Get started

WorkMartin Luther

An Open Letter on Translating

Accused of adding a word to Scripture, Luther defends it by sending his critics to the market to hear how Germans actually talk.

by Martin Luther34 passages held

  • German, the original language
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work See it in context
Original title
Ein Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen
First published
(aged 47)
Original language
German

Report a rights issue

Overview

Paul writes in his letter to the Romans that a person is justified by faith without the works of the law, and Luther's German New Testament had put one word into that sentence that Paul's text does not contain: allein, alone. His Catholic critics called it tampering with God's word. A correspondent Luther never names asked him about it, and about a second question, whether the dead saints pray for the living. Luther answered in September 1530 from Coburg Fortress, a castle of the elector of Saxony, while the imperial Diet met at Augsburg some two hundred kilometres away and his colleague Philipp Melanchthon presented the Lutheran confession of faith there. His first answer is scorn: his critics could not translate a page, and the bungler of Dresden, dead now and never again to be named, had taken Luther's own New Testament almost word for word and put his name to it. The second is an argument about language. German, unlike Latin or Greek, adds alone to make a negative complete: a farmer brings only grain and no money. Nobody learns German from the letters of a Latin text, Luther says; you ask the mother at home, the children in the street and the common man in the market, watch how they speak, and translate accordingly. The angel's greeting to Mary, rendered word for word as full of grace, makes a German think of a barrel full of beer or a purse full of money. Yet where a single word carried the meaning, he and his helpers kept to the letter. On the saints, he answers that God nowhere commands anyone to call on them for intercession. On 12 September Luther sent the letter to Wenzeslaus Linck in Nuremberg, who had it printed there before the year was out with a preface of his own.

Key concepts

What does Luther mean by translating by sense rather than letter?

Rendering what a sentence means in the way the target language would say it, instead of copying its words one by one. Luther's test is the speech of ordinary Germans at home, in the street and at the market. A literal 'full of grace' is bad German, so he looked for what a German would say. Sense governs, but where one word carries the meaning, the letter is kept.

Why does German grammar call for 'alone' in Romans 3?

Because in German, when a sentence affirms one thing and denies another, 'allein' (alone, only) is added to make the denial full and clear. Luther's example is 'the farmer brings only grain and no money'. Paul says a person is justified by faith without the works of the law. In good German, Luther argues, that sentence needs 'alone', even though Latin and Greek do without it.

What does 'faith alone makes righteous' claim, according to the letter?

That a person is accepted by God through trust in Christ's death and resurrection, with no contribution from any work, including the works the law of Moses requires. Luther presses the point by asking whether Christ's death and resurrection are our work. Since they are not, nothing we do can stand beside them. He adds that Ambrose and Augustine taught the same before him.

Why does Luther reject calling on the saints for intercession?

Because intercession, asking someone to pray on one's behalf, is a matter of worship, and in worship nothing should be done without God's command. God nowhere commands calling on saints or angels, and Scripture gives no example of it. The practice also teaches people to put more trust in saints than in Christ. Leaving it off, Luther says, risks nothing.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Word 'Alone'

Had Luther falsified Paul by adding one word to a sentence about faith? The charge touched both his German and his whole doctrine, and he answers both.

Admitting that the four letters s-o-l-a stand in neither the Latin nor the Greek of Romans 3, Luther defends the word twice. As German, it belongs there: when a sentence affirms one thing and denies another, German adds alone, as in 'the farmer brings only grain and no money'. As doctrine, the matter itself demands it, since Paul excludes even the works of the law, not just ordinary deeds. To the complaint that this discourages good works he replies that Paul's own words are more offensive still, and that Ambrose and Augustine said it first.

  • translation
  • justification
  • faith and works
  • scripture
  • biblical interpretation
  • linguistic meaning
  • religious controversy
  • faith

Enter a dialogue

How German Is Spoken

Should a translation follow the letters of its source or the speech of its readers? Luther's answer made a method out of listening to ordinary people.

