On the first Sunday in Lent, March 9, 1522, Luther began a daily sermon series in the pulpit of the Wittenberg city church, known as the Invocavit Sermons after the Latin name for the Sunday. Luther criticized the people of Wittenberg for not allowing love for their neighbor guide how they reformed the church. The weak need to be taught slowly and patiently so they desire the change and are not forced to do so before they were ready.
The reformer discussed the issues in the light of two sets of definitions. When something is necessary to sustain faith, then it must be done. Faith needs to be firm and immovable. When it is not, Christian love must control our actions for the sake of weak brothers and sisters in Christ. Love is flexible and does not insist on its own rights.
In addition there are things which must be done and other things which we are free to do. For example, God forbids the making of images in some places in Scripture and in other places commands that they be made. So we are free to make them, providing they are done for God-pleasing reasons. What we should worry about is when we make them to worship them or donate them because we think we’re doing it as a good work.
The sermon series greatly moved those who heard it. The town immediately settled down. Luther was now their preacher.
The two treatises of early 1522 became very popular and were well-read during Luther’s lifetime and afterwards. However, they did little to calm the unrest brewing in Germany, however. To complicate matters, men from the Saxon town of Zwickau came to town, claiming to be profits, whom God spoke to directly. They taught many doctrines that would be eventually adopted by the Anabaptist movement, including that infant baptisms were not baptisms at all. Philip Melanchthon confronted them, but was at a loss as to how to answer them.
In mid-February, the Wittenberg town council begged him to return. And so he did, emerging permanently from his retreat on 6 March 1522, five hundred years aggo today. While he was on the road, he wrote to the Elector to warn him of that development. The Elector was worried he wouldn’t be able to protect Luther. Wittenberg was just fifty miles from the Saxon territory of Duke George, a supporter of the papacy — more or less. He would not hesitate to burn Luther at the stake as a heretic.
When Luther arrived home, he spent the next few days conferring with his allies. He decided for the time being not to resume his professorship, but for the next two years preached regularly in the city church (St. Mary’s) and worked on his Bible translation. He began his time as “Preacher in Wittenberg,” on the first sunday in Lent, known as Invocavit Sunday, March 9, 1522. He continued to preach for seven days, concluding on the second Sunday in Lent.
Pastor Brent Keller was recently installed as pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Guttenberg, Iowa and St. Paul Lutheran Church in McGregor, Iowa. His bio has been updated at: https://whatdoesthismean.blog/meet-rev-brent-keller/
Romans 8 is one of the most comforting chapters in the Holy Scriptures. It follow St. Paul’s description of the frustration he feels with struggling against his old Adam, the dark, sinful self that remains in a Christian. It begins by affirming that Christ can help us with our struggles with the sinful flesh. He fulfilled the requirements of the law for us, setting us free from slavery to our sinful flesh.
The passage before us talks about how we can live according to the Spirit, even while still living in conflict with our sinful desires and all the while suffering in this world. There are several phrases in it that are difficult to render in English. How translators handle them reveal much about their theology.
In Romans 8:15, Paul explains the new status we have as Christians. We do not live fearfully, as a slave fears displeasing his master, but we live the way children and heirs of the paterfamilias — the father of the house, who we can call “daddy.”
The Greek for our relationship is υἱοθεσίας (huiothesias) literally means “to place as a son.” It is the term for adoption, which was very common in Roman and Greek culture. It made the person adopted an heir with all the same rights, privileges and status of the one who adopts. Even slaves could be adopted and thus freeing them and more. It was almost as common to adopt adults as it was to marry. In fact, Julius Caesar adopted his ally Octavius, who then was known as the son of Caesar, and, when Caesar was honored as a god, the son of god.
Following the Vulgate, The English Standard Version translates it as a part of a title for the Holy Spirit (the Spirit of adoption as sons), the old New International Version in a similar, but less accurate way (the Spirit of sonship). The Good News Bible separates it into an event (the Spirit makes you God’s children), losing its connection to the Spirit entirely.
Martin Luther translated the phrase very differently. He wrote “einen kindlichen Geist” — a child-like spirit. If Paul is comparing attitudes, this is likely what he meant. We are not given a slave’s attitude, or the attitude of the follower of a pagan god, which is motivated by the fear of punishment. We are given the attitude of an adopted son. We approach the Father in prayer “confidently with all assurance, as dear children ask their dear father.” (Small Catechism 3.1.2)
Paul then tells us what this adoption means for us. It is not our imagination. The Holy Spirit is our witness, testifying with our spirit that we are God’s children. Since we are God’s children then, we are God’s heirs, heirs with Christ and share everything he has. Since Jesus suffered that he might enter his glory, so we share his sufferings with him.
