The Luther Bible Online
June 2nd, 2007
My colleague, Rev. Benjamin Mayes, pointed this fascinating web site out to me. He wrote, "Here’s the entire 1545 Luther-Bibel online, with Luther’s marginal
notes and the original illustrations. But wait, there’s more! The text
is in clean Roman typeface."
What is this? Beginning with the publication of his so-called "September Testament" in 1522, the translation of the New Testament that Luther prepared while at the Wartburg Castle in "exile," he spent the rest of his career working on the translation of the Bible. The last edition to be printed in Luther’s lifetime was in 1545. This web site provides the entire text in Roman letters, the type of characters we are used to in our day.
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I have a CPH German Luther Bibel w/ Apocrypha published in 1910. If the Missouri Synod used it from 1839 to the early 1900s why didn’t it translate it into english?
McCain: I assume you are asking why the Apocrypha didn’t come along with English Bibles when The LCMS moved to English?
My theory is this:
The LCMS did not translate the Bible into English, but picked up the KJV. The English KJV at the time did not have the Apocrypha. Hence, the Apocrypha never came into English.
I wasn’t concerned too much about the Apocrypha rather than why the synod didn’t translate the whole Luther Bible into English. Would CHI or CPH have some historical works regarding the synod’s switch to KJV?
McCain: I may have been unclear. I think the problem is that The LCMS did not translate the Bible into English, but rather just picked up the KJV available to it at the time, and that was sans Apocrypha here in America, though the Apocrypha *was* I’m told, translated in 1611 when the KJV first did it and many Anglican Bibles thereafter always had it in England. Interesting. I’m unaware of any study of the switch to KJV, but perhaps others may be aware of something?