Questions of Audience
We have been examining ways in which Luther attempted to direct the reading of the New Testament. But how successful were these efforts? And how large an audience did this effort reach? Statistics on reprints suggest that the German New Testament quickly became a sixteenth-century "best-seller," at least among those who could read.[45] The first edition appeared in September 1522 (the "September Testament") in an unusually large printing of between three and five thousand copies.[46] It sold out immediately and its Wittenburg publisher Melchior Lotther the Younger, produced another large edition in December of the same year (the "December Testament"). The first complete reprint appeared in Basel in December of 1522, and at least another eleven or twelve complete reprints left the press in 1523, six more in Basel, three in Augsburg, one in Grimma, and one or two in Strasbourg.[47] Another twenty complete reprints appeared in 1524, including three or four in Strasbourg.[48] 1525 saw another eight or so reprints, one of which was issued in Strasbourg. By any measure this indicates a remarkable demand, despite its relatively high price (the September Testament sold for half a gulden for an unbound, undecorated copy, the rough equivalent of the purchase price of about 150 kilograms of wheat, two butchered sheep, 430 eggs, or two weeks' wages for a baker or four months' wages for a serving maid at the city hospital in Vienna).[49]
Approximately forty-three distinct editions appeared in forty months (September 1522 through 1525). Some of these editions were quite large for sixteenth-century printings, and even if a conservative
Plate 5.
The Dragon of Revelation Wearing the Papal Tiara. From the first edition
("September Testament") of Luther's German New Testament
(Wittenberg, 1522).
Plate 6.
The Whore of Babylon Wearing the Papal Tiara. From the first edition
("September Testament") of Luther's German New Testament
(Wittenberg, 1522).
Figure 2.
Editions of Luther's German New Testament by Publication Format
average of 2,000 copies per printing is assumed, at least 86,000 copies were issued in this short time span. As figure 2 indicates, the expensive folio reprints quickly made way for quarto and octavo editions. These smaller, less expensive editions were likely available to a larger audience than the folio editions.[50] This development suggests that printers were either responding to demand for less expensive and handier editions or at least thought that such editions would be easier to sell. Since there were frequent reprints by the same printer, it seems safe to infer that printers had no difficulty selling the German New Testament . For a book as costly as this (undoubtedly an expensive book even in its cheapest and handiest octavo format), these were remarkable sales. No other publication of Luther's came close to this number.
Six editions were produced in Wittenburg, three of which identified Luther as the translator. The other three gave the place of publication, Wittenberg, and readers would have had no difficulty inferring who the translator was. It is another matter with the other thirty-seven editions printed elsewhere. As best as I can determine only two of these thirty-seven editions named Luther as the translator. Given the highly pointed prefaces and glosses, an alert reader would probably have had
no difficulty inferring the provenance of the translation, but this is not a sure thing. Since the early Wittenberg editions did not mention Luther's name, the printers, in typesetting from these editions or from editions based on these early Witteberg editions,[51] may have simply copied the omission. The printers outside Wittenberg also had an incentive to avoid placing his name on their editions, since the Edict of Worms forbade the publication of Luther's works. By omitting his name, the printers assured a larger market, including readers who remained loyal to the Catholic church, and helped propagate Luther's message to as large an audience as possible.
Most of the reprints also diverged from the September Testament in the significant matter of the woodcuts for the Book of Revelation. In three of the woodcuts in the September Testament the papal tiara graced the brow of the beast or the whore of Babylon. As a result of objection from such worthies as Duke Georg of Albertine Saxony, the upper two crowns were excised already in the second edition published in Wittenberg in December 1522.[52] Most of reprints elsewhere also omitted either the woodcut series in its entirety or offered copies without the offending tiaras. But this was not always the case. The Basel printer Jakob Wolff had the artist Hans Holbein make from the September Testament woodcut copies in a smaller format that included the polemical tiaras. He used these woodcuts in three printings in 1523 and two printings in 1524. The printer Amandus Farkal of Hagenau copied fifteen of Holbein's copies, including the three with the triple crown, for his 1524 edition, and Johann Knobloch of Strasbourg used a subset of the Holbein originals, including the controversial woodcuts, in two of his 1524 editions and in his one 1525 edition. In sum, a little less than a quarter of the editions contained the visual identification of the papacy with the beast or whore of the Book of Revelation.[53] This still means that a significant number of printers (and hence a significant number of readers who purchased their editions of the New Testament) assisted in propagating Luther's conviction, in this case visually expressed, that the papacy was the Antichrist.