The Reformed tradition and the Lutheran tradition understand Romans 8:17 differently. For the Reformed, the passage is conditional. If we share in Christ’s suffering, we will be rewarded by sharing in his glory. Lutherans understand it unconditionally. Since we share in his sufferings, we will share in his glory.
The Greek construction can be legitimately understood either way. It is:
εἴπερ συμπάσχομεν ἵνα καὶ συνδοξασθῶμεν.
The Greek particle εἴπερ sets up a relationship between two phrases. It can be conditional or unconditional. What is important is the two are linked. Should the first happen, the second must happen. So, if a translation says, in effect, “since,” we suspect a Lutheran had something to do with it. If it translates, “if,” then a Reformed translator. So, for example, the Evangelical Heritage Version has “since we suffer with him, so that we may also be glorified with him” and the NRSV “if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.”
Philippians 2:5-11 is often called the Christ Hymn. Verses 6-11 are and ancient hymn which explain the work of Christ in a profound poem. The center of the poem is the phrase “death on the cross.” The first part of the hymn speaks about the way Jesus thinks. He let go of his power and glory as God, became a man, then humbled himself further to die on the cross. The second part is how God lifted him up to his full godhood giving him the name above all names. Everyone in the end will confess that Jesus Christ is Yahweh to the Father’s glory.
A lot of meaning is packed into these few verses. how a translator presents several phrases in this passage reveals much about what he or she believes. In Greek, verse five is: “Τοῦτο φρονεῖτε ἐν ὑμῖν ὃ καὶ ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ” (literally: “Think this in you all the also in Christ Jesus”) Here St. Paul urges the Philippians to think like Jesus thinks. Jesus put the interests of others — all of us — before his own. φρονεῖτε comes from the verb φρονέω, which means to have an opinion, to consider carefully, to develop an attitude. It is a command to think a certain way. In American idiom it is to have a mindset. The pronoun, which tells us who is to have the mindset, is plural. It is the congregation Paul wants to follow Jesus’ example.
There is a wide variety of ways translators handle the phrase. The King James Version is “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.” The English Standard version translates: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus.” New American Standard has: “Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus,” the New Jerusalem Bible: “Make your own the mind of Christ Jesus” and the Good News Bible: “think the same way that Christ Jesus thought.”
This variety helps us to see that, no matter how hard you try, translation loses something. All of the translations lose track of the fact that Paul is not addressing individuals. Nor is it an ethical you (as if you read it to mean “one should have the mind of Christ in him”). Paul urges the congregation to be humble and think of others first as a group. In addition, the word “mind” sounds strange to English ears when used this way. Finally, “attitude” often has a negative sense in American English (he has an attitude!) when Paul is intending the opposite.
This is the very reason why Lutheran seminary students are required to learn to read Greek and Hebrew. So, what can a layman, who has a vocation other than pastoral ministry? The best advice is to compare several solid translations. Where you see a range of interpretation like this, you will know the original text is not easily translated. You can check commentaries (The People’s Bible commentaries, like this one: Kuschel, Harlyn J. Philippians, Colossians, Philemon. The People’s Bible. Milwaukee, WI: Northwestern Pub. House, 1986, are good sources for laymen), Ask your pastor, or both.
One of the best known Bible verses is John 3:16-17. Beloved by millions, it is called “the gospel in a nutshell.” In the King James Version (KJV), it is:
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.
If you open multiple versions to the verse, you will notice very quickly is that they are virtually the same. This is very comforting. It shows the “tradition” side of translation. If you do not read Greek, this tells you also that the original is very clear. There is little controversy as to what it means. By comparing them carefully, you will notice several words are handled slightly differently. One is in the version you likely memorized as a child: “only begotten.” The original Greek word is: μονογενῆ (monogene).
To modern English speakers, the word sounds very old. “Beget” means that a man is the biological father of a child. We often say he fathered a child. When the King James Version used this word, it was following, St. Jerome’s Vulgate (unigenitum) and Martin Luther’s German Bible (eingeborenen). They, in turn, were influenced by the Nicene Creed’s, “Begotten not made.” The point of the creed was that Jesus is eternally God’s Son, not the first created being, as the heretic Arius maintained.
So far, so good. So why do so many modern translations say something like: “only son” or “unique son” instead? It turns out that the word μονογενῆ has a much wider meaning in the Greek language. It means “Unique, one-of-a-kind.” It is used to describe Jesus and an only child in the Gospel of John.
What does it tell us when a translation uses “Only Begotten?” Such a translation has a concern for both word-for-word translation and to preserve a connection with doctrinal language. For example, when describing the greeting of the Angel Gabriel to Mary, (Luke 1:28) Martin Luther said he should have translated it “Hi, Mary!” But for doctrinal reasons and tradition, he translated: “Gegrüßet seiest du, Holdselige” (Greetings be to you, blessed one!)
When a translation uses some form of “only, unique, one-of-a-kind,” the emphasis is on what it meant to the original readers. In our next post, we’ll try another passage I use to get to know a translation.
