Roman letters lecture (Martin Luther)

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Page from Luther's personal copy (Romans 3, 1–9a) with personal comments for the lecture
First page of the printed copy of the letter to the Romans with large line spacing for Martin Luther's letter to the Romans lecture in 1515; handwritten notes by the student Sigismund Reichenbach (Anhaltische Landesbücherei Dessau, signature Georg 1049a; UNESCO World Heritage Site)

The lectures on Romans by Martin Luther in the years 1515 to 1516 at the University of Wittenberg is a turning point of his theology viewed. This is less true of the lecture itself, which was held in front of a relatively small audience, and all the more true of the rediscovery of the sources for this lecture, which were edited by Johannes Ficker in 1909 and triggered the so-called Luther Renaissance .

The lecture

As a student who was impressed by Luther at the time and a canon who later returned to Catholicism, Johannes Oldekop vividly reported on Luther's reading of the Romans:

“In jare 1515 of the mandage na dem witten sondage, is Quasimodogeniti came ik to Wyttenberge ... And umme de tit court to Doctor Martinus Luther epistolas Pauli ad Romanos reading. The Doctor had de darup bi Johan Grunenberg the bokdruker ordered, that de epistula Pauli de rige was printed one like the other for the sake of less. "

“In 1515, on the Monday after White Sunday, that is Quasimodogeniti, I came to Wittenberg. ... And around this time, Doctor Martinus Luther started reading Paul's letters (sic!) To the Romans. The doctor had ordered Johann Grunenberg, the book printer, that Paul's letter, the lines one far from the other, should be printed for the sake of the glosses . "

It was this description of a special pressure on the hand of the students that prompted Ficker to write to all European libraries and private individuals who were eligible to ask whether such student transcripts were still preserved anywhere.

Luther's lecture manuscript

As he had already done at his psalm lecture (see: Wolfenbütteler Psalter ), Luther also had the Latin Bible text printed with wide spacing and wide margins for his second lecture at the Wittenberg printer Rhau-Grunenberg , so that the students, but also himself , were able to enter handwritten notes ( glosses ) in this text .

The following is about various copies of this printed matter with their respective handwritten additions.

The 28 sheets of paper were about 17.8 cm wide and 21.5 cm high as they left the printing press. Some of them were subsequently trimmed and therefore smaller. The title was: “Divi Pauli apostoli ad Romanos Epistola.” On sheet 28a, the printed Bible text ended with the note: “Wittenburgii in aedib. Joan: Grunenbergii. Anno MD XV. Apud Augustinianos. “It is not clear which Latin text model of the letter to the Romans Grunenberg's small dispenser used. The printed text of the letter to the Romans probably basically followed the text version by Johann Froben , Basel 1509, but was often dependent on the Vulgate version by Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples , and took Luther's own critical textual decisions into account. According to Ficker, however, the proofreader, if there was one, "worked in an opaque manner and not carefully."

At the beginning of each chapter of the Romans, the print offers short summary information (summaries) of Nicholas of Lyra .

original

After Ficker had already carried out extensive research into Luther's personal copy of the letter to the Romans, he also asked generally in Berlin about manuscripts from the Reformation period and, to his greatest surprise, received the answer that the manuscript had been there for a long time in the showcase of the royal family Library. Of course, mistakes can happen everywhere ... "

Luther's personal copy, 156 sheets (of which sheet 50 is an inlaid sheet), had the signature Ms. theol in the Royal Library in Berlin . lat. qu. 21 ( manuscripta theologica latina in quarto 21). It has a splendid binding with the year 1582 and originally came from the Royal Court Library in Dresden, as the coat of arms supralibros shows. Pages 1 to 28 contain the printed Bible text with glosses, pages 29 to 152 the scholia . Luther used red ink to highlight headings and underline sentences.

The original is "currently not accessible for research", so that in this regard one is still dependent on the high-quality collotype prints of the manuscript initiated by Ficker in 1909 . " Luther's autograph , which was originally kept in Berlin and was long considered a war loss, is in the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow." It is part of the cultural property known as Berlinka that was relocated during the war.

Handwritten copy

Ficker found a copy made very carefully by several copyists for Luther's time in the Vatican Library ( Bibliotheca Palatina, lat. 1826). She had received the handwritten title: "Commentarius DM Lutheri in Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos ex autographo descriptus" from Johannes Aurifaber . The manuscript was transferred to the Palatina from Ulrich Fugger's private library in 1571.

Student transcripts

There are five more or less complete student copies of the Rhau-Grunenberg print.

The transcript of Sigismund Reichenbach , which is kept in Dessau, was selected for the world document heritage. Because his text comes closest to Luther's manuscript, and Gabriele Schmidt-Lauber was also able to make it likely that Luther did not read parts of his manuscript in the lecture hall (so that they are missing in the student transcripts). This self-censorship by Luther particularly affected critical and polemical peaks.

Ficker received another copy with handwritten glosses for viewing from the biblical collection in Stuttgart. Today it has the shelf mark in the Württemberg State Library : Ba lat.151503. In addition, Ficker received a reference to another copy in the Zwickau council school library .

A student transcript of the lecture is in the Aschaffenburg court library and another in Rome.

content

For the first time, as a professor, Luther dealt with an original Greek Bible text. His digressions on the Greek language, however, remain quite elementary, as he evidently had more interest in Hebrew than in Greek throughout his life. The reprint of the letter made for the lectures featured the Latin Vulgate text .

Luther divides the text of Romans into two main parts:

  • Romans 1–12 Paul destroys all human wisdom to emphasize the importance of Christ.
  • Romans 13-16 Paul teaches right action. "Accordingly, most of the present-day and critical remarks can be found in the remarks on these last four chapters."

