ome; and he called James lacking in apostolic
dignity.

[Sidenote: Luther]

By far the best biblical criticism of the century was the mature work
of Martin Luther. It is a remarkable fact that a man whose doctrine of
the binding authority of Scripture was so high, and who refused his
disciples permission to interpret the text with the least shade of
independence, should himself have shown a freedom in the treatment of
the inspired writers unequaled in any Christian for the next three
centuries. It is sometimes said that Luther's judgments were mere
matters of taste; that he took what he liked and rejected what he
disliked, and this is true to a certain extent. "What treats well of
Christ, that is Scripture, even if Judas and Pilate had written it," he
averred, and again, "If our adversaries urge the Bible against Christ,
we must urge Christ against the Bible." His wish to exclude the
epistle of James from the canon, on the ground that its doctrine of
justification contradicted that of Paul, was thus determined, and
excited wide protest not only from learned Catholics like Sir Thomas
More, but also from many Protestants, beginning with Bullinger.

But Luther's trenchant judgments of the books of the Bible were usually
far more than would be implied by a merely dogmatic interest. Together
with the best scholarship of the age he had a strong intuitive feeling
for style that guided him aright in many cases. In denying the Mosaic
authorship of a part of the Pentateuch, in asserting that Job and Jonah
were fables, in finding that the books of Kings were more credible than
Chronicles and that the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Proverbs and
Ecclesiastes had received their final form from later editors, he but
advanced theses now universally accepted. His doubts about Esther,
Hebrews, and the Apocalypse have been amply {569} confirmed. Some
modern scholars agree with his most daring opinion, that the epistle of
James was written by "some Jew who had heard of the Christians but not
joined them." After Luther the voluminous works of the commentators
are a dreary desert of arid dogmatism and fantastic pedantry.
Carlstadt was perhaps the second best of the higher critics of the
time; Zwingli was conservative; Calvin's exegesis slumbers in fifty
volumes in deserved neglect.

[Sidenote: German version]

Among the great vernacular Protestant versions of the Bible that of
Luther stands first in every sense of the word.