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CONTINENTAL VERSIONS
CONTINENTAL VERSIONS
413
edition one copy only, at Gottingen, out of the thirty-two known to us, bears a date, 1474. On Zainer’s edition of 1473 the Swiss edition and three other Augsburg editions, printed by Zainer (1477) and Sorg (1477 and 1480), depend. The next edition, published by Koburger at Nurem- berg in 1483, professes to be and is ‘a revision made with great diligence,’ his corrections being possibly derived from those in the Cologne Low German Bible, with which Koburger’s edition has many illustrations and other points in common. The ‘last five editions of the complete High German Bible which preceded Luther are dependent on that of Koburger. They were published, one at Strassburg (1485) by Griininger, and four at Augs- burg—two by Schénsperger in 1487 and 1490, and two by Otmar in 1507 and 1518. Walther thus sums up the result of his exhaustive investigation of the early printed Bibles: ‘Our conclusion from the comparison of these Bibles is that they all belong to the same family of translations, but that the Bible first published by John Mentel at Strassburg in 1466 was revised about 1473 by G. Zainer at Augsburg, and that this new and revised edition received at the hands cf A. Koburger at Nuremberg, and afterwards in the two last Bibles of the Middle Ages, a further slight corree- tion.
The text represented by this succession of printed Bibles is found also in various Psalters printed at various dates and in various places be- tween 1473 and 1498, and also in an edition of the Apocalypse (1498) and of Job (1488). Besides printed editions of this recension of text, Walther enumerates fourteen MSS in which it is found, nine of which, however, are copies of a printed Bible, as is evident from the misprints which they reproduce, while a tenth also depends on a printed text. Two of the other MSS (at Wolfenbiittel and Nuremberg) are MSS of the early part or middle of the 15th century. That at Nuremberg contains only Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, but is interesting on account of the reasons given by the translator_—John Rellach of Resom, in the diocese of Constance—for undertaking the work of trans- lation. The other two are MSS of the NT—the one at Freiburg in Saxony; the other, already mentioned, at Tepl in Bohemia. These are 14th cent. MSS, having many points of resemblance, but neither is a copy of the other. From a care- ful examination Walther concludes that Mentel’s Bible represents the text of this family in a purer and more original form than these, the oldest MSS which contain it. This text, based of course on the Latin, shows many points of agreement with old MSS of the J¢ala, and in the NT many points of agreement with the Greek against the Latin, but only in cases where the Greek has a reading not contained in the Vulgate ; for if the Vulgate has a fuller reading than the Greek, the Vulgate is followed. The question to be decided is whether the German translator himself enriched his text by using several MSS of the Vulgate, or used a MS of the Vulgate which itself contained the additions which he has translated. Walther decides in favour of the second alternative, and finds such a MS in a Latin MS at Wernigerode, which has 37 of the 45 additions common to the first Bible and the Freiburg and Tepl MSS; and many, but by no means all, of these are found also in the Provencal version connected with the Waldenses. But the resemblances are not, as we have seen above (see p. 412%), sufficient in number or distinctive enough to prove a Waldensian origin of the earliest German printed Bibles. :
11. The work of Luther marks an epoch in the history of the German Bible. His labours in
translation began with some of the Psalms, the
Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, sections of the Gospels and the Epistles, all clearly in- tended for the edification of the unlearned.
The idea of making a complete translation of the Bible dates from 1521, but it was thirteen years later before the work was carried out in its entirety. The first part to appear was the NT, the translation of which was done at the Wart- burg. This was the so-called Septemberbibel, so called because it appeared in September 1522, at Wittenberg, but without any date or the name of the publisher on its title-page. Of this a photo- graphic facsimile appeared in 1883 on the four hundredth anniversary of Luther’s birthday. The first edition was followed by a second in the same
ear 1522, and by 1580 more than seventy editions of the NT had appeared.
The translation of the OT was a more difficult task, to which Luther then turned. He tells us that in the translation of Job days were some- times spent over a few verses, and the erasures in the MS of his work, now in the Royal Library at Berlin, are sufficient evidence of the trouble which he took. The OT translation was pub- lished in parts, beginning with the Pentateuch, which appeared in 1523. ‘The historical Books and Hagiographa were followed in 1532 by a complete translation of the Prophets, and in 1534 by the Apocrypha, and so ‘in a relatively short time the most epoch-making work of modern times came to light.’ For the translation Luther was himself responsible, though he consulted numerous friends. Though he is not wholly independent of the work done by his predecessors, some of whose mistakes he reproduces, he was not by any means dependent on them. Both in the OT and NT he translates from the original text, using in the OT the Brescia edition of 1494, and in the NT Erasmus’ edition of 1519, which he follows, for instance, in the curious reading év rats judpus éuais at Rev 218, He had also the assistance of the LXX, Vulgate, and the Glossa ordinaria. The object Luther set before himself was not to produce a literal translation, but one which should be clear and intelligible to the people; and in this he was successful, largely because he was a thorough German, fully conscious of the needs of the people, and in sympathy with them. The result was that this translation had an incalculable effect on the development of the German language and literature, leading to the pre- dominance of one dialect throughout the country. Outside the limits of Germany it was the basis of the versions used in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Holland.