“The wrath of God has come upon them,” he writes in one such passage, “of which I do not like to think, nor has this book been a cheerful one for me to write, for I have been forced to avert my eyes from the terrible picture, sometimes in anger, sometimes in scorn; and it is painful to me to have to speak of their horrible blasphemies against our Lord and His dear Mother, to which we Christians are loath indeed to listen; I can well understand what St. Paul means in Romans x. 1, when he says that his heart was sore when he thought of them; such is the case with every Christian who earnestly dwells, not on the temporal misery and misfortune of which the Jews complain, but on their addiction to blasphemy, to cursing, to spitting at God Himself and all that is God’s, even to their eternal damnation, and who yet refuse to listen or lend an ear but will have it that all they do is done out of zeal for God. O God, our Heavenly Father, turn aside Thy wrath and let there be an end of it for the sake of Thy dear Son. Amen.”[1645]
“O my God,” he groans elsewhere, “my beloved Creator and Father, do Thou graciously take into account my unwillingness to have to speak so shamefully of Thine accursed enemies, the devil and the Jews. Thou knowest I do so out of the ardour of my faith and to the glory of Thy Divine Majesty, for it pierces me to the very quick.”[1646]
If, however, we look more closely into the matter we shall see that the “ardour of his faith” was also fed from other sources. There was, for instance, the reaction of his own protracted struggle in defence of the new doctrines and against the Papacy, a struggle which left deep marks on all his labours and on all his writings.
Towards the end of a career which had worked such untold disaster to the Christianity of the past he feels keenly the need of vindicating the dignity of Christ if only to soothe his own conscience; he was resolved to hammer it in with the utmost defiance, just as formerly he had clung to the idea that, by his doctrine, he was defending the rights of Christ against the Pope. He is now resolved again to take his stand on this, his efforts becoming the more violent the more the sight of the ruin wrought by his own work affrights him. Hence his eagerness to take advantage of Jewish attacks on the pillars of the faith in order, while triumphing over them, to enjoy the sense of his comradeship with Christ, the Son of God now so soon to come in Judgment. Here again he allows his vanity to mislead him and to paint his intervention on behalf of the great truth of Christianity as far more successful than that of any of the Popes; this helps him to close his eyes to the wounds which the inner voice tells him he had inflicted on the Christian truths and on the public life of Christendom. For was he not doing for Christ what the Pope was quite unable to do? Indeed, “the world, the Turk, the Jew and the Pope are all raging blasphemously against the name of the Lord, laying waste His Kingdom and deriding His Will; but ‘greater is He that is with us than he that is with the world’; He triumphs,” so he wrote at that time to some foreign sympathisers, “and will triumph in you to all eternity; may He console you by His Holy Spirit in which He has called you to oneness with His Body.”[1647]
It is true, so he says elsewhere, that the Pope admits the existence of Christ, but, in spite of this, neither Jews nor Turks are quite so bad; the Jews have far better arguments than the Papists for themselves and their religion; the foundations of the latter are easily shaken; the Papist Church is a worse “den of murderers” than Turks, Tartars, or Jews.[1648]
All the more glorious and creditable to the new Evangel is therefore the victory won by Luther over the Jews; it may serve to show the world that his school’s study of the Bible could furnish the weapons to bring about such a result. The Pope, with his unbiblical treatment of the Jews, had merely succeeded in making them doubly un-Christian; but to us God has unlocked the Holy Books, hence on us devolves the duty of pointing out to the Jews their errors.[1649] Luther accordingly claims, that his “Von den Jüden” was the first real work of instruction on Judaism, one which “might teach us Germans from history what a Jew is and warn our Christians against them as against veriest devils.” It was only fitting that he who had unearthed Scripture should also “wipe clean the holy old Bible from Jewish ‘Hamperes’ and ‘Judas-water.’”[1650]
Nevertheless everything else—even his yeoman service in the cause of the Bible, and his shaming of the Papacy, which had so ineffectively struggled against the Jews—recedes into the background before his determination to crown his whole life-work by snatching from the Jewish devil the honour of Christ our one Salvation.
This was admittedly his motive for taking up his pen yet a third time.
The Third Work against the Jews, 1543
As early as June, 1543, Luther was engaged on a new polemical work against the Jews entitled “On the last words of David.”[1651] It is a lengthy essay on 2 Kings xxiii. 1-7, and certain other striking passages, with the object of proving that the Messias was to be a God-man and of vindicating the mystery of the Trinity.