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Bible translations into German

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Through Middle Ages, Martin Luther and Worms, Germany

Lab · Class 11Nomadic Medieval

Pre-Lutheran Germanic Bibles

The earliest known and partly still available Germanic version of the Bible was the fourth century Gothic translation of Wulfila (c. 311–380). This version, translated primarily from the Greek, recorded or established much of the Germanic Christian vocabulary that is still in use today. Later Charlemagne promoted Frankish Bible translations in the 9th century. There were Bible translations present in manuscript form at a considerable scale already in the thirteenth and the fourteenth century (e.g. the New Testament in the Augsburger Bible of 1350 and the Old Testament in the Wenceslas Bible of 1389). There are still approximately 1,000 manuscripts or manuscript fragments of Medieval German Bible translations extant.

Printed Bibles

There is ample evidence for the general use of the entire vernacular German Bible in the fifteenth century. In 1466, before Martin Luther was even born, Johannes Mentelin printed the Mentel Bible, a High German vernacular Bible, at Strasbourg. This edition was based on a no-longer-extant fourteenth-century manuscript translation of the Vulgate from the area of Nuremberg. By 1518, it had been reprinted at least 13 times.

The Sensenschmidt Bible was published around 1476‒1478. In 1478–1479, two editions were published in Cologne, one in the Low Rhenish dialect and another in Low Saxon. In 1483, the Koberger was printed . In 1494, another Low German Bible was published in the dialect of Lübeck, and in 1522, the last pre-Lutheran Bible, the Low Saxon Halberstadt Bible was published.

In 1477, in Delft, Holland, an Old Testament (except the Psalms) was printed in Middle Dutch. An accompanying New Testament seems to have been lost.

In total, there were at least eighteen Catholic complete German Bible editions, ninety editions in the vernacular of the Gospels and the readings of the Sundays and Holy Days, and some fourteen German Psalters by the time Luther first published his own New Testament translation. An Anabaptist translation of the Prophets by Ludwig Hetzer and Hans Denck was published at Worms in 1529.

Overview of the German Bibles before Luther

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