In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

104 Text #12 Sermon on Jeremiah 23:5-8 (TheVisit of Three Jews) (1526) Language: German Critical Text: WA 20:569,25–570,12 english Translation: LW 47:191, n. 63 {supplemented by editors} On November 18, 1526, the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Trinity, Luther preached a sermon on Jer. 23:5-8. Behold,the days are coming,says the Lord,when I will raise up for david a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.In his days Judah will be saved,and Israel will dwell securely.And this is the name by which he will be called:“The Lord is our righteousness .”Therefore,behold,the days are coming,says the Lord,when they shall no longer say,“As the Lord lives who brought up the people of Israel out of the land of egypt,” but “As the Lord lives who brought up and led the descendants of the house of Israel out of the north country and out of all the countries where he had driven them.”Then they shall dwell in their own land. For Luther, that the promised Branch/Messiah will be called “The Lord is our righteousness” means that the Tetragrammaton, the personal name of God, will be applied to the Messiah, that is, the Messiah will be called Lord.This in turn implies that the Messiah will be God.And because Jesus is the Messiah,this becomes a proof text for the divine nature of Jesus.This then leads Luther into recalling a debate he had had with some highly learned Jews (that is, at some point prior to November 1526) about this text and his Christian interpretation of it. The relevant excerpt from the sermon is as follows. LW 47:191 [supplemented by editors] {Because Holy Scripture and the Jews themselves, as well as the holy fathers and all writers, agree that this name belongs alone and truly to the divine majesty and being, so we have here in the Prophet Jeremiah a powerful and strong strike Sermon on Jeremiah 23:5-8 105 against the Jews and a splendid and great comfort for us Christians. For here this article of our faith—that Christ is true, natural God—is powerfully established.} I myself have discussed this with the Jews, indeed with the most learned of them, who knew the Bible so well that there wasn’t a letter in it that they did not understand. I held up this text to them, and they could not think of anything to refute me.Finally they said that they believed theirTalmud;this is their {interpretation }, and it says nothing about Christ.They had to follow this interpretation. Thus they do not stick to the text but seek to escape it. For if they held to this text alone, they would be vanquished. {For this statement leads strongly to the conclusion that this Seed of david is a true and natural God; for he will be called by the same name as the true, proper God is called.} There are several later references in Luther to exegetical debates with three learned Jews, or Rabbis, about the proper christological interpretation of OldTestament texts.This has given rise to the belief that Luther was regularly in face-to-face debate with Jews. But according to the most recent study of the issue by OstenSacken , all of these references are likely refractions of a single encounter, that is, the one mentioned in this 1526 sermon.1 In this regard, it should be born in mind that Luther’s personal encounters with Jews were almost exclusively limited to Jews who had converted. His encounters with Jews as Jews were likely extremely rare. Kaufmann has described the situation succinctly: For Luther the Jews were never at any point in his lifetime‘conversation-partners’ in the sense that they had something to say that might have influenced either Christian theologians in their conversations with Jews or their theological judgments about them.There is no evidence Luther ever took the initiative to make contact with learned Jews to learn from them as some of his contemporaries did. .. . His own narrowly bounded world was located far even from the few remnants of formerly flourishing urban centers of Jewish life and Jewish learning in the empire, and the few personal contacts which Luther had had with Jews during the course of his life occurred because others sought him out and asked...

Share