# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1855_S203
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran-Theological Pastors’ Library. 203

is called: the Ernestine Bible, the Nuremberg Bible (though one then usually adds, to distinguish this work from other folio Bibles published in Nuremberg: “with the Electors”), Biblia Gerana. Our church owes this incomparable work above all to the sincere godliness and self-sacrificing love of Duke Ernst III, or Ernst the Pious (also called Bet-Ernst), of Sachsen-Gotha (who died in 1675 after a reign of 35 years). The work was begun and completed amid the hardships of the Thirty Years’ War. It first appeared in Nuremberg in 1641, and for the last time there in 1780. Surely no work on Holy Scripture has ever been undertaken and completed with greater seriousness and zeal, sparing neither effort nor expense, in order to provide something that would truly serve the glory of God and the edification of his church, than this annotated Bible. Ernst Sal. Cyprian, who read the correspondence concerning this work between the Duke and the theologians involved, as it was still preserved at that time in the ducal archive in Gotha, writes: “If ever a book in the Evangelical Church was produced with fervent prayer, untiring diligence, arduous labor, and great wisdom, it is surely this one. The Duke was deeply concerned, first, to secure capable commentators; second, excellent revisers; and third, suitable printing.” More than 30 theologians worked on it (see Löscher’s Unschuld. Nachr., year 1704, pp. 398–404), each of whom was assigned certain biblical books to prepare. Not only had the theological faculty at Jena at that time, which consisted of the doctors of theology Johann Major, Johann Gerhard, and Johann Himmel (a “triga theologorum Johannitica”), and with which Johann Michael Dilherr, then professor of rhetoric there, was also associated, drawn up certain rules that all contributors were required to follow; *) but no contribution was incorporated into the work until it had been reviewed and approved by the entire aforementioned faculty, meeting for this purpose. This review was conducted with a precision perhaps paralleled only by the care with which Luther proceeded in his German translation of the Bible, with the assistance of Melanchthon, Bugenhagen, Jonas, Amsdorf, and Aurogallus. Johann Gerhard did most of the work. He, this adamantinus Germanicus, as Calov calls him, not only prepared substantial portions by himself (including the paraphrasing of Genesis, Daniel, and the Revelation of St. John), but also read through and corrected everything except Proverbs and the Gospel of John several times with unspeakable diligence, and presided over the joint review.

*) The first of these rules, which Buddeus communicated in his Isagoge, was: “Everyone must take particular care that the interpretation of all passages agrees with the analogy of faith and with the confessions of our church.” (p. 1559.)