Given the importance of the glosses in Luther's effort to supplement Scripture alone, it is worth noting that two of the editions published in Strasbourg did not reproduce in the margins themselves Luther's highly directive marginal glosses. The 1523 edition by Johann Schott reproduced the glosses on twenty-four leaves placed between Acts and Romans.[54] The 1524 Strasbourg edition by Wolfgang Köpfel omitted
the glosses entirely. Instead, they were reproduced in a separate booklet.[55] Schott's decision to put the glosses in a special section may have been dictated by considerations of economy, since it was certainly easier to typeset the glosses separately than to typeset them in the margins. Köpfel's separate printing, however, probably reflected the glosses' controversial nature. Just as the text of Luther's speech before the Imperial Diet of Worms may have been modified to blunt the suggestion that Luther was offering new teachings, his marginal glosses may have been separately printed to minimize offense to prospective buyers.[56]
In light of the low literacy rates in sixteenth-century Germany and the expense of even the cheapest German New Testament , the purchasers would have made up but a tiny fraction of the German-speaking population. Even so, more people would have had access to a German New Testament that at any time in the past. Moreover, Luther did not have to reach everyone, only those in positions of leadership or influence. The statistics suggest that, in fact, he reached a goodly number of such people. But most people would have been influenced by Luther's translation only through preached sermons and oral readings from Scripture. The degree to which glosses and prefaces may have influenced this oral reception is extraordinarily difficult to determine. Bernd Moeller's recent study of preaching has come closest to shedding some light on this question.[57]
Moeller looked at all the publications that he could find that purported to be summaries of sermons that Evangelicals had given in cities and towns—large and small—throughout the Holy Roman Empire. Of the thirty-two sermon summaries that Moeller examined, produced by twenty-six authors, he found four major themes: justification by faith alone apart from works of the law, the church, the Christian life, and, finally, the rapidly approaching Endtime. In each of these treatises can be found the major elements of the doctrine of justification, namely, the totality of human sin, the unconditional reception of salvation promised solely through faith in Christ, and the exclusion of all merit and human accomplishment in regards to salvation. These points are, of course, just the issues of law and gospel that Luther hammered on in his prefaces and marginal glosses.
Vehemently and with regularity these authors rejected their opponent's claim that they so concentrated on grace and faith that they encouraged moral laxity. While these authors characterized the practices of the medieval church as works righteousness and human doctrine,
they insisted, nevertheless, that good works necessarily followed from faith. Each treatise repeated the assertion "Where there is faith, there is also love." Christians did good works not for their own sake, but for the sake of the neighbor. Love was the fruit of faith. This was perhaps the most repeated biblical passage in these treatises. All these distinctly Evangelical themes can be found in the apparatus Luther provided for his German New Testament . Even the expectation of the imminent Endtime, while left out of the prefaces and marginalia, found visual expression in the woodcuts to Revelation.
The preachers Moeller has studied (and many others who preached in support of the Reformation but did not commit their sermons to print) undoubtedly acquired many of their beliefs from a variety of Luther's publications. But it is also highly likely that these "opinion leaders" were strongly influenced by Luther's German New Testament . The extent of this influence, or at least the likelihood of the extent of this influence, is made plain by a remarkable study by the historian Holm Zerener. In a 1911 article he showed conclusively that Luther's translation enjoyed incredibly rapid and comprehensive adoption among those publishing both in support of, and (remarkably) in opposition to, the Reformation movement. In this study, he examined a large sample of 681 German pamphlets published between 1522 and 1525. Of those that included citations from the New Testament, 23 percent of those published in 1522 used Luther's translation, 44 percent of those published in 1523, 72 percent of those published in 1524, and 77 percent of those published in 1525.[58] Even a significant number of Catholic controversialists availed themselves of Luther's translation!
The conclusion seems inescapable. The collection even of "proof texts" is not a casual matter, and these authors must have been intensively studying Luther's text and, one would assume, the accompanying glosses and prefaces. Certainly the glosses would be hard to overlook or ignore. If three-quarters of the publicists sampled in Zerener's study were using Luther's translation by 1524–1525, this means that a major fraction of the publicists of the day underwent a thorough and lengthy exposure to Luther's understanding of law and gospel, faith and works. It would be surprising indeed if such an intense exposure would have no influence.
"Scripture alone" was the Evangelical watchword, and "Scripture interprets itself" its theological justification. But Scripture was not disembodied. It took concrete form as typeset letters on a page. As a
printed book Scripture had already undergone one interpretation in the choices Luther made to render the Greek into acceptable German. The preface, introductions, and marginalia that Luther added became an integral part of Scripture as published text, adding further interpretation. As a physical artifact, then, that people could pick up and read, Scripture was not alone, but Luther's German New Testament certainly interpreted itself.