Luther sought to create a Bible not to be a bestseller, but one through which individuals would hear God speaking directly to them in their world, in their time, in their place. A Bible that was God’s Word—more accurately, God speaking. Not a passive tool that sits on a shelf or a table or even altar. But an active, speaking, seeking, hearable, and impactful speaking of God. Everything Luther does, from the style of translation to the title page to the sequence of the books to notes is designed to bring people to Christ.

We know exactly when the Bible first became the “best-selling book of all time.” It was September 21, 1522. This date was the opening of the annual book fair in Leipzig, Germany. The previous April, Martin Luther refused to recant his writings before the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at an assembly convened to examine his works known as the Diet of Worms. From there he was secreted to the Wartburg Castle for his own protection.
In eleven weeks, he completed a translation of the New Testament from Greek into German. From there, his colleague at Wittenberg University, Philip Melanchthon, edited the translation. Two businessmen in Wittenberg, Lucas Cranach the Elder and his partner Christian Doering, then employed the printer Melchior Lotter the Younger to rush to completion this New Testament in German in time for the book fair—even setting up temporary presses on their property to ensure completion. Between 3,000 and 5,000 copies were made, bundled up, and rushed to Leipzig for the book fair.
An Immediate Bestseller
The book was a hit. All the copies of this German New Testament sold out before the fair ended a week later. From there, Luther’s German New Testament spread around Europe. A second printing was started immediately and released in December. A pirated version was printed in Basel before the end of 1522. In the next year a total of twelve authorized and sixty-six unauthorized reprints appeared throughout Germany and Europe—hundreds of thousands of copies sold in just over twelve months. Suddenly, the Bible was a bestseller. Luther’s Bible. The German New Testament.
Now, all this might be left as a footnote in history, except that this little Bible by Luther still influences the way that we read Bibles today. From format to contents to readability to explanatory notes—all have been shaped by the Septembertestament.
How did this instant success happen? Luther was not the first to market. In fact, the first printed German Bible had appeared in 1466, fifty-five years before Luther’s work. Seventeen total versions appeared before 1522. So, there was not simply a pent-up demand for the Bible in German into which Luther tapped. Rather, it was Luther’s theology and notoriety, combined with a readable translation style and a physical and visual format designed to help the reader understand the text—at least the text as Luther wanted the reader to understand it—that made this Bible become a bestseller.
The Context of Luther’s Achievement
For the first 1500 years of the church, the Bible, or rather, the various books and stories in the Bible, were accessed by almost all people not by reading, but by hearing. People heard the Bible in worship, they sung it in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. They were taught it in sermons and catechetical teaching, they saw its contents portrayed in icons and eventually stained glass, watched it performed in mystery plays and passion plays (some of which are still performed today).
But possessing a Bible, holding a Bible, whether on papyrus or parchment or paper was not at all common. Almost all physical copies of the Bible down to the 1500s were produced for use in churches, in monasteries, and for clergy. A few wealthy people had beautifully decorated devotional books, which often contained the Psalms, but the Bible as we know it was simply not accessible—nor indeed seen to need to be accessible—to the vast, vast majority of people.
Even Gutenberg did not produce a bestseller because what he produced looked and felt and, to some extent, even cost what a Latin manuscript of the Bible cost in the 1450s. Gutenberg could produce sixty copies in the time it took a copyist to produce one manuscript. The first edition of 1454 was produced in about 160 to 180 copies: ¾ of them on paper and ¼ on vellum.
Paper copies cost thirty florins at a time when the salary of a clerk in the Medici bank earned between fourteen and fifty florins per year. So, if you have a great job in 1450, a Gutenberg Bible would cost roughly one year’s wages—and you still had to be able to read Latin. Most copies were purchased by religious orders or wealthy individuals for donation to churches and ecclesial institutions. While a pivotal moment in western history (Time magazine named it the most significant event of the past 1000 years) Gutenberg did not immediately change the way that people accessed the Bible.

But in the early 16th century, people began to want to read the Scriptures for themselves. And reform-minded scholars throughout Europe worked to make it accessible to all people, in their own languages.

Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam was one of the greatest classical scholars of all time. He produced numerous first editions of texts from antiquity, including the first published Greek New Testament in 1516. But he did not call it a “New Testament.” He called it a “Novum Instrumentum,” a new tool. The edition has Greek in one column and Latin in the other, but not the Vulgate, the commonly used Latin text, but a fresh translation that Erasmus argued was more accurate to the Greek. He wanted to make the Greek text more accessible to scholars and theologians in the west who did not really know Greek. And what was this tool to be used for? He lays this out in his preface, what he called the paraclesis or “exhortation” at the beginning of his new tool:
The sun belongs to everyone; the science of Christ is just the same. I am totally opposed to the fact that divine scripture should not be translated into one’s native language, to be read by the non-clergy; it is as if Christ’s teaching was so mysterious that only a handful of theologians could understand it, or as if the fortress of religion was built with the ignorance which the Church has forced on the common man. I wish that even the lowliest women read the gospels and the Pauline Epistles. And I would that they were translated into all languages so that they could be read and understood not only by Scots and Irish, but also by Turks and Saracens… Would that, as a result, the farmer sing some portion of them at the plow, the weaver hum some parts of them to the movement of his shuttle, the traveler lighten the weariness of the journey with stories from this source.
Luther used the second edition (printed in 1519) of Erasmus’s “new tool” to create a New Testament for German farmers and weavers, and in so doing created a runaway success. The audience for this German New Testament was the German people themselves. Where the Gutenberg Bible was out of the reach of almost all people, both for the cost and the fact that it was in Latin, a bound copy of Luther’s New Testament cost a single guilder: schoolteacher’s two month’s wages, or the price of a calf.
A Book to Point to Christ
It seems self-evident to us today that the Bible should be translated. But for Luther, the translation of the Bible was not an end in itself. It was not simply, “let’s get the Bible out there and see what happens.” Nor was he interested in a text for academic study since Greek, Hebrew, and Latin editions were available for that if one wanted. Rather, Luther wanted a New Testament through which individuals could hear the Word of God directly, without the mediation of the church or a priest. Said another way: Luther’s goal was that individuals hear “God’s message about Christ.”
In the language of Romans 10: “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” Luther expresses this in his introduction to the Old Testament published later in 1534: “If, then, you would interpret well and surely, set Christ before you; for He is the man to whom it all applies.” But even the New Testament, which Luther acknowledged should be clear enough, also can be misinterpreted and therefore the reader needs assistance to hear the Gospel clearly.
Luther produced this book, quite simply, to point to Christ. To give people access, for themselves—with Luther’s guidance—to the promises of God. We see this on the title page of a 1524 Wittenberg Bible with its simple description, and Christ on the cross.
Luther’s entire purpose in translating the New Testament, then, and every feature of the translation and the contents of the volume is designed to preach Christ and the Gospel message. This accounts for the new features of the Septembertestament. It was a text like no other before it. It translated a Greek text into the vernacular for the first time in Western Europe since the Vulgate. It included prefaces and notes to ensure that the readers heard the Gospel. And even the sequence of the New Testament books was altered to suit Luther’s goal of leading people to trust the promises of Christ.
This might be surprising. A Reformation motto is sola Scriptura! By Scripture alone! without tradition or interpretation. But sola Scriptura itself is actually in service to the central Reformation tenet: “Christ Alone!” (solus Christus). Luther put Scripture into the language of the people so that by Scripture alone they could hear Christ and his gospel, and so receive salvation.
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The core of the issue addressed by the Eggert concurrence was a disagreement between a temporary session and some of the members of the congregation they were supposed to be serving and shepherding. All church members have a duty to honor their leaders, “to submit to the government and discipline of the Church, and to study her purity and peace.” But this submission does not mean members of a mission congregation must have their consciences bound by the preferences and recommendations of a temporary session comprised of men who are not members of the congregation.

