It was now his intention, as he declares at the beginning of his preface to the German New Testament, that the great work he had produced should make an end of the “old delusion” in which the whole world was sunk, viz. “that men do not really know what is the Law or the Gospel, or what the New or the Old Testament.”[2051] He is determined, so he tells us, by popularising his New Testament to show the people that the Gospel is not to be turned into a “code of laws or a handbook,” as had “hitherto been the case and as certain earlier prefaces even by St. Jerome” had proposed. For the Gospel does not really require our works that we may become devout and thus be saved, nay, it condemns such works, but it does demand that we should believe that Christ has overcome sin, death and hell for us and therefore that He makes us pious, vivifies us and saves us, not by our own works but by His work, i.e. by His death and passion. “Hence it is, that, no Law is given to the believer whereby he may be justified before God.”[2052] It was his old antagonism to the importance of man’s co-operation with grace and to good works that made him place at the head of both his German Testaments his motto against works, so indicative of his tendency. In the beginning of the preface to the first part of the Old Testament (1523) we read that Moses, in his 1st Book, taught that “it was not by the Law or by our own works that sin and death were to be vanquished,” but only by the seed of the woman, that is Christ; “in order that faith may be exalted from the beginning of Scripture above all works, Law or merit. Thus the 1st Book of Moses contains hardly anything but examples of faith and unbelief, and of the fruits of faith and unbelief, and is thus almost an evangelical book.”[2053]
That the German Bible was intended as a bulwark of the Evangel was also plain from the illustrations. For the New Testament contained, as Duke George complained when interdicting it, “many disgraceful pictures, ridiculing and deriding His Holiness the Pope and fortifying his [Luther’s] doctrines.”[2054] Emser, too, refers to these pictures in his protest: “How should Christians accept the work of one who has been openly branded as a heretic, a work which lacks the approbation of the church, and, moreover, insults and reviles the Pope in abusive figures, pictures, words and insinuations?”[2055] Thus, for instance, in the woodcuts appended to the Apocalypse the scarlet woman of Babylon and likewise the dragon, the monster from the pit, both wear the papal tiara. In Apoc. xiv. Babylon is depicted as Rome, Sant’ Angelo, St. Peter’s, the Belvedere of the Pope’s palace and Santa Maria Rotunda are all collapsing, whilst in chapter xviii. these same buildings are shown in flames.[2056]
In Luther’s Bible the Catholic rulers were directly attacked in the heading chosen in 1529 for the book of Wisdom: “The Wisdom of Solomon for the Tyrants.” “The book should above all be read,” he here says, “by the big Johnnies who rage against their subjects and against the guiltless on account of the Word of God”; for “in this book the tyrants are violently taken to task and scourged.” “Hence this book is very much in place in our day.”[2057]
The introduction to Romans (1522) not only exposes at length the doctrine of faith alone, which Luther supposed Paul to have taught in this Epistle, but also warns all against the “verminous medley of men-made laws and ordinances under which the whole world groans.” Rightly enough had Paul said of the makers of these laws, that their God is their belly.[2058]
As we are here less concerned with the theological importance of Luther’s German Bible than with the spirit which inspired its composition, we shall only remind the reader briefly, that the work of translation was intended as a solemn expression of the author’s root ideas according to which the Bible was the only true source of faith. From the Bible alone, so he taught, all must derive their faith and find the way of salvation under the direct inspiration of the spirit from on high; it ought to be in the hands of all, even of the unlearned. Hence, in his “To the German Nobility” of 1520, he had declared that the Bible, and particularly the Gospel, ought to be in the hands of everybody, even of the boys and girls.[2059]
We find Luther, says Risch, regarding the Bible and its use from “a new standpoint diametrically opposed to the Catholic, and which found its ripest expression in his German Bible.”[2060]
O. Reichert likewise has it, that the “chief incentive to his translation of the Bible,” was the determination in which his whole life’s work centred, of unlocking for the German people by means of a thoroughly German translation, that book with the help of which “each one could live up to his faith and be assured of his salvation.”[2061]
“Only now,” says Hausrath, speaking of the spread of Luther’s Bible,[2062] “could the burghers feel that they had attained to manhood in the matter of religion, and that the universal priesthood had become a reality. The head of each household had now the well-spring of all religious truth brought to his very door. To the Papists this seemed an abomination, as Cochlæus admits when he says, that every cobbler and old crony was poring over the New Testament as a source of all truth.[2063] Even the populace took part in the controversies of the learned, having now begun to see that the faith concerned them too. For a while this could lead to strange excesses, as the theology of the New Prophets showed.” Still, “the advent of the German Bible was the dawn of freedom.”
Johann Fabri, who had recognised Luther’s aims, was at one with Cochlæus and Emser in lending support to the prohibition issued against the German Bible. To Luther he said: “Your Testament works more harm than all the idolatrous books of Ephesus (Acts xix. 19), nay, than the hail in Egypt.”[2064] This was, as it were, his answer to the wish Luther had expressed to his friend Lang as early as Dec. 18, 1521: “Oh, that every little town had its translator! Oh, that this book might be found on the lips of all, in their hands, before their eyes, and in their ears and hearts.”[2065]
A surprising psychological trait is the haughty self-satisfaction evinced by Luther with his grand achievement when objections were raised.