The first miracle of Jesus?
The Austrian Bible Translator’s borrowings from the Apocrypha, the ‘Infantia Salvatoris’ and the canonical taming of the German-language Bible
Abstract
This article details the controversy between the Austrian Bible Translator, currently the object of much close academic study, and unknown opponents, presumably theologians, around the former’s use of sources from the Biblical apocrypha as a gloss to his gospel harmony; in so doing, it draws on the Translator’s apologia, composed in Latin, which has received little attention from research to date. Part I of the article consists of an exemplary analysis of the Translator’s borrowings from the German ‘Kindheit Jesu’, indexed with its underlying Latin documents; this text supplements Luke’s narrative of the nativity with an alleged first miracle of Jesus, the healing of a midwife called to his birth by Joseph. Part II retraces the drawn-out historical process by which apocryphal additions found themselves successively eliminated from the manifold spectrum of vernacular Biblical writings, a process which did not result in effective synonymity between the German lay term ‘Bible’ and the canonical concept of the ‘Holy Scripture’ until, at the earliest, the end of the 15th century.