“Translation is treason,” “Translation is tradition,” are two ways to translate a famous Latin pun. (translatio traditio est) It is credited to St. Jerome, the early Church father who translated the Bible into Latin, giving us the famous version known as the Vulgate. For pastors and Bible scholars it is a cautionary proverb. You really need to carefully test translations — and take care when you do the work of a translator yourself. Over a series of posts, we will look at passages that can be used to do just that.
The beginning of the Gospel of John, known as the Prologue, begins at the Beginning. Not the beginning of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, as the Gospels of Matthew and Luke do. Not the beginning of the ministry of Jesus, as does Mark. The Apostle John takes us back to the beginning of creation. Here, John tells us, the Son of God had already been in existence with God the Father. He reveals that he is ὁ λόγος (the Logos), the Word in Greek philosophy. He is all of wisdom and reason itself in one person. This Word is not a created being, nor a spin off of God’s own essence, but God Himself, present in a relationship with the Father forever. This Word is the Creator of all things and yet became a flesh and blood human being — Jesus of Nazareth. We cannot understand God. Yet in him, the only begotten God, we can know God.
At first, you might wonder why this is a test passage for translations. In almost all translations, it reads:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)
Even the translations that focus on conveying what the translator believe the text says emphasize that the Word is eternal and is fully God and do so even more than the surface meaning of the Greek.
There is one “translation,” however, that translates the last phrase: “… the Word was a god.” (John 1:1, the New World Translation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. See https://www.jw.org/en/library/bible/study-bible/books/john/1/ ) (Aside: the so-called translation committee that produced the NWT had no one on the staff that could read either Greek or Hebrew. So it is really not a translation, but a commentary.) The translation justifies this reading by noting the original text, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος, (and God was the Word) does not have the word “the” in front of it. In New Testament Greek, when you want to talk about a specific example of something, you use ὁ, the definite article in front of it. They do this to keep the text from proving the Scripture teaches Jesus is God.
The problem with this way of looking at the text is that the lack of an article in New Testament Greek does not mean one example of the noun out of many. For example, when St. Paul speaks of θεοῦ πατρὸς in his First Letter to Timothy (1:2), he is not speaking of one god or one father, but God the Father. The lack of an article in New Testament Greek, as it is in English, is a matter of style. For example, in John 19:21, Jesus is called the King of the Jews both with and without the article.
To translate it as the Watchtower does here brings all kinds of problems. For example, the Bible clearly states there is only one true God. If Jesus is only one of many beings called a god, then he has to be a false god. The New Testament clearly teaches the opposite. Also, in other places in the New Testament Jesus is called God clearly (Romans 9:5, Titus 2:13, etc.) Third, the Evangelist John continues in this chapter to tell us that Jesus possesses characteristics that only God possesses. (He is eternal 1:2, the creator with the Father 1:3) and is Light and Life (1:4)
For more detailed information on this phrase, see William Weinrich’s helpful discussion at John 1:1–7:1. Edited by Dean O. Wenthe and Curtis P. Giese. Concordia Commentary. Saint Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 2015, 94.
So you’ve decided to get (more) serious about studying the Bible. Maybe you’ve joined a Bible Study or picked up a book or two to help you learn more and get into God’s Word more. That’s very good! Faith comes — and grows stronger — by hearing and reading — the Word.
So, which Bible should you choose? Pastors are asked this question all the time. English readers are blessed with dozens of choices. You can read and compare most of them at the Bible Gateway for free. what do you do with them? Much depends on your purpose.
Some are good for reading. They smooth out the language, choosing words to explain what the translator thinks the Bible is saying. The problem is often that reflects the translator’s theology. That is acceptable when you are just reading large sections of the Bible, but can be a problem when you want to know what the Bible says in detail.
Other translations try to stay close to the original Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic text of the Scriptures. The translators try hard to keep close to the original words. Problems occur when they do this. One is it is impossible to convey all the meaning of one word in Greek into English. The translator has to choose one or another word.
Try this little experiment. If you cannot use the word “excellent,” what word would you choose in it’s place? If you say, “good,” doesn’t it mean the same thing? Almost, but not quite. This happens even more when translating from another language.
With some translations, you have to work at following sentences that sound awkward in English. That is why it is often best to choose two or three translations when you do a deep dive into God’s word. When you find that the different versions of a passage are about the same, you can be sure the original meaning is pretty straightforward. If they are substantially different — not so much. When this happens, ask your pastor. He had to learn Greek and Hebrew in seminary and see what’s going on in the original text and explain it to you.
