Luther’s translation has been recommended by the Evangelical Church in Germany for Protestants both in religious education and Bible translation. This edition features an updated German translation of the Bible that retains Luther’s language in many places while conveying his more difficult or ambiguous terms into modern German, giving it at once a timeless and modern feel.
On the Apocrypha:
“Not equal to the Holy Scriptures, but still useful and easy to read.” This is how Martin Luther characterized the Apocrypha (from the Greek
apokryptein
= to hide). In his Bible translation, he therefore summarized them in a separate section between the Old and New Testaments.
In 1534, Martin Luther and his colleagues translated most of the Apocrypha from the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), and only had very unreliable original text editions available. Therefore the Apocrypha was partly retranslated for this 2017 edition, using the language and readability of Luther’s translation as a model. The result is a German translation that (1) is based on the Septuagint, (2) can be compared with other translations of the Apocrypha, (3) is suitable for academic use, and (4) can still be compared with older Luther editions by reason of partially duplicated verse references.
With the exception of Psalms, which is a single column, the biblical text is presented in two columns.
Features include:
Outlines at the beginning of each book
Cross-references as footnotes to the text
Maps inside front and back covers
A subject index