Luther Bible

The Luther Bible is a German language Bible translation by the Protestant reformer Martin Luther. A New Testament translation by Luther was first published in September 1522; the completed Bible contained 75 books, including the Old Testament, Apocrypha and New Testament, which was printed in 1534. Luther continued to make improvements to the text until 1545. It was one of the first full translations of the Bible into German that used not only the Latin Vulgate but the original Hebrew and Greek.
Luther did not translate the entire Bible by himself; he relied on a team of translators and helpers that included Philip Melanchthon, a scholar of Koine Greek who motivated and assisted Luther's New Testament translation from Greek, and Matthäus Aurogallus, a linguist and scholar of Hebrew. One of the textual bases of the New Testament translation was the bilingual Latin and Greek version, with its philological annotations, recently published by the Dutch Catholic humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam and called the Novum Testamentum omne.
The project absorbed Luther's later years. The publication of Luther's Bible was a decisive moment in the spread of literacy in early modern Germany, promoting the development of non-local forms of language and exposing all speakers to forms of German from outside their own areas. Thanks to the then recently invented printing press, the result was widely disseminated and contributed significantly to the development of today's modern High German language.

Previous German translations

The Luther Bible was not the first translation or printing of the Bible into German. A number of Bible translations into German, both manuscript and printed, were produced prior to Luther's birth. Historian Margaret O'Rourke Boyle has claimed: "there was no causation between the Lutheran Reformation and the popular reading of Scripture."

There are still approximately 1,000 manuscripts or manuscript fragments of Medieval German Bible translations extant, mainly from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
In total, there were at least eighteen complete printed German Bible editions, ninety editions in the vernacular of the Gospels and the readings of the Sundays and Holy Days, and some fourteen German Psalters by the time Luther first published his own New Testament translation.
Translation approaches

These previous translations were coupled to the Latin Vulgate and typically word-for-word or literal translations that were not idiomatic in any German dialect, nor necessarily intended to be. One previous word-for-word translation from 1350, printed by Johann Mentelin in 1466, has been called linguistically clumsy and partially incomprehensible.
Luther adopted more of a free phrase-by-phrase or dynamic equivalence translation approach and made key use of some of Erasmus' Greek and philological annotations in his Novum Testamentum omne, where it fitted his theology of law versus faith. However, at least some of Luther's passages can be explained as translations from the Vulgate.

Contemporaneous

The Zürich Bible was released in stages from 1525 to 1530, made by Zwingli and Leo Jud. It was a High Alemannic revision of Luther's New Testament altered in word order and vocabulary, with a new Old Testament: the books of the prophets were derived from the 1527 translation of the Anabaptists Ludwig Haetzer and Hans Denck. The publication of the complete Zwinglibibel pre-dates the complete Lutherbibel by four years.
A Catholic revision of Luther's New Testament was issued in 1526 by Hieronymus Emser, and in 1534 Johann Dietenberger released a complete Bible based on Emser's New Testament and the Zwingli/Jud Old Testament.
Johannes Bugenhagen published a Middle Low German version of Luther's New Testament in 1534.

"September Bible" New Testament (1522)

While he was sequestered in the Wartburg Castle for ten months, Luther prepared a translation of the New Testament from Latin and Greek and previous German into Saxon German. He produced the initial version in eleven weeks.
One of the textual bases of Luther's New Testament translation was Erasmus' second edition of the Latin New Testament with Greek and annotations. After leaving the castle, Luther revised passages obscure to him with the assistance of Greek specialist Phillip Melanchthon. Like Erasmus, Luther had learned some Greek at the Latin schools led by the Brethren of the Common Life. These lay brothers had added Greek as a new subject to their curriculum in the late 15th century. At that time Greek was seldom taught even at universities.
Known as the "September Bible", this translation included only the New Testament and was printed in September 1522, six months after he had returned to Wittenberg. Luther also published the Bible in the small octavo format.
In the opinion of the 19th-century Protestant theologian and church historian Philip Schaff:
Luther's translation was "remarkably free for its time" as Luther's translation goal was to produce idiomatic Saxon German rather than a literal translation. Schaff notes:
For example, he translated δίκαιος -forms with gerecht -words to refer to divine righteousness, but with frum -words in contexts which refer to human goodness, with billig for what is fitting or appropriate, and with recht -words when referring to lawful conduct, to create distinctions that reflected his theological view.

