You Can Read The Bible On Your Phone Because Of Luther

Martin Luther had determined that the Bible should be brought to the homes of the common people. He echoed the cry of Erasmus that the ploughman should be able to recite the Scripture while he was ploughing, or the weaver as he hummed to the music of his shuttle.

Therefore, during his exile in the Wartburg Castle, Luther grasped his opportunity to begin to translate the New Testament into German. He took a little more than a year to translate the New Testament and have it revised by his friends and colleagues, including the young Philip Melanchthon.

The simplicity, the directness, the freshness, the perseverance of Luther's character appeared in the translation, as in everything else that he wrote.

Henry Zecher, writing in Christianity Today, posited: “Luther's Bible introduced mass media, unified a nation, and set the standard for future translations.”

Today, the multiplicity of media through which God’s Word is freely available can be traced, in no small way, to the efforts of Luther and his fellow Reformers in the realm of Bible translation.