The German New Testament

The September Testament arrives in the bookshops of Germany and the demand is immediate and overwhelming.

For most German Christians, this is the first time they have ever held a New Testament in their own language. Some of them have heard parts of it read aloud in church, in Latin they could not understand. Some have heard it in sermons, filtered through the preacher's interpretation. But to hold the text itself — in German, with Cranach's woodcut illustrations, in a format small enough to carry — is something entirely new.

People read it in workshops and kitchens and fields. They read it aloud to neighbors who cannot read. They argue about it. They write letters about it. They discover, sometimes with shock, that what the text says and what they have been told it says are not always the same thing.

The institutional church panics. Duke George of Saxony bans the translation in his territory and confiscates copies. Other rulers follow. The confiscations create demand: people want to know what is in the book that the authorities don't want them to read.

Within twelve years, more than 200,000 copies of Luther's New Testament have been printed — an almost incomprehensible number for an age in which books were still expensive and literacy was limited.

Luther has done what Wycliffe and Hus could not: put the text in the hands of the people at a scale that cannot be reversed.

The Reformation is no longer a theological debate among academics. It is a popular movement, and its fuel is scripture in German.

The Bible is the cradle wherein Christ is laid. Luther's image is precisely right: the text is not the end — it is the place where the one the text is about is found.

People were reading the September Testament not because they had been told to but because they were hungry for what was in it — hungry for Christ, for the direct encounter with the one the church had been mediating for them at several removes.

The Reformation succeeded where Wycliffe and Hus failed not because Luther was braver or smarter but because Gutenberg had changed the mathematics of information distribution. The text could not be suppressed. The demand could not be satisfied. The cradle was in too many hands.

Are you reading the text or only reading about it? And when did you last encounter Christ there, rather than someone else's account of him?