Complete Bible

The translation of the entire Bible into German was published in a six-part edition in 1534, a collaborative effort of Luther and many others such as Johannes Bugenhagen, Justus Jonas, Caspar Creuziger, Philip Melanchthon, Matthäus Aurogallus, and Georg Rörer. Luther worked on refining the translation up to his death in 1546; he had worked on the edition that was printed that year.
The Old Testament was translated using a Jewish Masoretic Text of Soncino, the Vulgate of Jerome, the Septuagint, and, later, Latin versions by Santes Pagnino and by Sebastian Münster.
The 1534 edition issued by the Hans Lufft press in Wittenberg included 117 original woodcuts. This reflected the recent trend of including artwork to reinforce the textual message.
According to Biblical historian W. Gordon Campbell, Lufft's printing of the Bible was introduced for sale at the Michaelmas fair in Wittenberg. The work, was printed on 1,824 pages in two volumes with the addition of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha to Luther's 1522 New Testament, and included woodcut illustrations.

Editions during Luther's lifetime

Revisions were made during and after Luther's lifetime, sometimes with multiple editions in a single year. The 1530 edition is regarded as his most thoroughgoing revision of the New Testament. The successive revisions were less constrained by Latin and Greek.
Luther's Bible was a bestseller in its time. About 200,000 copies in hundreds of reprinted editions appeared before Luther died in 1546. However, the book remained too expensive for most people; an unbound copy of the complete 1534 Bible cost the equivalent of a month's wages for the average laborer. Instead, the Bible was bought by churches, pastors, and schools.

Editions after 1546

Even though the translation and revision work on the Luther Bible ended with Martin Luther's death in 1546, this does not mean that the text of the Luther Bible was no longer changed. It was reprinted and distributed in various places. New adaptations were made time and again. Text changes were part of the everyday business for printers and typesetters. Depending on the region, dialectal idiosyncrasies were incorporated and unfamiliar expressions replaced. Due to its fundamental importance for Protestantism, voices were soon raised that wanted to regulate the content of the Luther Bible, but such initiatives were regionally limited. Three regional versions came to prominence.

In central Germany, the Normalbibel imposed by Augustus, Elector of Saxony, was the standard text for decades from 1581 onwards.
The Kurfürstenbibel, printed in Nuremberg in 1641, was compiled by a committee of the theological faculty in Jena with the aim of producing an exact reprint of the 1545 edition. By this time, however, everyday language had already clearly moved away from Luther's language. For this reason, more and more Bible editions tried to make the text easier to understand by adding glossaries.
In 1690, a carefully edited version of the text was also published in northern Germany in the form of the Stader Bibel, after translations of the Luther Bible into Low German had been common in northern Germany until then. Johannes Diecmann, who studied philology in Bremen, had compared numerous editions of the Bible and was thus able to publish the most reliable edition of the Luther Bible to date. The Stader Bibel also formed the textual basis for the first printing of the Canstein Bible Society. This "Canstein Bible" was the most widely used Luther Bible until the end of the 19th century.

Nevertheless, the number of different versions of the text grew. By the end of the 19th century, there were around ten different versions of the Luther Bible, which contained numerous errors, some of which distorted the meaning. In some editions, for example, the "Sintflut" became the "Sündflut", "Osterfest" was inadvertently reinterpreted as the "Opferfest" and Luther's now incomprehensible expression "freidig" became "freudig".

Official church revisions

In 1863, the Deutsche Evangelische Kirchenkonferenz decided to prepare a revision of the Luther Bible. Linguistic modernisation was avoided. The explicit aim was to produce a standardised text in which obviously incorrect passages were carefully corrected. The editing lasted until 1892, when the edition was confirmed by the EKD and published by the Bible societies.
Shortly after the first revision, the EKD realised that the Luther Bible contained too many archaisms and that the spelling did not conform to the current rules. With the introduction of the Duden in the German Reich, a binding spelling system was taught in schools for the first time. So it was unacceptable that the Luther Bible, of all things, deviated from this. The text was carefully modernised and adopted and the second official church revision was published in 1912.
The Bible societies were of the opinion that the text was still completely outdated and that the Luther Bible could therefore lose its character as a popular book, but the First and Second World Wars hampered editorial work. Partial revisions were made in 1956, 1964, 1970, and 1975. In 1976, "Luther NT", a very modern version of the New Testament, was published, but it met with much opposition, so that the translation had to be revised again. In 1984, the third official church revision of the Luther Bible was then completed and published. This version was adapted to the new German orthography in 1999. Here also some revisions have taken place, e.g., Weib changed to Frau. Despite the revisions, the language is still somewhat archaic and difficult for non-native speakers who want to learn the German language using a German translation of the Bible.
In 2017, on the 500th anniversary of Reformation Day and the posting of the Ninety-five Theses, the fourth official revision of the Luther Bible was published. This is the translation currently in use. Some of the text that had been toned down in previous revisions has, in this revision, been reverted to Luther's stronger formulations. The Apocrypha were extensively revised. The Septuagint, the old Greek translation of the Old Testament, was used throughout for the translation of the Apocrypha. As a result, the numbering of the verses had to be revised in some cases.