He had repeatedly proclaimed that he intended everything solely for the honour of God.[2066] But woe to anyone who in any way attacked his own honour! For, by this work, Luther had vindicated his mission as the appointed preacher to the Germans; only at Wittenberg, where the Bible was taken really seriously, were people able to fathom the secrets of this sealed book.
“What is needed,” he says in 1530, in his “Sendbrieff von Dolmetzscheñ,” speaking of the work of translation, “is a truly pious, faithful, God-fearing, Christian, learned, tried and experienced heart. Hence I hold that no false Christian or sectarian can translate faithfully.”[2067] Not only does he deem himself qualified for the task, but, as he declares in 1523, he knows nobody else who “can, within a twentieth part,” do as well as he, though many find fault with his Bible. “I know that I am more learned than all the Universities, those sophists by the grace of God.” True enough, “even if we all set to work with a will, we should still have enough to do to bring the Bible to light, one by means of his reason, another by his knowledge of languages.” But all these critics, “who blame me here and there,” “know that they themselves are unable to do it, yet they would fain make themselves out to be proficient in an art that is entirely foreign to them.” To him their objections were but “the mud that clings to the wheels.”[2068]
Thanks to himself, he says, “the German language has now a better Bible than the Latin [the Vulgate]; in support of this I appeal to the reader.”[2069]
Of the superiority of his Bible over the Latin Vulgate in the matter of accuracy he had not the slightest doubt. “St. Jerome,” he wrote in 1533, “and many others from among the masses, have made more mistakes in translating than we, both in the Latin and in the Greek.”[2070]—Should anyone attempt to translate the Psalms and refuse to be guided in his work by Luther’s German Psalter, so he says in the same passage, “he would translate the Psalter in such a way that precious little would remain in it either of German or of Hebrew.” “But a man who is unable to do anything good himself likes to court praise and to appear an adept by abusing and crying down the good work of others.”[2071]
Of Emser he remarked, that he had admitted by his amended edition of the German Bible that, “my German is good and sweet; he saw plainly that he could not better it, and yet he wished to dishonour it, hence he took my Testament and copied it almost word for word.” “I am glad to see even my very foes compelled to further my work.”[2072]
“If anyone will translate me 72 or 73 verses aright,” he assures his friends, “I will give him 50 florins. But, for this, he must not make use of our translation.”[2073]—“Since the heathen Church has existed we have never had a Bible that could be read and understood so easily and readily as that which we have produced at Wittenberg, and, praise be to God, put into German.”[2074]
To irritate (“irritare”) the Papists by his work, to rouse them to fury (“furiam concitare”) and to let loose their “calumnious attacks” on his translation, was a real pleasure to him.[2075] As in the case of the Papists, so also in that of rivals within his fold, his work for the Bible spelt their undoing. This it was which justified him against all opponents.
People like Osiander, he told his friends in 1540, single out one word of my translation “in order to find a ground for disagreeing with us. They dispute about a single word but they are after more. They should be compelled to translate the whole Bible and then we should see what they are able to do. And Amsdorf said: If I were the sovereign I should clap these wiseacres into cells and order them to translate Holy Scripture without making use of Luther’s Bible. Then we should soon see what they could do.”[2076] “When we were at Marburg [at the religious Conference in 1529],” Luther once remarked, “Zwingli always spoke in Greek”; he declared he had studied the Greek Testament for thirteen years; “Oh, no, something more is needed than the mere reading of the Testament, but these people are blinded by ambition”; that was why Zwingli had used Greek and Hebrew when preaching at Marburg.[2077] Carlstadt, too, was always making a display of his Greek and Hebrew,[2078] but all of them were only able to “pick holes in the Scriptures” which Luther had translated.[2079]
He was determined that nobody should be allowed to interfere in his Bible and protests in his own way against any alterations. He wrote in 1539: “I beg all my friends, foes, masters, printers and readers to look upon this New Testament as my own; if they have any fault to find with it, then let them make a new one for themselves. I know full well what I am about, and I can also see what others are able to do. But this Testament is to be Luther’s own German Testament! For of criticism and cavilling there is now no end.”[2080]
Which of his rivals had ever had to contend with “temptations” when engaged on the Bible? He, however, had to thank his “combats” for having been his instructors.[2081] Münster, so Luther said in 1536, accused him of making certain mistakes in his translation of the book of Jonas. “Yes, dear Münster, you have never been through these temptations. I, like Jonas, have looked into the belly of the whale where all seemed given over to despair.”[2082] “The pious are like unto Jonas; they are cast into the sea of despair, nay, into hell itself.”[2083]