The Sacred Books

Библията на German

There are still approximately 1,000 manuscripts or manuscript fragments of Medieval German Bible translations extant.[1] The earliest known and partly still available Germanic version of the Bible was the fourth century Gothic translation of Wulfila (ca. 311-380). This version, translated primarily from the Greek, established much of the Germanic Christian vocabulary that is still in use today. Later Charlemagne promoted Frankish biblical translations in the 9th century. There were Bible translations present in manuscript form at a considerable scale already in the thirteenth and the fourteenth century (e.g. the New Testament in the Augsburger Bible of 1350 and the Old Testament in the Wenzel Bible of 1389). There is ample evidence for the general use of the entire vernacular German Bible in the fifteenth century.[2] In 1466, before Martin Luther was even born, the Mentel Bible, a High-German vernacular Bible was printed at Strassburg. This edition was based on a no-longer-existing fourteenth-century manuscript translation of the Vulgate from the area of Nurenberg. Until 1518, it was reprinted at least 13 times. In 1478-1479, two Low German Bible editions were published in Cologne, one in the Niederrheinish or West-Westfalian dialect and another in the dialect of Lower Saxony or the East-Westfalian dialect. In 1494, another Low-German Bible was published in Lübeck, and in 1522, the last pre-Lutheran Bible, the Low-German Halberstaedter Bible was published. In total, there were at least eighteen complete German Bible editions, ninety editions in the vernacular of the Gospels and the readings of the Sundays and Holy Days, and some fourteen German Psalters by the time Luther first published his own New Testament translation.[3]

Luther Bible, 1534

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The most important and influential of translations of the Bible into German is the Luther Bible. The influence that Martin Luther's translation had on the development of the German language is often compared to the influence the King James Version had on English. The Luther Bible is currently used in a revised version from 1984. Despite the revisions, the language is still somewhat archaic and difficult for non-native speakers who want to learn the German language using a German translation of the bible.