Roland and I recently
returned from a Reformation Tour. We had a German tour guide who didn’t believe
in free time or lunch, but we were with a fun group of people, so overall it
was a good trip. We also learned a lot about Martin Luther and the Reformation.
The picture shows the
study at Wartburg Castle where Luther translated the New Testament into German
in just eleven weeks.. He translated the Old Testament as well, but he did that
at a more leisurely pace while in his own home.
I always thought that
Luther was the first to translate the Bible into German. That would have been a
big accomplishment, but there are many skilled translators around today, and
there probably were then, too. Still, it would have taken courage to stand up
to a church hierarchy that didn’t want laypeople to know what the Bible
actually said, and Luther had plenty of courage. So maybe that was what made
him stand out. That was my thinking before this trip.
It turns out that Luther
was not the first to translate the Bible into German after all. He was the
first to translate it directly from the Hebrew and the Greek rather than from
the Latin, which increased the accuracy of the translation. But that wasn’t
what made his translation so awesome.
Germany was not unified
at the time. Each region had its own dialect, and people from different regions
had trouble understanding each other, so the earlier German translations were
of little use outside their own regions. Luther’s primary contribution was to
study the different dialects and figure out how to standardize them into a
universal German language. In other words, he wasn’t the first to translate the
Bible into German, but he was the first to translate it into a form that all
German-speaking people could understand. Not read, of course, since most people
couldn’t read, but that they could understand when it was read to them.
I call that genius, but
Luther wouldn’t have agreed. He would have said, “Ad Dei gloriam” (Latin),” or “Zu Gott die Ehre“
(German).
To
God be the glory.
