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Martin Luther on the New Testament Canon

Dates: c. 1522 (the September Testament, Wittenberg; the prefaces here are from that first edition, with the 1530 revision to Revelation noted) · Wikipedia
Verdict on Hebrews, James, Jude & Revelation: KEPT but DEMOTED — translated, printed, and bound in his New Testament, yet moved to the end, left unnumbered in the table of contents, and prefaced as books of lesser, doubtful apostolicity — never removed. Luther read the New Testament the way Eusebius had: a core of "true and certain chief books," and a disputed remainder. In his 1522 German New Testament he set the four he most doubted — Hebrews, James, Jude, and the Revelation — apart at the close of the volume and gave each a preface explaining the doubt. It is a "canon within the canon," ranked by apostolicity and by whether a book "preaches Christ" — a real demotion of rank and order, but not an excision: all twenty-seven books stood in his Bible, and have stood in every Lutheran and Protestant Bible since.

Claims & evidence

The 1522 September Testament: four books moved last, left unnumbered

Luther translated and printed the whole twenty-seven-book New Testament. But he broke its order. Where the other twenty-three books are listed in his table of contents and numbered consecutively 1–23, the last four — Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation — he set below them, separated by a gap and left without numbers, the typographic mark of a different rank. The reordering pushed Hebrews and James out of their traditional places and to the back of the volume, where they still stand in Luther Bibles to this day. The arrangement was a visible two tiers: the numbered "chief books" above, the four doubted books below.¹ The preface to Hebrews, which opens the group, states the principle for all four:

Up to this point we have had to do with the true and certain chief books of the New Testament. The four which follow have from ancient times had a different reputation.

— Luther, Preface to Hebrews (1522).² The four are kept and translated; they are simply ranked below the rest — the ancient antilegomena (Eusebius's "disputed" books) revived and printed as the layout of a page.

The "epistle of straw" — and its quiet removal

Luther's general Preface to the New Testament (1522) set out the criterion behind the ranking: the books that "show you Christ" stand highest, and a book is measured by how much gospel it carries. By that test James fell short, and Luther said so in the line that became notorious:

In a word, St. John's Gospel and his first epistle, St. Paul's epistles, especially Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians, and St. Peter's first epistle are the books that show you Christ and teach you all that is necessary and salvatory for you to know, even if you were never to see or hear any other book or doctrine. Therefore St. James' epistle is really an epistle of straw, compared to these others, for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it.

— Luther, Preface to the New Testament (1522).³ The remark is a comparative judgment of value, not a deletion — James stayed in the Bible — and Luther evidently thought better of putting it so bluntly: the whole evaluative paragraph, the "epistle of straw" phrase included, was dropped from the revised Preface to the New Testament and is absent from the later editions of his German Bible. The slogan survives only in the first edition.³

The prefaces to James and Jude: ranked out, not thrown out

The standing preface to James and Jude lays out Luther's reasons. He doubts that James is apostolic, chiefly because (at James 2) it "ascribes justification to works" in a way he could not reconcile with Paul, and because it does not "preach Christ"; yet he is careful to keep the book and to frame the judgment as his own:

I do not regard it as the writing of an apostle, and my reasons follow.… Therefore I cannot include him among the chief books, though I would not thereby prevent anyone from including or extolling him as he pleases.

— Luther, Preface to the Epistles of St. James and St. Jude (1522).⁴ His test is explicitly theological, not a matter of pedigree alone:

Whatever does not teach Christ is not yet apostolic, even though St. Peter or St. Paul does the teaching.

— Luther, Preface to James and Jude (1522).⁴ Jude he demotes on the older grounds the Fathers had used — that it depends on 2 Peter and cites non-canonical matter (the dispute over Moses' body, the prophecy of Enoch):

It is an extract or copy of St. Peter's second epistle, so very like it are all the words.

— Luther, Preface to James and Jude (1522).⁴ Even here the disposition is to rank, not to delete: James and Jude are kept, prefaced, and left for the reader to "extol… as he pleases."

The preface to Revelation: doubted in 1522, embraced by 1530

Of the four, Revelation drew Luther's sharpest first verdict. In the 1522 preface he found it neither clear nor Christ-centered enough to count as apostolic:

I miss more than one thing in this book, and it makes me consider it to be neither apostolic nor prophetic.… My spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book.

— Luther, Preface to the Revelation of St. John (1522).⁵ But this was the judgment he most plainly reversed. In 1530 he replaced the brief, cold note with a long, warm new preface that reads the Apocalypse as a prophecy of the Church's whole history and commends it to Christians — and the 1522 line that it was "neither apostolic nor prophetic" was deleted from his Bible from 1530 on. The course of his opinion is itself the evidence against treating the four as books he had decided to discard: a man pruning the canon does not write a fresh preface drawing a doubted book back toward the center.⁵

Notes

• KEPT — a demotion of rank and order, not a removal. Luther never excised Hebrews, James, Jude, or Revelation. All four were translated, printed, and bound within his New Testament; they remained in every edition of the Luther Bible and in the Lutheran and wider Protestant Bibles that followed. What he changed was their place (moved to the end), their numbering (left off the contents list), and their standing (a preface marking each as doubtful) — a "canon within the canon," not a shorter canon.
• An ancient distinction, not a Reformation novelty. Luther's tiering revives Eusebius's sorting of the New Testament into "acknowledged" and "disputed" books (Church History 3.25) — James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2–3 John were Eusebius's antilegomena, Hebrews long doubted in the West, the Apocalypse longest doubted in the East. Luther was also not alone among his contemporaries: Erasmus had questioned the same four in the Annotationes to his 1516 Greek New Testament, and Cardinal Cajetan, Luther's own Catholic interlocutor at Augsburg, doubted them too. The disputed status of these books is the very soft-edges history this timeline traces.
• Why the demotion was doctrinal — and why that cuts both ways. Luther's criterion was openly theological: a book ranks by its apostolicity and by whether it "preaches Christ." James fell because of its apparent works-justification (James 2); Hebrews he doubted partly on its passages denying a second repentance (Heb. 6, 10) and on its non-Pauline authorship. So the popular charge that the demotion was driven by doctrine is not simply wrong — but it tells against excision as much as for it, since the same theological reading led Luther to keep the books, to soften his language over time, and to draw Revelation back. Whether "removed four New Testament books" is a fair description of any of this is weighed on the argument page, Did Luther remove four New Testament books? (assessment: weak).
• The Roman response. Partly in answer to doubts like Luther's, the Council of Trent (8 April 1546) dogmatically defined the twenty-seven-book New Testament — Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation expressly included — closing on the Catholic side the question Luther had reopened. His own church kept the books and let his value-rankings fade: the "epistle of straw" line and the harsh Revelation note were gone within a decade.
• Provenance. The prefaces are quoted from Luther's Works, vol. 35 (American Edition); the "epistle of straw" passage from the 1522 Preface to the New Testament (LW 35:362), the others from the prefaces to Hebrews (LW 35:394), James and Jude (LW 35:395–398), and Revelation (LW 35:398–399). The arrangement of the September Testament's table of contents is documented in the standard accounts of Luther's canon.

Sources