Answer to the Superchristian, Superspiritual, and Superlearned Book of Goat Emser of Leipzig

This treatise belongs to the pamphlet war that erupted after Luther published To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation in 1520. Jerome Emser, secretary to Duke George of ducal Saxony and a trained humanist who had once taught Luther briefly at Erfurt, answered that appeal with a book defending the distinction between the clerical and lay estates and the authority of the Roman hierarchy. Luther's reply, written in Wittenberg in March 1521 in the weeks before he set out for the Diet of Worms, takes its mocking title from Emser's coat of arms, which bore an ibex; Luther had already been calling him the Goat of Leipzig, and Emser had answered by calling Luther the Bull of Wittenberg. The exchange was conducted in German, for a lay public, and the appended remarks on the Franciscan Thomas Murner show Luther treating his opponents as a pair rather than as isolated critics.

Beneath the invective, the work makes three substantive moves. First, Luther restates the priesthood of all believers from 1 Peter 2 against Emser's claim that Scripture speaks there only of an inward, metaphorical priesthood while the real sacrificing priesthood belongs to the ordained. Luther answers that there is one Christian priesthood conferred in baptism, and that the ministry of Word and sacrament is an office filled by persons called out of that common priesthood, not a higher estate standing above it. Second, Emser had grounded his reading of Scripture in 2 Corinthians 3:6, the letter kills but the Spirit gives life, taking this as warrant for a spiritual sense that overrides the plain text. Luther argues at length that Paul is contrasting law and gospel, not literal and allegorical meanings, and insists that the grammatical sense of Scripture is the one sense that can bear doctrine; allegory may adorn, but it cannot prove. Third, he subordinates the church fathers to Scripture, granting that the fathers are to be read but denying that their consensus or the pope's decree can establish what the text itself does not teach.

The treatise has remained important chiefly for the second of those moves. Luther's handling of letter and spirit here is one of his earliest sustained statements of the hermeneutic that would govern his later exegesis and the Protestant insistence on a single literal sense of Scripture. It also shows the priesthood of all believers being clarified under pressure, with the office of ministry defended at the same time, which corrects the assumption that the doctrine was simply anticlerical. The tone is unsparing, and the mockery of Emser's name runs through the whole.

Who should read this: those studying the origins of Protestant biblical interpretation, the early Luther's doctrine of ministry, or the rhetoric of the Reformation pamphlet wars, ideally alongside To the Christian Nobility. It is not devotional reading, and readers seeking Luther at his most pastoral should look to the sermons or the catechisms rather than here.