The new understanding of God's righteousness did not open up for Luther at the same time as his reading of the Romans, but it was already indicated in the first reading of the Psalms. Even if Luther spoke in retrospect of a Reformation breakthrough (tower experience), it seems that the new insights in him gradually matured from reading the Psalms to reading the Romans.

From Paul ( Rom 5,14  LUT ) Luther learned a more radical understanding of human sin and thus came to a break with the traditional scholastic view of man . The scholastic positions increasingly became the counterpart from which Luther distanced himself through this lecture.

Timely effects

The fact that the student transcripts show traces of the revision and that they have been kept at all is an indication that the Roman letter lecture, more than the previous psalm lecture, was viewed as remarkable in the academic Wittenberg.

The student Bartholomäus Bernhardi from Feldkirch showed during his doctoral process for Baccalaureus sententiarus in September 1516 that he knew how to draw the conclusions from the lecture with regard to the doctrine of justification. The break with scholasticism became even clearer a year later when Franz Günther from Nordhausen had to defend a number of theses that Luther had written for him in his doctoral process for the Baccalaureus biblicus, including these two: It is wrong to assert without Aristotle does not become a theologian (No. 43). Rather, one becomes a theologian only without Aristotle (No. 44).

Quote

“Our Samaritan Christ took the half-dead person, his sick person, into the hostel for care and began to heal him after he had promised him perfect health for eternal life. He does not count the sin, ie the desires, to death, but in the meantime only refuses him in the hope of the promised recovery from doing and not doing that which could delay that recovery and the sin, ie the evil desire, could be increased. Is he perfectly fair with that? No, he is at the same time a sinner and a righteous man ( Non, Sed simul peccator et Iustus ); Sinner in reality, but righteous by virtue of the respect and certain promise of God that he would redeem him from sin until he completely heals him, and so he is perfectly healed in hope, but in reality a sinner ( Ac per hoc sanus perfecte est in spe, In re autem peccator ) ... "(WA 56, p. 272, 11–20)

literature

  • Martin Luther: The lecture on Romans : WA 56 ( online )
  • Martin Luther: The lecture on Romans. Postscripts : WA 57/1.
  • Martin Luther: Lecture on Romans 1516/16 (Latin and German), ed. by Martin Hofmann, translation by Eduard Ellwein, Darmstadt 1960.
  • Martin Luther: Lecture on Romans 1516/16 (German), ed. by HH Borcherdt and Georg Merz, translation by Eduard Ellwein, Munich 1965
  • Valentin Rose, Fritz Schillmann: Directory of the Latin manuscripts of the Königl. Berlin Library , Vol. II.3, III, Georg Olms Verlag 1976 (reprint of: The Manuscript Directories of the Royal Library of Berlin, 1905 and 1919), ISBN 3-487-06041-8 , p. 1355 ( online )
  • Gabriele Schmidt-Lauber: Luther's lecture on the Roman letter 1515/16, a comparison between Luther's manuscript and the student transcripts , Böhlau 1992, ISBN 978-3-412-11193-9 . (not evaluated)
  • Ulrich Köpf : Luther's Roman Letter Lecture (1515/16) - Historical and Theological Aspects . In: Irene Dingel , Henning P. Jürgens (ed.): Milestones of the Reformation. Key documents of the early effectiveness of Martin Luther , Gütersloh 2014, ISBN 978-3-579-08170-0 , pp. 48–55.
  • Ernst Koch : Notes on Luther's interpretation of the letter to the Romans - The manuscript in Dessau . In: Irene Dingel, Henning P. Jürgens (Ed.): Milestones of the Reformation , pp. 56–59.
  • Brian Cummings: Luther in the Berlinka , in: The Times Literary Supplement December 12, 2017 ( online )

Web links

Commons : Lecture on the Romans  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
  • Johannes Ficker (Hrsg.): Luther's lecture on the Romans 1515/1516 , Vol. 1: The gloss . With a collotype plate, Leipzig 1908.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ WA 56. pp. XII-XIII , accessed on January 23, 2018 .
  2. ↑ WA 56, p. Xvii ( digitized version )
  3. ↑ Johannes Ficker: The gloss . S. XLIX .
  4. ↑ Johannes Ficker: The gloss . S. XII .
  5. ↑ Johannes Ficker: The gloss . S. XIX .
  6. ↑ Ernst Koch: The manuscript in Dessau . S. 58 .
  7. ↑ Ernst Koch: The manuscript in Dessau . S. 59 .
  8. ^ The Lecture in Romans. Retrieved January 23, 2018 .
  9. ↑ Johannes Ficker: The gloss . S. XL .
  10. ↑ Johannes Ficker: The gloss . S. XXVII .
  11. ↑ Johannea Ficker: The gloss . S. XXXII .
  12. ↑ Luther's script is part of the world heritage canon ; Illustration
  13. ^ A b Ernst Koch: The manuscript in Dessau . S. 59 .
  14. ↑ Ulrich Köpf: Luther's Roman Letter Lecture . S. 54 .
  15. ↑ Johannes Ficker: The gloss . S. X .
  16. ↑ Diui Pauli Apostoli ad Romanos epistola. Retrieved January 23, 2018 .
  17. ^ Divi Pauli apostoli ad Romanos epistola. Accessed January 31, 2018 .
  18. ↑ a b Ulrich Köpf: Luther's Roman Letter Lecture . S. 49 .
  19. ↑ Ulrich Köpf: Luther's Roman Letter Lecture . S. 51 .
  20. ↑ Ulrich Köpf: Luther's Roman Letter Lecture . S. 52 .
  21. ↑ Ulrich Köpf: Luther's Roman Letter Lecture . S. 53-54 .
  22. ↑ a b Ulrich Köpf: Luther's Roman Letter Lecture . S. 54 .