The critical edition and commentary of the works of the so-called “Austrian Bible Translator”, who made a comprehensive Bible translation and commentary around 200 years before Luther.

From the fourteenth century, the “Century of the Lay Bible”, large parts of the Latin Vulgate and the exegetical and catechetical commentaries upon it were translated ever more frequently into German and presented to an ever broader public. Among these pre-Reformation translations, the work of the “Austrian Bible Translator” holds a distinctive position, since he aimed to achieve a comprehensive translation and commentary and also drew on the latest Latin specialist writings. The distinctive quality of the work lies in its linguistic brilliance, its near completeness (it consists of numerous individual parts of the Bible, but also of heresiological treatises and apologetics), its accompaniment by commentaries that represent contemporary understanding of the text, and in the fact that a layperson was active as a translator, defending himself both against contemporary “heretics” and against attacks from orthodoxy. The commentaries are also witnesses to contemporary criticism of philosophy and of superstition.

The work of this interacademic project is taking place in two research groups, a larger one at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Augsburg (director: Prof. Freimut Löser; acting director: Prof. Jens Haustein) and a smaller one at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (director: Prof. Martin Schubert, acting director: Prof. Jens Haustein).

The Academy research project “The Austrian Bible Translator. The Word of God in German” is part of the Academies' Programme , a research funding programme co-financed by the German federal government and individual federal states. Coordinated by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities , the Programme intends to retrieve and explore our cultural heritage, to make it accessible and highlight its relevance to the present, as well as to preserve it for the future.