Luther Bible

The Luther Bible is a German language Bible translation from Hebrew and ancient Greek by Martin Luther. The New Testament was first published in 1522 and the complete Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments and Apocrypha, in 1534.

The project absorbed Luther's later years. Thanks to the then recently invented printing press, the result was widely disseminated and contributed significantly to the development of today's modern High German language.

Luther's New Testament translation

While he was sequestered in the Wartburg Castle (1521–22) Luther began to translate the New Testament from Koine Greek into German in order to make it more accessible to all the people of the "Holy Roman Empire of the German nation." He translated from the Greek text, using Erasmus' second edition (1519) of the Greek New Testament, known as the Textus Receptus. Luther did not translate from the Latin Vulgate translation, which is the Latin translation officially used by the Roman Catholic Church. Like Erasmus, Luther had learned Greek at the Latin schools led by the Brethren of the Common Life (Erasmus in Deventer, the Netherlands, and Luther in Magdeburg). These lay brothers added Greek as a new subject to their curriculum in the late 15th century. At that time Greek was seldom taught even at universities.