes Bugenhagen is said to have held that day on which Luther put the final touch on his translation of the Bible as a festival day with his home church every year because he wanted to make clear the excellence of this work. (For commendations of the German version as translated by Luther, see in Prince George of Anhalt, on Psalm 16, Oper. Germ., f. 508; and Hesshusius, preface on the Psalter, p. 4.)
§ 523. These commendations must be set against: (1) The scoffings of the Calvinists, who do not think much of Luther’s translation. As a result, the preachers of Zürich, Leo Jud, and Piscator of Herborn prepared new German translations after Luther. In his marginal notes on the Bible, Tossanus tries to correct it and bring it back to the soundness of the Hebrew text in almost every chapter. Keckermann is not afraid to write about it in clear words “that it has not insignificant blemishes in the Old Testament and especially in the New and that the translation of Tremellius,” which differs somewhat from Luther’s in almost every verse, at times even giving a completely different sense, “surpasses Luther’s by many miles” (Syst. theol., bk. 1, p. 188).
(2) The false accusations of the Papists who accuse it of multiple subtraction, addition, and change. Bellarmine, De verbo Dei, bk. 2, c. 11: “Luther translates the Bible in bad faith, as is clear from Cochlaeus, Vita Lutheri, year 1522, where we read that, in the new translation of the New Testament that Luther made, there were noted about a thousand changed passages, that is, passages that were added, subtracted, or corrupted.”
** Stanislaus Hosius, De sacro vernacul. legendo, vol. 1, p. 664: “Luther created bad German out of good Latin. Catholics have noted that in translating the Holy Bible he allowed more than six hundred errors.” **
Similar accusations occur in Pistorius (De signis antiquae et nov. fidei, p. 6ff.), Caspar Ulenbergius (Caus. ad papatum defectionis, caus. 8 and 18), Tannerus (Anatom. August. confess., demonstrat. 2, § 24; Dioptra fidei, bk. 1, c. 5, p. 80; bk. 3, c. 15, p. 986), and especially in Zangerus, who wrote an entire book against this version. Almost all of those accusations, however: [a] Flow from a false principle because they examine Luther’s version according to the Latin Vulgate translation, to which they falsely assign authentic authority, and because they consider the apocryphal appendices of the canonical books as canonical. [b] Those accusations begin from the variation and different reading of the manuscripts. [c] They demand from Luther that he should have translated word for word, though he did not count the words in his translation but only respected and expressed their sense. In the reformation of Styria and Carinthia carried out in previous years, the Jesuits did not hesitate to burn Luther’s German Bible in the public marketplace, according to Dr. Polycarp Leyser (preface to Paraph. in histor. passionis Domin.).