Martin Luther and his ranking of books of the New Testament.

This is a subject that has generated hundreds of responses over the centuries. Responses have varied the spectrum in tone: angry refutation to sympathetic acceptance. References listed below are only a handful of those available on the subject.
 

Let us step back and preface the subject with observations about why Martin Luther translated the New Testament and in general how he did it. Few scholars would disagree that Luther’s translation of the New Testament into High German is a literary masterpiece, almost incomparable in its art. He had already sparred violently in print with the best scholars of Europe for several years and he was in top form.
 

                        Eramus by who else? Albrecht Dürer

Why did he translate the New Testament? One of the driving forces was the appearance of editions of the New Testament from the best Greek manuscripts available. This Herculean task was done by Erasmus of Rotterdam, ironically a major love-hate figure in Luther’s mind. The second edition by Erasmus appeared in 1519. At that time 14 High German Bibles and four Low German Bibles already existed. They were derived from the Latin Vulgate New Testament. Not one was derived from the best New Testament documents in Greek. Luther’s friend Johann Lang made a stab at translating the Book of Matthew but Lang did not have Luther’s superb skills as a wordsmith.
 

   Castle Wartburg (being renovated); courtesy Traveler100
 

The second driving force was Luther’s exile by his protector Frederick the Wise in the Castle Wartburg starting May 1521. For months Luther was denied all his normal time-consuming pastoral and university duties. He worked up some tracts and his Christmas postil but became obsessed by the idea that the German-speaking Holy Roman Empire needed to be reading the Bible itself, not works about the Bible. He was, after all, professor of the Bible at the University of Wittenberg and had been so for many years.
 

Luther--being Luther, virtually a force of nature--translated the Greek New Testament of Erasmus into High German of the electoral Saxon court in just 11 weeks! By March 1522 friends like Melanchthon were helping him revise it. By September of that year it was published, not at all slipshod but magnificent and illustrated by woodcuts of the master artist Lucas Cranach.
 

                  Title page 1522 Newe Testament Deutzsch
 

How did Luther render his High German? After several revisions, he had changed High German itself by avoiding stilted words, foreign words and slang. He increased capitalization of nouns and usage of conjunctions. He took adverbs from within the sentence and placed them at the end. He invented words: for example, scapegoat, decoy, and stopgap. Luther created sentences that were rhythmic and memorable. The High German of Luther’s Bible is “kraftvolles Deutsch” or ‘powerful, lusty German’ of the people.
 

All this was in deference to the theological meaning of the translation. The entire New Testament to Luther is the ‘gospel’, not just the first four books. The central message was Christ. A corollary to that was Luther’s belief that Paul’s central message was that the just shall live by faith and not by works of the law. Salvation was by faith alone. 

First Luther would place the Gospel of John, then the Pauline epistles [with Romans pre-eminent] and First Peter, after them the three other Gospels, and in a subordinate place Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation. He mistrusted Revelation because of its obscurity. “A revelation," said he, “should be revealing.” [Roland Bainton, 332]

Of first importance Luther named the Gospel of John, the epistles of Paul (especially Romans), and 1 Peter as “the true kernel and marrow of all the books.” [Martin Brecht, 51]

Or as H. H. Kramm commented, to Luther the priority of the canon of the New Testament was whatever ‘urges Christ’.  To hammer this point home Luther clearly separated Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation in the table of contents and placed them at the end. The four books were not even numbered as chapters. To drive his point home even more he noted all this in his general preface to the New Testament and more yet in each preface to the individual books in the New Testament.
 

Luther was seldom ambiguous.
 

Further Reading:
Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand (Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1950), 326-335.
Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: Shaping and defining the Reformation 1521-1532 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 46-56.
H. H. Kramm, The Theology of Martin Luther, (James Clarke and Co., 1947).
Ingetraut Ludolphy, afterword in Martin Luther, Das Newe Testament Deutzsch (Leipzig facsimile of 1522 Septembertestament: 1972), 1-7. In German.

NEXT: How Martin Luther regarded the books of the Old Testament.