BTL 10th Anniversary: Der Lutheraner, translated, the Walther Years OCR digitized (Part 1)

 [Last update: 2023-11-22: The downloads of this post are mostly obsolete, being superseded here and here; 2021-08-12- more English unformatted]

     10 years ago I began this blog, not knowing much about blogging.  But I had plenty to say because of my return to the Lutheran Christian faith.  I had plenty of materials to draw on, but where to start?  I was more than a little upset by the falling away from Luther within Lutheranism, nay, within the LC-MS.  I had found Luther not by the modern LC-MS, but by the Old (German) Missouri Synod, from Walther and Pieper.  And as I looked at modern Luther scholarship within the LC-MS, I found an almost total disregard for the fathers of the Missouri Synod.  LC-MS scholars, even going back to the year of its name change in 1947, have not only ignored Old Missouri's scholarship, but actually belittled the fathers.

A current example of the continuation of this LC-MS mindset comes from the scholarship of the "Companion Volume" of Luther's Works, vol. 58 from CPH's "New Series".  General Editor Prof. Christopher Boyd Brown ↗, Associate Professor of Church History, Boston Univ. School of Theology, continues the "Old Series"' total lack of acknowledgement of the fathers of the Missouri Synod. All scholarship is from modern theologians, as the Old Series said of itself: "exposure... of his [Luther's] writings to modern critical judgment is an inherent purpose of this American edition." Practically all scholarship is modern scholarship which never draws on the fathers of the Missouri Synod.  But the Old Missouri fathers were the ones who built the true Lutheran Church in America, and based it on the work of the Reformer, Martin Luther.  It continues to amaze me, as I read from the works of Old Missouri, of the breadth and depth of knowledge of Luther among the teachers and pastors of Old Missouri. — But they wrote in the German language, out of the reach of virtually all of American Lutherans today.

Der Lutheraner, the Walther Years

      And so on this 10th Anniversary of my blog I am announcing the result of 6 months of work – the availability of the digital text of Walther's flagship publication, his Der Lutheraner newspaper/journal, from the years he was living, volumes 1-43, years 1844-1887. This is a major advance over just the images made available previously, none of which had adequate underlying OCR text. Here again are the headers for each bi-weekly issue through Walther's tenure: 

Der Lutheraner headers:     vol. 1 (1844)                       vol. 6-20 (1850)                  vol. 14-1 (1857)                      vol. 28-1 (1871)

German: partially formatted OCR text; DOCX files for downloading:

          01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 (1844 – 1854)

          11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 (1854 – 1864)

          21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 (1864 – 1874)

          31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 (1875 – 1884)

          41 42 43                      (1885 – 1887)

English: Unformatted DeepL machine translations, DOCX files for downloading: (all volumes will be available before the end of August 2021 are now available below.)

          01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 (1844 – 1854)

          11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 (1854 – 1864)

          21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 (1864 – 1874)

          31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 (1875 – 1884)

          41 42 43                      (1885 – 1887)

When one opens one of the English unformatted files, it will become immediately apparent that the text is unformatted and it is not perfect.  One must read these with the original German page images in view, which is easily done with my handy listing of all these volumes. Images of volumes 28 (Oct. 1871) and later should be viewed in the Archive.org viewer instead of Google Books due to split scans of over-size pages. Although the text can be navigated by the page numbers, the split larger pages will have the odd page numbers out of sequence by 1 column. — Although not perfect, the essays, doctrinal articles, sermons, book reviews, blurbs, etc. were substantially proofed for the correct original German text so that the machine translations would offer the maximum benefit. I found the DeepL English machine translations to be amazingly readable in most cases. Church financial reports, ordinations, and miscellaneous items were not proofed and corrected.  Where errors still remain, the machine translations will be faulty. More about formatting below… 

Title page, vol. 31

English: Formatted DeepL machine translations. This third category of downloads allows the maximum utility for American readers because the formatting is much more convenient in navigating the great volume of narratives. More about the benefits below.  I will add hyperlinks to the volumes below as I am able to get these.  Click for example on #31 below and compare it to its unformatted version above. Hopefully these will be all completed within the next few months – please check back often for the latest availability. [2021-08-23: This table is completed in Part 2]

   01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 (1844 – 1854)

   11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 (1854 – 1864)

   21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 (1864 – 1874)

   31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 (1875 – 1884)

   41 42 43                      (1885 – 1887)

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     Some readers will be aware that an English translation of the first 3 volumes was published in print by Pastor Joel Baseley through his Mark V Publications, now Lulu (see all my blogs on Pastor Baseley).  Volume 4 was also translated but never published in print, only being made available in PDF format to mailing list subscribers. But as I stated in the blog of the first listing in 2013: 

"But although Baseley's translation work is helpful, it is not near enough for me.  Walther's material is so wonderful, I want much more...  I want it all!"— 

A benefit of the German (partially) formatted text is the formatting that has been retained. The OCR engine (ABBYY FineReader) attempted to retain much of the font sizing, bolding and italicizing of words, also paragraph formatting.  It did not retain the emphasis of "sperrdruck" or spaced-letter emphasis within words.  For some selected texts, especially Walther's sermons, I manually added underlining to substitute for "sperrdruck". —   I am not following Baseley's convention of changing the publication title to The Lutheran from Der Lutheraner.  Walther's publication was by German-American Lutherans, and it remains so.  I am leaving the title in German for more than just appearances, I leave the German title to distinguish it from other American publications that confuse Lutheranism, and for the German heritage of Luther's Reformation. — Later posts will give evidence of the importance of Walther's Der Lutheraner paper and further information on these digitized text files. Part 2 is next…