German language translations of the Bible have existed since the Middle Ages. The most influential is Luther's translation, which established High German as the literary language throughout Germany by the middle of the seventeenth century and which still continues to be most widely used in the German-speaking world today.
Pre-Lutheran Germanic Bibles
The earliest known and partly still available Germanic version of the Bible was the fourth century Gothic translation of Wulfila (c. 311–380). This version, translated primarily from the Greek, established much of the Germanic Christian vocabulary that is still in use today. Later Charlemagne promoted Frankish Bible translations in the 9th century. There were Bible translations present in manuscript form at a considerable scale already in the thirteenth and the fourteenth century (e.g. the New Testament in the Augsburger Bible of 1350 and the Old Testament in the Wenceslas Bible of 1389). There are still approximately 1,000 manuscripts or manuscript fragments of Medieval German Bible translations extant.
Printed Bibles
There is ample evidence for the general use of the entire vernacular German Bible in the fifteenth century. In 1466, before Martin Luther was even born, Johannes Mentelin printed the Mentel Bible, a High German vernacular Bible, at Strasbourg. This edition was based on a no-longer-extant fourteenth-century manuscript translation of the Vulgate from the area of Nuremberg. By 1518, it had been reprinted at least 13 times.
The Sensenschmidt Bible was published around 1476‒1478. In 1478–1479, two Low German Bible editions were published in Cologne, one in the Low Rhenish dialect and another in the Low Saxon dialect. In 1483, the Koberger was printed . In 1494, another Low German Bible was published in the dialect of Lübeck, and in 1522, the last pre-Lutheran Bible, the Low Saxon Halberstadt Bible was published.
In 1477, in Delft, Holland, an Old Testament (except the Psalms) was printed in Middle Dutch. An accompanying New Testament seems to have been lost.
In total, there were at least eighteen complete German Bible editions, ninety editions in the vernacular of the Gospels and the readings of the Sundays and Holy Days, and some fourteen German Psalters by the time Luther first published his own New Testament translation. An Anabaptist translation by Ludwig Hetzer and Hans Denck was published at Worms in 1529.
Overview of the German Bibles before Luther
Luther's Bible
The most important and influential translation of the Bible into German is the Luther Bible, completed in 1534. It was the first translation (mainly) from the original Hebrew and Greek and not translated from the Latin Vulgate. The influence that Martin Luther's translation had on the development of the German language is often compared to the influence the King James Version had on English. The Luther Bible is currently used in a revised version from 1984, which was adapted to the new German orthography in 1999. Here also some revisions have taken place, e.g. "Weib" > "Frau". Despite the revisions, the language is still somewhat archaic and difficult for non-native speakers who want to learn the German language using a German translation of the Bible. Another revision was published in 2017; in this version, some of the text that had been 'toned down' in previous revisions has been reverted to Luther's stronger formulations.
Froschauer Bible
Zwingli's High Alemannic German (Swiss German) translation grew out of the Prophezey, an exegetical workshop taking place on every weekday, with the participation of all clerics of Zürich, working at a German rendition of Bible texts for the benefit of the congregation. The translation of Martin Luther was used as far as it was already completed. This helped Zwingli to complete the entire translation five years before Luther. At the printing shop of Christoph Froschauer, the New Testament appeared from 1525 to 1529, and later parts of the Old Testament, with a complete translation in a single volume first printed in 1531, with an introduction by Zwingli and summaries of each chapter. This Froschauer Bible, containing more than 200 illustrations, became notable as a masterpiece of printing at the time. The translation is mainly due to Zwingli and his friend Leo Jud, pastor at the St. Peter parish. The translation of the Old Testament was revised in 1540, that of the New Testament in 1574. Verse numbering was introduced in 1589.