Page:Thirty-five years of Luther research.djvu/39

Rh tures on Galatians of 1531 (Wei. ed. vol. 40, I); Annotationes in aliquot capita Matthæi of 1536 (Wei. ed. vol. 38); Lectures on Genesis of 1534-1545 (Wei. ed. vols. 42-44). Then there are the expositions of single Psalms (for ex., 110, 68, 118, 119, etc.), of different biblical passages (for ex., Magnificat, Isaiah 9, Isaiah 53, Ezekiel 38-39, Daniel 12, I Kings 7, etc.) and explanations of entire biblical books in the German language (I Peter of 1523, II Peter and Jude of 1523-1524, Jonah and Habbakuk of 1526, Zechariah of 1527, etc.) which from the very first were meant for wider circles. The publication of these lectures, in as much as they were completed by means of the manuscripts, do not only enable us to form a more clean-cut conception of Luther in the midst of his academical activities, but they also put us in a position to compare that which he dictated to his audience with the form in which some of these lectures were published by his pupils.

A hitherto almost unknown province in the work of Luther were the debates which he arranged while professor at Wittenberg. Kawerau writes on this as follows: "We were acquainted with the theses which he prepared for these debates (for ex. Wei. ed. vol. 9), but concerning the course they took, we had only a fragment given us by Valentine Loescher and a complete copy of one debate from the year 1644, which Mollenhauer in 1880 extracted from a manuscript at Dorpat." We are indebted to the early deceased Paul Drews,15 who by dint of tiresome investigations in manuscripts at Muenchen and Wolfenbuettel discovered much new material for this branch of Luther's activity, so that in 1895 he could give us copies of twenty-four debates from the years 1535-45, among which was such an important one as the