Learn German

I’m thinking of reading the bible again this time in German to improve my German. I’m wondering how different is the regular luther bible from Average common German today.

In my language the the King James Version of the bible the English used is very old, and even native English speakers have a hard time understanding it.

First, there are thirty three languages spoken in Germany as native tongues, more than one of which would qualify as "German." Second, there is about the same distance to Luther as there is to Shakespeare. That is the language difference.

Third, Luther didn’t have the best texts around. It wasn’t as bad as the KJV, which had 20,000 errors removed from it in 1890, but it wouldn’t pass muster today.

The bible is a poor choice as well. Certain words used in the bible are translated into English certain ways because of theological custom. For example, "salvation," has a distinct theological meaning in English which no longer reflects the Greek well. A better modern English word would be "liberation." Likewise in any theologically sensitive passage you are quite likely to find English translations that are due to not wanting to offend a denomination more than accuracy. When the KJV was retranslated in 1890 it destroyed the justification for entire denominations. Translators are careful today due to the backlash then. They don’t lie, but they don’t pick fights either.

You are much better to pick a modern English work you know well and have a copy of and then read it in German. That way you are dealing both with modern languages as currently used and you are only dealing no intervening languages as well.

Finally, the grammar structures of German and English do not match one to one, neither do Hebrew or Greek, but they overlap in different ways. Although outside your interest, to give a very clear example, Russian has no to be verb in the present tense. Neither the words is or am exist in Russian. Now think about how to say "I am ‘the I am.’," without having an equivalent to "am."

English and Latin lack certain grammatical structures Greek possess such as reflexive sentences. I do not know how they are handled in German. However, there is a clear theological impact of this loss of grammar.

When Augustine, and hence Protestantism, discussed original sin he lacked a knowledge of Greek and so used Jerome’s Latin. Jerome had the passage, "because of sin, all die." But it actually does not say that in Greek. Jerome was trapped for lack of an equivalent phrasing in Latin, English also lacks this structure and follows Jerome, but that isn’t what the bible says in Greek.

In English it is always translated that way, I do not know how it is translated in German. A better translation would have been "Because of death, all sin," while holding the simultaneous, but lesser meaning "because of sin, all die." The biblical passage says that because we are mortal and feel it doesn’t matter, we go ahead and sin while it is simultaneously true that sin is the cause of death. Jerome had to pick, he sort of flipped a coin and put a note in the margins that the meaning is inexact due to grammar issues.

That is why you cannot just go from German to English and vice versa with a book like the bible. Translators in each language have to develop customs on how to translate problematic passages. Language to language these customs do not match.

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