So, when you pick translations as your study companion, look for a few. You can test them out in Bible Gateway or another app or online Bible site. You may want to check out the English Standard Version, which the Lutheran Church — Missouri Synod uses for worship and study materials, the Evangelical Heritage Version, produced by conservative Lutheran translators, The New King James Version and The New American Standard Version. If you can find it, the original New International Version (from the 1980s) is OK. Do not use the one currently for sale in bookstores, however, which has in recent years allowed liberal translators to alter it. The same goes for the old, 1950s era Revised Standard Version. Your pastor may also have some suggestions.
In future posts, I’ll take up passages from Scriptures I use to test translations. I pray those will help you as you begin to acquire your Bibles for study.
When the forces of the Elector of Saxony whisked Martin Luther away to the Wartburg Castle for safe keeping, the public assumed Luther had been assassinated. Albrecht Dürer wrote in his diary: “O God, if Luther is dead, who now will teach us the holy Gospel so clearly? Dear God, what would he still have been able to write in ten or twenty years! O all you pious Christians, help me earnestly to mourn this divinely inspired man, and pray that God would send us another enlightened man.” (Martin Brecht, Martin Luther 2:473). As word got out that he was safe, Europe began to become unsettled even further.
Even though the Edict of Worms had made Luther and his friends outlaws, the allies of the papacy soon discovered it was not enforceable. Emperor Charles V and his Spanish forces were at war with France. He also faced several revolts which needed to be put down. Sweden and Denmark were also fighting over Swedish independence. Suleiman the Magnificent began to lead his Ottoman Turk forces against Christian Europe, capturing Belgrade. Unrest began to ripple throughout northern Europe as people who agreed with Luther began to protest conditions, sometimes violently.
In Wittenberg, Luther’s friends Philipp Melanchthon and Nikolaus Von Amsdorf were joined by Justus Jonas. Together they tried to steer the town and University through the tricky task of applying the teachings of the Reformation without crushing the faith of everyday people. Luther proposed to the Wittenberg Town Council that Melanchthon be licensed to preach in his place, even though he was a married layman. Everyone agreed but the All Saints’ Foundation, which scheduled the preachers, refused. Another professor at the University, Andreas Karlstadt, initially an ally of Luther, began to urge immediate reformation of practices in Wittenberg and soon came into conflict with Luther and his friends.
In the fall of 1521, public agitation against private masses, distributing the Lord’s Supper in one kind and other practices Luther had criticized began to grow. The Elector forbid such changes for the time being, but in some cases, he was ignored. Luther decided in the beginning of December he had to see for himself what was going on.
Without notifying the court, dressed as a knight accompanied by a servant, he traveled to Wittenberg, where he stayed with Philipp Melanchthon. He met with his friends, sent a letter to Spalatin and then returned to the Wartburg, determined to write a tract against the unrest.
Martin Luther was out of the public eye five hundred years ago. His prince had arranged to have him taken to the Castle Wartburg, his fortress overlooking Eisenach, the town where Luther went to school as a child. He had a suite designed to house noble hostages, where he was able to write letters and had been working on model sermons for Advent.
One of the major projects that Luther and his allies had on their agenda was to translate the Bible into German so that everyday people could read and understand it themselves. There were some rather wooden, inaccurate versions of the Bible available in German, none of which were very popular and were translated from the Vulgate Latin version To complicate matters, German was spoken in many hundreds of dialects, some of which could not be understood outside of a small area. Two dialects were understood in all the courts in Germany — one spoken by the court of the Holy Roman Emperor and the other by the court of Luther’s prince, the Elector of Saxony.
Luther had made some quiet visits outside the castle from time to time, disguised as Junker Jörg. During one trip to Wittenberg, he arranged with Georg Spalatin and his friend Philipp Melanchthon to gather materials to translate the New Testament. In mid-December of 1521, he began his work. In eleven weeks, he finished the first draft.
Luther translated the New Testament from Erasmus’ Greek New Testament of 1519. Erasmus also prepared a new Latin translation he published alongside the Greek. Luther used the court language of Saxony to for his German version. He would frequently ask everyday people how they would say things to bring the New Testament into everyday language. For the book of Revelation, he even had his friends at court show him the jewels mentioned and asked them to describe the jewels. The result was a conversational, easy to understand version of the Bible.
When the reformer returned to Wittenberg in March of 1522, he and Melanchthon improved the translation. The first edition appeared in September 1522. It sold out quickly and was reprinted in December of 1522. Luther then turned to translating the Old Testament with a group of his friends that he called his Sanhedrin. The first publication of the full Bible came in 1534. Luther and his friends would continue to revise the translation until the day of Luther’s death.
The Luther Bible was very popular. The printing press made a copy of the Bible affordable to every middle class household in Germany. Even Luther’s opponents praised the work. So many people now read the Bible that it unified the literary language of Germany as High German. William Tyndale was inspired by its success to translate the Bible into English. Tyndale’s work would be modified by the compilers of the King James version eighty years later. To this day, the principles Luther developed for the work of translation is used to bring the Bible to many languages around the world.
