Martin Luther's Great Surprise Translating the New Testament, 1522–2022

Abstract

Martin Luther's Great Surprise Translating the New Testament, 1522–2022 Timothy J. Wengert An after-dinner speech, given at the celebration of the 500th anniversary of Luther's "September Testament" for the opening of the Kessler Collection exhibition on October 26, 2022, at the Pitts Theology Library of the Candler School of Theology, Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia). In November 1532, Martin Luther sat at table with his students and mused about his nearly completed translation of the entire Bible, ten years after his rendering of the New Testament in German had first appeared. He was working with Wittenberg's team of translators on the Apocrypha, which they considered an important but secondary part of the Bible. There is so much hard labor in translating Ecclesiasticus. When it is done, I will stop working altogether. Nowadays you have everything in Holy Scripture, which you can now use after my death. It certainly took enough hard work but is scarcely used by us. Our adversaries read it more than our own people. I believe that Duke George [of Saxony] reads it more diligently than our own nobility. For he confessed to having said, "If only that monk had completely translated the Bible and then gone back to where he belonged!" I have this testimony from Duke George and the entire Papal party, who now use our translation.1 Credit Katie Luther's beer for some after-dinner exaggeration by her spouse. But to appreciate fully just what an impact Luther's biblical translation work had on his contemporaries, there is no better place to begin than with Duke George of Saxony, sponsor of the Leipzig Debates between Luther and Johannes Eck in 1519 and Luther's implacable enemy ever after. [End Page 172] So, we begin with Duke George, cousin to Luther's prince, Elector Frederick the Wise. When the house of Wettin split into two parts in the fifteenth century, Frederick's side got Wittenberg and, hence, the claim to the electorship, the highest rank in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, while George's side got Leipzig, a much better city, but they coveted the electoral dignity ever after until they were awarded it in 1547. According to one account, at the Leipzig Debates, when Luther said something positive about the martyred Czech reformer, Jan Hus, George was heard to gasp, "Egad, sir, that's the plague." With that, the lines were drawn, and, until his death in 1539, George fought Luther tooth and nail. It comes as no surprise, then, that when Wittenberg published Luther's translation of the New Testament in 1522, Duke George, far from welcoming it, started a campaign to rid his lands of all of Luther's writings, including that translation. Click for larger view View full resolution Image provided courtesy of the Richard C. Kessler Reformation Collection at Pitts Theology Library, Candler School of Theology, Emory University. [End Page 173] George's court theologian, Jerome Emser, even wrote a tract defending the banning of Luther's New Testament in ducal Saxony and pointing out ad nauseam every one of Luther's errors in that work. Luther responded by writing one of his most influential pamphlets, On Secular Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed.2 In it he counseled the ducal Saxon citizenry to a kind of passive resistance. When George's henchmen come a-calling, he wrote, let them look for the banned books but don't tell them where you hid them. Flee if you could, help others as you ought, accept punishment if you must, but in matters of the conscience before God, follow St. Peter's advice and say, "We must obey God rather than mortals." In addition to book-burning, Duke George also embarked on a different approach, one that will help us understand why anyone should celebrate Luther's translation 500 years later. On the one hand, on 21 September 1523 Emser finished that line-by-line refutation and correction of Luther's translation, commenting on the Reformer's prefaces, glosses, and individual points of translation, finishing with a wholesale attack on Luther's method and warning the reader not to buy Luther's...