Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/194

 and commentaries on the Psalms and the Magnificat, sermons on the Gospels and Epistles for the year, a book on Confession, and an elaborate treatise condemning the validity of monastic vows, flowed with amazing rapidity from his pen. More important was his translation of the New Testament, on which he was engaged during the greater part of his captivity. The old error that versions of the Scriptures in the vernacular tongues were almost unknown before the Reformation has been often exposed, but it is not so often pointed out that these earlier translations were based on the Vulgate and thus reflected the misconceptions of the Church against which the Reformers protested. It was almost as important that translations into the vernacular should be based on original texts as that there should be translations at all, and from a critical point of view the chief merit of Luther's version is that he sought to embody in it the best results of Greek and Hebrew scholarship. But its success was due not so much to the soundness of its scholarship as to the literary form of the translation, and Luther's Bible is as much a classic as the English Authorised Version. If he did not create the Neukochdeutsch which Grimm calls the "Protestant dialect," he first gave it extensive popular currency, and the language of his version, which was based on the Saxon Kanzleisprache, superseded alike the old Hochdeutsch and Plattdeutsch, which were then the prevalent German dialects. The first edition of the New Testament was issued in September, 1522, and a second two months later; the whole Bible was completed in 1534, and in spite of the facts that a Basel printer translated Luther's "outlandish words" into South German and that a Plattdeutsch version was also published, the victory of Luther's dialect was soon assured.

Luther's Bible became the most effective weapon in the armoury of the German Reformers, and to the infallibility of the Church they and later Protestants opposed the infallibility of Holy Scripture. But this was a claim which Luther himself never asserted for the Bible, and still less for his own translation. His often-quoted remark that the Epistle of St James was an "epistle of straw," should not be separated from Luther's own qualification that it was such only in comparison with the Gospel of St John, the Pauline Epistles, and some other books of the New Testament. But his references to that Epistle and to the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Book of Revelation show a very independent attitude towards the Scriptures. Wherever the words of the Canonical Books seemed to conflict with those of Christ, he preferred the latter as an authority, and further difficulties he left to individual interpretation. Let each man, he writes, hold to what his spirit yields him; and he confessed that he could not reconcile himself to the Book of Revelation. He was in fact supremely eclectic in respect to the Scriptures and to the doctrines he deduced from them; he gave the greatest weight to those Books and to those passages which appealed