Martin Luther translates the New Testament

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.