# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1862_S279
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lic. Ströbel on the Revision of Luther's Bible. 279

thought is what is meant! But even granting that the stated reason for the change is honestly meant, it is not for that reason yet valid. "Religion and the Church, which stand above the world and above time, have the privilege of not being subject to the change of fashion. This holds also of their language. It is a poor honor for an evangelical German to say that he does not understand Luther's German. He thereby declares that he has irresponsibly neglected the use of Holy Scripture. Whoever takes the Bible in hand only on rare occasions may indeed find much obscurity in it. A diligent reader will not easily have cause to complain of obscurity. Even the divergences from present usage must become familiar and intelligible to him. It is at once shaming and instructive for us to look at the example of the Greeks. Their Homer was, in language, far more removed from the speech of ordinary life in the fifth or fourth century before Christ than Luther's language is from that of today. But what Greek ever thought of wanting to rework Homer into the language of his own time? Who has even so much as wished it, and regretted that it could not be done? Have not the Greeks held the Homeric language, with all its peculiarities, sacred as a precious relic and monument of their ancient past, and watched over its preservation? And yet Homer was to them anything but a book merely for scholars. He was to them, much as the Bible is to us, their household and life-book, read and known by all, applied in all circumstances and to everything. Are we to let ourselves be put to shame by the Greeks? Are we to betray less attachment and zeal for the glorious monument of our language, which ought to be dear to us from a still far higher point of view? It is well known what an immeasurable influence the Lutheran Bible has exercised for three hundred years upon the whole of German literature, how through it our literature purified itself of the bad taste of the seventeenth century, of the mere aping of the French, and found its way back to the simplest, most natural, most genuinely German mode. And this service she has rendered our nation not merely once. She renders it again and again, and we need her service especially again at the present time, when a new, deep decline threatens our language and literature. And are we, at this very time, voluntarily to do without the one corrective that our people possesses? The language of the English Bible perhaps departs even more strongly than ours from present ordinary speech, and yet the English Bibles now printed differ from the older editions in no respect except in orthography." Concerning the restoration of wholly obsolete forms that have already gone out of use for two centuries or more (e.g., "ich schrei" as an imperfect), opinions may differ, as also over whether it is advisable "to demand a diplomatically exact reprint of the original edition." The Ev. K.-Z. declares itself against both, and considers the latter in particular to be "in a sense itself revolutionary." In any case it is also