Long he had meditated
on it before his enforced retirement at the Wartburg gave him the
leisure to begin it. The work of revision, in which Luther had much
help from Melanchthon and other Wittenberg professors, was a life-long
labor. Only recently have the minutes of the meetings of these
scholars come to light, and they testify to the endless trouble taken
by the Reformer to make his work clear and accurate. He wrote no
dialect, but a common, standard German which he believed to have been
introduced by the Saxon chancery. But he also modelled his style not
only on the few good German authors then extant, but on the speech of
the market-place. From the mouths of the people he took the sweet,
common words that he gave back to them again, "so that they may note
that we are speaking German to them." Spirit and fire he put into the
German Bible; dramatic turns of phrase, lofty eloquence, poetry.

All too much Luther read his own ideas into the Bible. To make Moses
"so German that no one would know that he was a Jew" insured a noble
style, but involved an occasional violent wrench to the thought. Thus
the Psalms are made to speak of Christ quite plainly, and of German
May-festivals; and the passover is metamorphosed into Easter. Is there
not even {570} an allusion to the golden rose given by the pope in the
translation of Micah iv, 8?--"Und du Thurm Eder, eine Feste der Tochter
Zion, es wird deine goldene Rose kommen." Luther declared his
intention of "simply throwing away" any text repugnant to the rest of
Scripture, as he conceived it. As a matter of fact the greatest change
that he actually made was the introduction of the word "alone" after
"faith" in the passage (Romans iii, 28) "A man is justified by faith
without works of the law." Luther never used the word "church"
(Kirche), in the Bible, but replaced it by "congregation" (Gemeinde).
Following Erasmus he turned [Greek] _metanoieite_ (Matthew iii, 2, 8)
into "bessert euch" ("improve yourselves") instead of "tut Busse" ("do
penance") as in the older German versions. Also, following the
Erasmian text, he omitted the "comma Johanneum" (I John v, 7); this was
first insinuated into the German Bible in 1575.

[Sidenote: English Bible]

None of the other vernacular versions, not even the French translation
of Lefevre and Olivetan can compare with the German save one, the
English. How William Tyndale began and how Coverdale completed the
work in 1535, has