Martin Luther, The New Testament (Translation)
Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a leading figure in the Protestant Reformation. Luther took orders as an Augustinian Friar after dropping out of his law degree at the University of Erfurt, which he later described as resembling a brothel and a tavern. In 1512 he was awarded a doctorate in theology, and lectured for the rest of his life at the University of Wittenberg. He turned against the Catholic Church in 1516 when the Dominican friar, Johann Tetzel, was sent by the pope to Germany to sell indulgences in order to pay for the rebuilding of St Peter’s Basilica, Rome.
Though he initially meant only to spark a debate about the sale of papal indulgences, in his letter of October 1517 to Bishop Albrecht von Brandenburg Luther included a document that came to be known as the Ninety-Five Theses, criticisms about the excesses of the Catholic Faith. Supposedly, Luther nailed the document to the door of All Saints’ Church, Wittenberg, though the story is disputed. Regardless, the Ninety-Five Theses were translated into German, reprinted, and disseminated far and wide across Europe. As his criticisms developed into a more coherent thesis, Luther became the leader of the Protestant Reformation.
Such a wholesale condemnation of the church, and the claim that God’s forgiveness of sinners is achieved by faith alone (Sola fide) inevitably invoked the ire of the Catholic Church, who excommunicated him in January 1520 when he refused to recant his criticism. After vociferously defending his beliefs at the Diet of Worms in April 1521, and stating that ‘I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience’, Luther was declared an outlaw, and tricked into (merciful) imprisonment at Wartburg Castle. At Wartburg, he undertook his most daring work yet.
This controversial enterprise was to translate the Greek New Testament into German. This ran entirely contrary to Catholic principles: the Church wanted to keep the Bible in Greek and St Jerome’s authorised Latin translation, which meant that only the clergy and well-educated could read and understand Scripture. The idea was that the Holy Mysteries of Scripture needed to be interpreted for common folk by the clergy, and that translating the Bible would lead to heretical beliefs and theories about its content. Before Luther, others had fallen foul of Canon Law for making translations, such as John Wycliffe in England.
Making the translation so all could understand the Word of God was thus an act of rebellion, and refusing to use the Latin Vulgate as his source was a further affront to the Catholic Church. Luther’s translation wrested the Catholic Church’s control of the Bible’s message away from them, and simultaneously empowered the common man. He returned to Wittenberg a year later, and his translation of the entire Bible was first published in 1534. Imprisonment gave Luther the opportunity to concentrate on his written output, safe from the ecclesiastical persecution and politics he endured in Wittenberg. He died in 1546.