A trip to a place that included Amish settlements in Indiana included a visit to one of their supply stores. These are quite interesting to see how they live in their self-imposed austerity. I have blogged about the Amish before, but what continues to amaze me the most is how they speak some kind of "low German" among themselves and have German language Bibles available. How did they maintain their use of the German language in America through 2 World Wars with Germany? How could they do it when the "Midwestern" Lutherans did not? One can read of the hardships the Wisconsin Synod (and Missouri Synod) Lutherans had by government restrictions and antagonistic popular opinion against them in a dissertation "The War to End All Germans: Wisconsin Synod Lutherans and the First World War" available here. 
What appears to be a "top of the line" Bible for the Amish (~$70) is pictured on the upper left and right. This Bible is not from Germany, it is from an American store! But as I examined it, I was greatly surprised at several things about it:
(1) The copyright page (right side, 2nd) indicates that it was printed in Grand Rapids MI in 2012 with the following indication:
Copyright © 1978. the Amish Book Committee.
(2) Then came the real surprise: the "Vorwort" was not written by an Amish theologian of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but by a Lutheran of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, August 8, 1904 by:
Prof. August Pieper (Wisconsin Synod - Lutheran)
The text appears to be the old original German translation of Luther – Genesis 4:1 is still the unrevised wording. The spelling was modernized like the one that Ludwig Fuerbringer wrote about and recommended instead of the revised butchered "Luther's Bible" that Germany started putting out in the 1800s. I suspect this Bible was what the Wisconsin Synod obtained from the Missouri Synod and sold to its Lutheran members before World War I, but it could be that the Amish added some prefacing pages of their own that I could not identify. -- The numerous line-drawing pictures of Biblical people and events show the great reverence for the truth of the Biblical account. — Why cannot some former Synodical Conference Lutherans translate Luther's German into English and make our own (English) Luther Bible?
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