Christ and the way of
salvation. The Bible, he held, can speak only for, never against Christ.
By this principle he determined for himself the respective value of
various writings in the Bible. Ecclesiastes and Jonah did not appeal to
him as very full of Christ. In the New Testament he seems strongly
attracted by the Gospel of John. But there are statements in his
writings in which he expresses a preference for Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
One must understand Luther's view-point and aim on a given occasion to
grasp these valuations. In regard to Job he expressed the opinion that
the book is dramatic rather than historical: it does not relate actual
occurrences, but rather points a moral in the form of a narrative. In
the New Testament the overgreat emphasis which he thought James placed
on works as against faith caused him to depreciate this Epistle and to
question its apostolic authorship. Luther also knew that in the earliest
centuries of the Christian era the question had been raised whether
Second Peter, Jude, James, Revelation, really belonged in the canon.

Unbiased readers will see in all these remarks of Luther nothing but the
earnest struggle of a sincere soul to get at the real Word of God. A
person may express a preference for certain portions of the Bible
without declaring all the rest of the Bible worthless. Doubts concerning
the divine character of certain, portions of the Scripture arise and are
occasionally expressed by the best of Christians. But Luther's critical
attitude toward certain books of the Bible is either misunderstood or
misrepresented when it is made to appear that Luther permanently
rejected, or tore out of his Bible, such books as Esther, Jonah,
Ecclesiastes, Second Peter, James, Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation. Some
Catholics go so far as to charge Luther with having rejected the
Pentateuch, the first five books in the Bible, because he speaks
slightingly of Moses' law as a means of justification. Not only did
Luther translate and take into his German Bible all the writings just
named, but he also cites them in his doctrinal writings as proof-texts.
In the Index of Scripture citations which Dr. Hoppe, the editor of the
only complete edition of Luther's works printed in America, has added to
the last volume we find 11 such references to Job, 12 to Ecclesiastes, 6
to Jonah, 48 to Second Peter, 18 to James, 6 to Jude, 61 to Hebrews, 17
to Revelation. We have counted only such references as show th