Sarah and Andrew Wilson are retracing Luther's journey from Erfurt and Rome, and blogging along the way about pilgrimage, church history, and church unity. Sarah being one of her generation's most talented theological writers (and Andrew apparently is no slouch either), the blogging is uncommonly insightful—I recommend it highly. One of today's entries includes this reminder of what made Luther's translation of the Bible unique and controversial.

re: bible, translation

Andy:

It’s well-known that Luther trans­lated the Bible into Ger­man, and it’s often thought that he was the first one to do so. But that’s not true at all.  In fact, there were 17—that’s right, 17—other trans­la­tions of the Bible into Ger­man before Luther’s! . . .

Gutenberg’s Bible was the first book printed in the West using mov­able type. But while the tech­nol­ogy was new, the social sys­tem was still old. We have in the Guten­berg Bible a clas­sic prod­uct designed for the nou­veaux riches. His Bible promised to up-and-coming classes the same access to writ­ten cul­ture afforded pre­vi­ously only by eccle­si­as­tics and nobility.

We can see that in even in its style. Gutenberg’s work left the intial let­ters unprinted with space left for illu­mi­na­tion. His printed Bible was meant to sim­u­late the great illu­mi­nated Bibles owned by the nobil­ity and rich monas­ter­ies, but for a bargain-basement price. That’s not to say they were cheap. Gutenberg’s Bible would have cost the aver­age worker a for­tune. It was still a pres­tige piece, not meant for study but to dec­o­rate the col­lec­tions of those who wished to be iden­ti­fied with book culture.

What we see in Luther’s work is an entirely dif­fer­ent kind of thing. Here was a whole Bible meant for study, for read­ing. It was designed to be printed en masse, to be bought and dis­trib­uted to many peo­ple below the nobil­ity, used in churches and schools for cat­e­ch­esis. We can see the dif­fer­ence in the design. Older Bibles were large, folio-sized objects,  printed in small num­bers. Luther’s was was small, mass-produced, and affordable.