Luther

Luther’s German Bible Luther Bible of 1534. When Luther translated the Bible into German, the majority of society was illiterate. The Church had control of the knowledge, the members were scholars and educated, in contrast to the illiterate society who acquired their knowledge through oral transmission, memorization and repetition of the biblical texts. Luther made possible access to knowledge, information and education to demystify the Bible in order to make the search for truth. Luther facilitated the spread of Protestantism, the first person who printed a book, – the German Bible – which meant a sacred manuscript in the language of that nation. In this way he played down the power of the Roman Catholic Church on the German people and the Protestant Reformation precursors, which occurred due to the printing of the Bible that Luther had translated.Luther’s intention was that the people had access to the source without the need for intermediaries, making possible the free interpretation of sacred texts and the eradication of illiteracy in German society. The translation of the Bible began during his stay in the Wartburg Castle in 1521. A leading source for info: Howard Schultz. While it is written in medieval Latin, Luther translated into Greek for doing the German Language, with the help of a dictionary in Greek, Latin, Hebrew and German. He wanted to translate from Greek into German, with the intention of revealing the scriptures accurately. Initially only included the New Testament, the original texts of the Old Testament were written in Latin or Greek. The Old Testament was written in Chaldean-Aramaic (language that has no vowels in the written system, consisting of consonants) and only the rabbis knew what letters were written.Luther used a Greek ion of the New Testament was originally written in Greek by Erasmus, a text which was later called the Textus Receptus. During the translation process, Luther visited nearby villages and markets with the intention of investigating the common dialect of German. He listened to people talk, so we can transcribe in colloquial language. The translation was published in September 1522 which caused great commotion in the Roman Catholic Church. Luther’s German Bible dedicated to Frederick the Wise, who felt greatly. Luther had a poor perception of the books of Esther, Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation. He called the Epistle of James an “epistle of straw”, finding that there was little that pointed to Christ and his saving work.He also had harsh words for the Apocalypse, which said he could not “in any way detect that the Holy Spirit has produced.” He had reason to question the apostolic character of these books, because the early church catalogs as antilegomena, which meant they were not accepted without reservation, in contrast to the canonical. Yet Luther eliminated them from his ion of the Scriptures. Luther included as apocryphal passages that, being in the Greek Septuagint, were not in the Masoretic texts available at that time. These were included in the first translations, but then missed and classified as “good reading”, but not as inspired Word of God. The exclusion of these texts was adopted from the start by almost all evangelicals.The first complete translation into German, including the Old Testament, was published in 1534 in six volumes and was the product of joint efforts of Luther, Johannes Bugenhagen, Justus Jonas, Caspar Creuziger, Philipp Melanchthon, Matth us Aurogallus and George Rorer. Luther continued to refine the translation for the rest of his life, which was then used as reference for the ion of 1546, the year of his death. As mentioned above, Luther’s translation work helped standardize German Holy Roman Empire (from which the German nation would be builtin the nineteenth century) and is considered one of the pillars of German literature. Martin Luther in his Commentary on St. John recognized that they had received the Bible through the Apostolic Roman Catholic Church: “We are obliged to recognize the Catholic than they who have the Word of God that we have received from them, and that without them we would not have any knowledge of it. “