Weimar Edition on… the St. Louis Edition, in English (Part 1 of 2)

      Today's Luther scholar's, almost without exception, reference the Weimar Edition of Luther's works (Weimar Ausgabe, WA from Germany) without even mentioning the Walther-Walch St. Louis Edition or Walch2 or W2 or StL, from America. Perhaps the most glaring example of this is the American Edition of Dr. Jaroslav Pelican, where the StL is barely mentioned except in a condescending, critical manner in the introductions and footnotes.  The WA is generally considered a "critical edition", and it is recognized as having the greatest scholarship.  No scholar today wants to be associated with a "popular edition", an edition "for the people" (and scholars).  A current book on Luther's life said of the Weimar that it was: 

"an edition that would be organized chronologically and present Luther’s works in their original languages, without modernization of the text, and according to the oldest available editions. German and Latin works would be included in the same volumes, offering researchers ready insight into Luther’s theological development. Despite the overall commit­ment to chronological presentation, however, the WA was divided into four sections: writings, correspondence, table talks, and German Bible." Martin Luther in Context, p. 364.

But what did the editors (Eike Wolgast and Hans Volz) of the Weimar Edition say about the St. Louis Edition?  Would they be as condescending and critical of the St. Louis Edition as the American Edition has been?  Would they criticize its scholarship?  We find out in volume WA 60 published in 1980.  This volume has surprisingly been uploaded to the Internet Archive and so it was available for OCR processing and online machine translation (DeepL) to make available in English. The following are the main excerpts of its analysis:

St. Louis Edition’s completeness:

Due to the inclusion of many writings that have become known in the meantime and due to the removal of those that were previously printed twice, there is occasionally a shift from volume to volume compared to the original [Walch 1]. … Georg Buchwald's various publications of previously unprinted transcripts of Luther's sermons served as models for the texts not included in Walch's old edition and now included. Volumes 11-13 with the postils have been completely revised. … [House Postils] followed likewise the second edition of the Erlanger edition. In volumes 15-20 with texts on the history of the Reformation, various duplicates have been excluded, and numerous pieces have been re-dated or reprinted according to better models. Like volume 13, volume 21 with the letters is divided into two part volumes to accommodate the new material published since the 18th century. Volume 22, which contains the Table Talks, was also thoroughly edited and enriched by the translation of the Table Talks collections of Lauterbach and Cordatus.

Weimar acknowledged the relative completeness of the St. Louis Edition.

St. Louis Edition’s translation quality:

All texts have been modernized linguistically and orthographically. The numerous and often extensive translations of the first edition, regardless of whether they already existed and were only reviewed and corrected by Walch or whether they were only prepared for his edition, have been partially compared again with the Latin original and the incorrect and inaccurate versions … corrected, incomprehensible expressions replaced by clear ones, complex paraphrases shortened; for the most part, however, the Latin texts were translated completely anew, including such extensive ones as Decem praecepta, Deuteronomium cum annotationibus, Operationes in Psalmos, Interpretation of the Gradual Psalms, both commentaries on the Epistle to the Galatians, Annotationes in aliquot capita Matthaei and De servo arbitrio.

Weimar acknowledged the superior translations of the St. Louis Edition. Because of this superior work, and its modernized language, it made the perfect source for machine translation, not only into English, but into many other languages. No longer are Luther's writing imprisoned in the Latin language, and now German, so unattainable for non-scholars among English speakers.

St. Louis Edition’s scholarship:

…volumes 11-13 with the Postils and volume 22 with the Table Talks, also published in this period, received new prefaces. After [A. F.] Hoppe took over the editorial duties in 1886, he provided the volumes published since then only with short prefaces [p. 606] in which he gave information about the scope of his work, and instead added an introductory, often detailed note to each piece in the text, in which information about the history of origin, earlier individual editions and places of discovery in the previous complete editions was given. While factual notes are generally missing in this edition as well, there are occasional text-critical notes with variants and conjectures from the Erlanger and Weimar editions.

Some of the scholarship of the Erlangen and Weimar Editions was included by the St. Louis editor Hoppe. — The St. Louis prefaces and introductory notes are likely to have better spiritual content than the Weimar because of a higher regard for Holy Scripture, especially verbal inspiration. From Walther to Engelder, the Old German Missouri Synod writings were filled with warnings against German theology's disregard for the Bible. An example of this disregard was pointed out in previous blog posts (here and here), where the comments of Weimar editor F. Cohrs were intended to cause suspicion of Luther’s teaching on Biblical chronology.

St. Louis Edition’s “step backward” principle: good or bad?

…Walch's principle of reproducing Latin texts only in translation is once again adopted, it represents a step backward from the standard established with the Erlangen edition and therefore cannot be compared with the latter in terms of importance; in any case, its intention was by no means of a scholarly nature.

Will the Weimar Edition criticize or praise the St. Louis Edition in its summary judgment?  We find out in the concluding Part 2.