How a church-plant, or “mission church,” (BCO 5-1) transitions to become a “Particular Church” is outlined in BCO 5-9.
Until a “mission church” becomes a particular church, the church plant is usually under the care of a Presbytery by means of one of two temporary arrangements. In the first arrangement, a commission of elders from the Presbytery is appointed to serve as a temporary session (BCO 15-1). In the second arrangement, the “mission church” is erected as a daughter church of another particularized congregation (BCO 5-3b), and the session of that particularized congregation serves as the overseeing session for the mission church.
A mission church is usually served by a “church planter” who is also a member of the commission serving as session (BCO 5-4a). This church planter is called by Presbytery to do the work of ministry organizing the church plant/mission work with the hopes that it will one day be particularized according to the steps outlined in BCO 5-9.
A crucial step toward becoming a particular congregation is the election of a pastor and other  officers.
The election of a Teaching Elder can sometimes be confusing in the case of a mission work. Ordinarily, a church plant already has had a Teaching Elder ministering as a “church planter” among the saints in that congregation for quite some time. In many instances, the members of the church plant will elect that church planter “to be their pastor” (BCO 5-9f), but not always.
If the members of a congregation “choose not to continue the pastoral relationship” with the church planter, they are free to follow the steps of BCO 20 to elect a different pastor in the ordinary manner.
Before the Standing Judicial Commission (SJC) last year, there was a curious case that tested the principles of our Presbyterian polity and challenged the integrity of our Constitution regarding the selection of a pastor by a church plant.
A group of men from a mission work met with the session – including the church planter – overseeing the plant to express their desire that candidates other than the initial church planter be considered for the position of pastor.
It was an undeniable difficult situation. The church planter had labored for years, investing much of his time and energies in the church plant. But now a group of men from several households in the congregation went to the elders and expressed a disagreement with the church planter’s philosophy of ministry and vision for the work.
The Session responded to the men’s concerns by doing three things. First, the Session demanded the men repent of any sin whether of omission or commission against the church planter. Second, the Session demanded the men reaffirm their membership vows. And third, the Session reaffirmed its belief that one of their number should be “offered to the congregation as a candidate to serve as its pastor.”
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Members of Generation Z who desire a sense of transcendence in their worship may simply need to look a bit harder. By fostering a dogmatic commitment to the authority and sufficiency of Scripture while retaining a deep respect for church history, much of evangelical, conservative, Reformed Christianity has managed to guard itself from the spirit of the age. Young people should by no means compromise on the true gospel (Galatians 1:8-9) to find a tradition that has retained its sense of reverence.

Polls consistently show that members of Generation Z—loosely defined as the cohort born between 1999 and 2015—are far less religious than their parents and grandparents. Young Americans are twice as likely to identify themselves as atheists in comparison to other adults, while a mere 59% identify themselves with some form of Christianity—a significant decline from the 75% of Baby Boomers who say the same.
Surveys also find that members of Generation Z are more socially progressive than other Americans, with as many as one in five identifying themselves as “LGBTQ.” Although some young people certainly attempt to blend the doctrines of biblical Christianity with the falsehoods of modern leftism, there is a remnant drawn to conservative religious traditions with weightiness and transcendence—which may even claim to uniquely feed the soul in a relentlessly materialistic era.
Talk to members of Generation Z who grew up in loosely evangelical households and you will discover that many have since turned to Roman Catholicism rather than the generic version of megachurch Christianity. The ornate architecture of cathedrals, the advent of the Latin Mass, and the otherworldly nature of chants are, to many young people, a departure from the emptiness of the modern age.
Take, for example, actor Shia LaBeouf, who recently made headlines for converting to Roman Catholicism. In an interview with Bishop Robert Barron, he explained that “Latin Mass affects me deeply.” When asked why, he said: “Because it feels like they’re not selling me a car.”
Big-box evangelicalism, on the other hand, is by no means transcendent. Pastors and worship leaders often find themselves limping and thrashing about their altars (1 Kings 18:26) with moralistic, therapeutic sermons and emotionalistic, shallow music. As LaBeouf correctly diagnosed, many evangelical churches merely make attempts at “selling Jesus” to their members. In the words of Pastor Rick Warren, you can simply give Jesus “a sixty-day trial” or get your money back—a tactic that is quite literally taken from car salesmen.
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