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Luther Bible

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German-language translation of the Bible by Martin Luther

Key facts

Full name
Biblia / das ist / die gantze Heilige Schrifft Deudsch , (Biblia / that is / the complete Holy Writing in German)
Abbreviation
LUT
Apocrypha
Deuterocanonical books Prayer of Manasseh
Authorship
Martin Luther Philipp Melanchthon Caspar Creuziger Justus Jonas Johannes Bugenhagen others
Textual basis
NT: Textus Receptus (Luther) , Vulgate (Bugenhagen) OT: Septuagint (Melanchthon) , 2nd Bomberg Edition (Creuziger)
Version revision
1984 (last official revision)
Publisher
Hans Lufft
Copyright
Public domain due to age
Religious affiliation
Lutheran churches Several Reformed churches

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Image
Lutherbibel.jpg
Show 6 more facts
edition or translation of
Bible
Commons category
Luther Bible
publication date
1534-00-00
copyright status
public domain
language of work or name
Early New High German
Sources (2)

via Wikidata · CC0

~32 min read

Encyclopedic overview

The Luther Bible (German: Lutherbibel) is a German language Bible translation by the Protestant reformer Martin Luther. A New Testament translation by Luther was first published in September 1522; the completed Bible contained 75 books, including the Old Testament, Apocrypha and New Testament, which was printed in 1534. Luther continued to make improvements to the text until 1545. It was one of the first full translations of the Bible into German that used not only the Latin Vulgate but the original Hebrew and Greek.

Luther did not translate the entire Bible on his own; he relied on a team of translators and helpers that included Philip Melanchthon, a scholar of Koine Greek who motivated and assisted Luther's New Testament translation from Greek, and Matthäus Aurogallus, a linguist and scholar of Hebrew. One of the textual bases of the New Testament translation was the bilingual Latin and Greek version, with its philological annotations, recently published by the Dutch Catholic humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam and called the Novum Testamentum omne (1519).

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Luther Bible” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.