Nobody learns German from the letters of a Latin text, Luther insists; ask the mother at home, the children in the street and the common man in the market, and watch their mouths. Rendered letter by letter, the angel's 'full of grace' makes a German think of a barrel full of beer or a purse full of money. Yet he did not let the letter go freely: where a single word carried the meaning, he and his helpers kept it, and they sometimes spent four days on three lines of Job.

  • language
  • linguistics
  • rhetoric
  • expertise
  • translator autonomy
  • plagiarism
  • polemics
  • authorship
  • reputation

Enter a dialogue

Do the Saints Pray for Us?

Should Christians call on the dead saints to intercede for them? The second question the letter answers turns on what God has commanded and what he has not.

Luther's answer is brief and practical. God nowhere commands anyone to call on angels or saints for intercession, and Scripture offers no example of it. In worship nothing should be undertaken without God's command, so the practice cannot be recommended. It is also dangerous, because people easily learn to trust the saints more than Christ. Nobody will anger God by leaving it off. To the objection that this condemns all of Christendom, he recalls Elijah, who thought himself alone while God had kept seven thousand faithful.

  • intercession of saints
  • idolatry
  • worship
  • religious practice
  • tradition
  • religious authority

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
34
distinct concepts
61
by passages held, corpus-wide
#709

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “expertise” and “translation”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 4 concepts, joined by 4 pairings. 27 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
expertisetranslation5
justificationtranslation4
expertisescripture1
scripturetranslation1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1517 Ninety-five Theses (Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum)

    Where the quarrel began: an academic exercise in Latin, followed within months by the German sermon that carried its argument to lay readers.

     LA
  2. 1518 Sermon on Indulgences and Grace (Ein Sermon von Ablaß und Gnade)

    The German companion to the Latin Ninety-five Theses: the same quarrel over indulgences, taken out of the lecture hall and put to lay readers a few months later.

     DE
  3. 1520 A Treatise on Good Works (Von den guten Werken)

    Published in the spring of 1520 just ahead of the three manifestos of that year, it lays out in plain German the teaching on faith and works that they take for granted.

     DE
  4. 1520 Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation von des christlichen Standes Besserung)

    The first of the three books of 1520 that made the break with Rome public; The Babylonian Captivity of the Church followed in October and The Freedom of a Christian in November.

     DE
  5. 1520 The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (De captivitate Babylonica ecclesiae praeludium)

    Of Luther's three treatises of 1520, the one written in Latin for the learned: the appeal to the nobility before it was in German, and The Freedom of a Christian, after it, appeared in both languages.

     DE
  6. 1520 The Freedom of a Christian (Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen)

    Meant as a peace offering to the pope, the third of Luther's treatises of 1520 turns from the institutions of the church to the life of a single believer.

     DE
  7. 1522 A Sincere Admonition by Martin Luther to All Christians to Guard Against Insurrection and Rebellion (Eine treue Vermahnung zu allen Christen, sich zu hüten vor Aufruhr und Empörung)

    Written in hiding between the Diet of Worms and Luther's return to Wittenberg, in the same winter that he began translating the New Testament into German.

     DE
  8. 1522 Preface to the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans (Vorrede auf die Epistel S. Paul an die Römer)

    A companion to The Freedom of a Christian: the same teaching on faith and works, given this time as a way into the book of the Bible it came from.

     DE
  9. 1523 Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed (Von weltlicher Obrigkeit, wie weit man ihr Gehorsam schuldig sei)

    A sequel that corrects its predecessor: three years after asking princes to reform the church, Luther marks the line beyond which their power over Christians stops.

     DE
  10. 1529 The Large Catechism (Der Große Katechismus)

    Sermons turned into a book: the catechism sermons Luther preached at Wittenberg in 1528, reworked into the fuller of his two catechisms.

     DE
  11. 1529 The Small Catechism (Kleiner Katechismus)

    Published a month after the Large Catechism, it gives the household the words to learn by heart, where the larger book explains them to the preacher.

     DE
  12. 1530 An Open Letter on Translating (Ein Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen) you are here DE
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work

— or open another of their works