biblical literature

German versions

The early Old Testament in Gothic has already been described. The New Testament remains are far more extensive and are preserved mainly in the Codex Argenteus (c. 525) and Codex Gissensis. The translation, essentially based on a Byzantine text, is exceedingly literal and not homogeneous. It is difficult to determine the degree of contamination that the original Gospels translation of Ulfilas had undergone by the time it appeared in these codices.

Nothing is known of the vernacular Scriptures in Germany prior to the 8th century when an idiomatic translation of Matthew from Latin into the Bavarian dialect was made. From Fulda (in Germany) c. 830 came a more literal East Franconian German translation of the Gospel story. In the same period was produced the Heliand (“Saviour”), a versified version of the Gospels. Such poetic renderings cannot, strictly speaking, be regarded as translations. There is evidence, however, for the existence of German Psalters from the 9th century on. By the 13th century, the different sects and movements that characterized the religious situation in Germany had stimulated a demand for popular Bible reading. Since all the early printed Bibles derived from a single family of late 14th-century manuscripts, German translations must have gained wide popularity. Another impetus towards the use of the German Scriptures in this period can be traced to mystics of the Upper Rhine. A complete New Testament, the Augsburg Bible, can be dated to 1350, and another from Bohemia, Codex Teplensis (c. 1400), has also survived.

The Wenzel Bible, an Old Testament made between 1389 and 1400, is said to have been ordered by King Wenceslas, and large numbers of 15th-century manuscripts have been preserved.

The first printed Bible (the Mentel Bible) appeared at Strassburg no later than 1466 and ran through 18 editions before 1522. Despite some evidence that ecclesiastical authority did not entirely look with favour upon this vernacular development, the printed Bible appeared in Germany earlier, and in more editions and in greater quantity than anywhere else.

A new era opened up with the work of Martin Luther, to whom a translation from the original languages was a necessary and logical conclusion of his doctrine of justification by faith—to which the Scriptures provided the only true key. His New Testament (Wittenberg, 1522) was made from the second edition of Erasmus’ Greek Testament. The Old Testament followed in successive parts, based on the Brescia Hebrew Bible (1494). Luther’s knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic was limited, but his rendering shows much influence of Rashi, the great 11th–12th-century French rabbinical scholar and commentator, through the use of the notes of Nicholas of Lyra. The complete Lutheran Bible emerged from the press in 1534. Luther was constantly revising his work with the assistance of other scholars, and between 1534 and his death in 1546, 11 editions were printed, the last posthumously. His Bible truly fulfilled Luther’s objective of serving the needs of the common man, and it, in turn, formed the basis of the first translations in those lands to which Lutheranism spread. It proved to be a landmark in German prose literature and contributed greatly to the development of the modern language.

The phenomenal success of Luther’s Bible and the failure of attempts to repress it led to the creation of German Catholic versions, largely adaptations of Luther. Hieronymus Emser’s edition simply brought the latter into line with the Vulgate. Johann Dietenberger issued a revision of Emser (Mainz, 1534) and used Luther’s Old Testament in conjunction with an Anabaptist (radical Protestant group) version and the Zürich (Switzerland) version of 1529. It became the standard Catholic version. Of the 20th-century translations, the Grünewald Bible, which reached a seventh edition in 1956, is one of the most noteworthy.

German glosses in Hebrew script attached to Hebrew Bibles in the 12th and 13th centuries constitute the earliest Jewish attempts to render the Scriptures into that German dialect current among the Jews of middle Europe, the dialect that developed into Judeo-German, or Yiddish. The first translation proper has been partially preserved in a manuscript from Mantua dated 1421. The earliest printed translation is that of the Scriptural dictionaries prepared by a baptized Jew, Michael Adam (Constance, 1543–44; Basel, 1583, 1607). The version of Jacob ben Isaac Ashkenazi of Janów, known as the Tzʾenah u-Reʾna (Lublin, 1616), became one of the most popular and widely diffused works of its kind.

The first Jewish translation into pure High German, though in Hebrew characters (1780–83), made by Moses Mendelssohn, opened a new epoch in German-Jewish life. The first Jewish rendering of the entire Hebrew Bible in German characters was made by Gotthold Salomon (Altona, 1837). An attempt to preserve the quality of the Hebrew style in German garb was the joint translation of two Jewish religious philosophers, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig (15 vol., Berlin, 1925–37; revised ed. Cologne, 4 vol., 1954–62).

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