Luther Bible (Lutherbibel)

Martin Luther's German translation of the Bible — the New Testament in 1522, the complete Lutherbibel in 1534 — was a watershed in both religious and literary history, establishing the modern German literary language and making scripture accessible to common people for the first time in the German-speaking world. Luther's canon retained the thirty-nine books of the Hebrew Old Testament and twenty-seven New Testament books but relegated the seven deuterocanonical books to an appendix he called 'Apocrypha,' deeming them useful but not equal to Holy Scripture. He also questioned the canonicity of Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation, placing them at the end of the New Testament without numbers, though he never removed them. This sixty-six-book Protestant canon became standard for all subsequent Protestant traditions.

Martin Luther's posting of the Ninety-Five Theses in 1517 ignited the Protestant Reformation, permanently fracturing Western Christianity. His translation of the Bible into vernacular German democratized scripture and fueled the spread of Protestantism across northern Europe, while triggering devastating religious wars that culminated in the Thirty Years' War of 1618 to 1648, which killed an estimated eight million people and devastated Central Europe. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 established foundational principles of the modern nation-state system. Lutheran Protestantism reshaped the culture, education, and governance of Scandinavia, northern Germany, and the Baltic states, while Calvinist offshoots spread to Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scotland, and eventually America, and the Reformation's emphasis on individual scriptural interpretation helped catalyze the Enlightenment and modern concepts of individual conscience and religious liberty.