The Bible Translator 73.3 (Dec 2022)

https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/tbtd/73/3

Five Hundred Years of Martin Luther’s September Testament

The translation of the New Testament into German by Martin Luther (1483–1546) appeared in September, 1522—five hundred years ago. The occasion of this quincentenary has been marked in many other publications and conferences throughout the year 2022. The Bible Translator joins in the celebrations with this special issue on Luther’s 1522 New Testament translation, commonly known as the September Testament.

At the beginning of 1522, during his stay at the Wartburg Castle, Luther started working on the translation. The Reformation, with its emphasis on the centrality of Scripture, needed a readable Bible. Luther completed the entire enterprise in around three months’ time. In May of the same year the work was finished. The checking of the text and the printing of the book took another four months, and in September 1522 Luther’s new translation was published. In the following years, Luther kept revising his New Testament translation, but also began working on the translation of the Old Testament with the help of Hebrew scholars in his circle. This project took significantly longer, around eleven years. Parts of the Old Testament translation appeared between 1523 and 1532. In 1534 the entire Luther Bible was published for the first time. During Luther’s life, it was revised three times: in 1539, 1541, and 1545. This German Bible translation remains Luther’s greatest achievement. It became the most authoritative translation in the German language and was used as a model for Bible translations in many other languages. It was praised by Goethe, Herder, and Nietzsche for its importance for the German language and German literature.

Though Luther’s New Testament translation of 1522 was not the first German translation, it was a groundbreaking publication in many ways. First of all, unlike his predecessors, whose translations were based on the Latin of the Vulgate, Luther founded his translation on the Greek text of the New Testament, for which he used Desiderius Erasmus’s Novum Testamentum of 1519. He shared the opinion of humanists such as Lorenzo Valla (ca. 1407–1457) and Erasmus that the Vulgate could no longer be used as a source because it was textually corrupted by many centuries of textual transmission, and that going back to the original texts (ad fontes) was paramount for a correct understanding. Furthermore, by using the German language in its full capacity and not keeping the German text unnaturally close to the Latin of the Vulgate, as many of his predecessors had done, Luther showed that vernaculars were equally capable of communicating God’s word. This promoted the emancipation of vernacular Bible translation in other European countries. In terms of text layout, too, Luther’s New Testament was groundbreaking. Instead of the much-used two-column layout, a one-column layout was used to facilitate reading. For the genealogies in Matthew and Luke a line-by-line layout was used, which was later adopted by William Tyndale for his New Testament (1526). Luther also used his translation to proliferate the essence of his new Reformation theology, which focused on the power of God’s grace. For this he used not only the translation itself, but also the prefaces to the individual books and the notes he added to the margin of the text. Luther’s New Testament also exploited the possibilities of the printing press to the fullest. The first print run was somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 copies, but already in early December the book was sold out. The same month a second edition appeared. The total number of New Testaments alone printed during Luther’s lifetime is estimated to be around 100,000, a huge number for those days. Finally, it was Luther’s Bible that eventually led to the establishment of the Canstein Bible Society (1710) in the German city of Halle. The Bible Society’s vision was to mass produce Luther Bibles at affordable prices—much the same vision that led to the foundation of the Bible Society movement a century later. Perhaps no other translation has had such a profound influence on the wider field of Bible translation as Martin Luther’s.

The authors in this collection treat various aspects of this groundbreaking translation. Henk Jan de Jonge retraces the origin of Luther’s reading of Eli eli lama asabthani in Matt 27.43, a reading that has become widely known through Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, which was performed for the first time in Leipzig in 1727.

Anja Lobenstein-Reichmann focuses on Luther’s role as translator of the Bible and his role in the development of the German language. The article also assesses Luther’s translation as a tool of emancipation for the common believer.

Euan Cameron investigates the question of how Luther’s translation was different from its predecessors in the German language, and compares Luther’s text with that of Anton Koberger’s German Bible of 1483. The article also discusses the way in which Luther made use of Erasmus’s Greek New Testament of 1519.

Martin Leutzsch compares Luther’s September Testament with a contemporary translation of the Gospel of Matthew (1521) by Luther’s friend Johannes Lang, who, like Luther, used Erasmus’s Greek text as his base.

Hans Förster suggests a different punctuation and therefore a different reading of 1 Cor 7.16-17 than is found in the current Greek text editions and in modern Bible translations. He discusses the history of the passage on the basis of several manuscripts, Erasmus’s New Testament editions, and Martin Luther’s translation.

Not long after he submitted his article to our journal, Henk Jan de Jonge learned that he was terminally ill. He passed away on April 16, 2022. Henk Jan was Professor of the History of New Testament Interpretation (1987–1991) and full Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature (1991–2006) at the University of Leiden. He not only published in the fields of New Testament exegesis and the history of early Christianity, but was also an expert on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New Testament scholarship. He was particularly known as an Erasmus scholar, and was for many years editor of the critical edition of the works of Erasmus. He will be remembered for his meticulous scholarship, but also for his generosity and kindness.

The editor wants to extend her thanks to Mr. Teunis van Lopik (Netherlands), who checked details of Henk Jan de Jonge’s article and finalized it for print, and to Andy Warren-Rothlin, who translated Anja Lobenstein-Reichmann’s article from the German.

Marijke de Lang

Articles

The Reading Asabthani in Luther’s Translation of Matthew 27.46
Henk Jan de Jonge

Luther’s Contribution as Bible Translator to the German Language
Anja Lobenstein-Reichmann

The September Testament and Its Predecessors: How Was Luther’s New Testament Translation Different from Previous German Versions?
Euan Cameron

The First Bible Translations into German Based on Erasmus’s New Testament: Johannes Lang’s and Martin Luther’s Versions of the Gospel of Matthew
Martin Leutzsch

Some Observations on the Punctuation in 1 Corinthians 7.16-17
Hans Förster