Luther Bible

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 also the Greek.

Luther did not translate the entire Bible by himself; 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).

The project absorbed Luther's later years. The publication of Luther's Bible was a decisive moment in the spread of literacy in early modern Germany, promoting the development of non-local forms of language and exposing all speakers to forms of German from outside their own areas. Thanks to the then recently invented printing press, the result was widely disseminated and contributed significantly to the development of today's modern High German language.