# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1862_S273
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lic. Ströbel on the Revision of Luther's Bible. 273

out anything of the kind; — and yet it is precisely on this circumstance, and on it alone, that everything depends, "when it is a matter of Holy Scripture as the edification-book of the Christian Church." For if Luther has nowhere offended against the spirit, sense, and doctrine of the original text, has nowhere translated unscriptural human opinions into it, but on the contrary has set forth its content unfalsified, then he has, with the German Bible, placed in the hands of the common Christian the pure Word of God (in the form and manner in which it exists at all for the unlearned) — and all real or alleged philological offenses in translation cannot alter this religious fact. The friends of revision mostly overlook the actual purpose of Luther's work as interpreter: he wished thereby to meet a practical, not a scholarly, need — to serve the common people, not the learned. Just as he had already created, in his catechisms, a "layman's Bible," from which the common people were to have a brief but, for their temporal and eternal welfare, sufficient sum of the divine Word, so he put the same into their hands also as a German Bible — not so that learned knowledge might be drawn from it, or questions of scholarly theology decided by it, but as a fuller guide through this transitory world to that imperishable one. How he would open his eyes wide, if he came back today and heard from the scholarship of the day the reproach that in his Bible translation he had handed down God's Word to Christendom unfaithfully and falsified — because he translated a number of passages grammatically-lexically inaccurately or incorrectly, and a number simply differently than his modern critics do! How he would send these "master know-it-alls" packing, if they wanted to demonstrate to him, with their great art and wisdom, that they had weighed his version against the original text and found it too light! "Stay at Jericho till your beards have grown!" — would he not, in full consciousness of the thoroughgoing scriptural analogy of his translation, call out this to that class of revisers who, with Stier, pass off a German-printed rehash as a faithful rendering of the Hebrew-Greek Bible, and who make scrupulous exactness in incidental matters the criterion of an unfalsified transfer of the original scriptural text into another language? — But yet a second reason is urged for the "revision": "appeal is made to the precedent of the ancient occidental Church, which put in the place of the old Latin version, the so-called Itala, that of St. Jerome, which is called the Vulgate. Even before Luther, various German translations were already in circulation. Luther himself expressed the wish that every city might have its own Bible translator. Why then should the German evangelical Church remain bound forever and ever to the Lutheran translation? and so forth." This argument at least states honestly what is being aimed at: the gradual, total displacement of the Lutheran Bible. It is to be revised right out of Christendom. Apart