On the Ineffable Name and on the Lineage of Christ

Vom Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi appeared in Wittenberg in 1543, within weeks of Luther's On the Jews and Their Lies, and belongs with that work to the final and most bitter phase of his writing about Judaism. The title names its two subjects. The first is the Shem HaMephorash, the "explicated" or ineffable Name of God, which Luther treats through the medieval polemical tradition he had found in the Carthusian Porchetus's Victoria adversus impios Hebraeos. That tradition preserved the Toledot Yeshu legend that Jesus worked his miracles by stealing the divine Name from the Temple, and Luther set out to ridicule it. The second subject is the genealogy of Christ in Matthew and Luke, which Jewish critics had long used to question the Davidic descent of Jesus and the virgin birth.

The treatise does two different things in two different registers. In its first part Luther retells the stolen-Name legend at length and then turns on it with scorn, arguing that a people who could believe such a story about the Name of God have surrendered Scripture for fable and are beyond persuasion. It is here that the writing descends into the scatological and dehumanizing invective for which the work is notorious, including Luther's mocking exposition of the Judensau relief on the Wittenberg parish church, which he reads as a fitting emblem of rabbinic learning. He declares that he no longer writes to convert Jews but to warn Christians against them. The second part is quieter and more recognizably exegetical. Luther works through the differing lineages in the two Gospels, harmonizes them by assigning one to Joseph and one to Mary, defends Mary's descent from David, and insists that the promise to Abraham and the house of David reaches its only fulfillment in the incarnate Christ. The argument is not original, but it shows the older Luther still practising the christological reading of the Old Testament that governed his whole theology.

The work has mattered chiefly as evidence. It documents how far Luther travelled from the comparatively hopeful That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew of 1523, and it was later excerpted and circulated by National Socialist propagandists, a history that led Lutheran church bodies in the late twentieth century to repudiate Luther's writings against the Jews explicitly. For historians of Christian anti-Judaism, of Reformation Hebrew studies, and of the reception of the Toledot Yeshu, it remains an indispensable primary source. It also forces a question the Lutheran tradition cannot avoid: how a theologian so devoted to the gospel of unmerited grace could write this, and what in his reading of Scripture permitted it.

Who should read this: scholars and serious students of Reformation history, Jewish-Christian relations, and the roots of modern antisemitism, read alongside a critical introduction and the churches' later repudiations. It is not a text for devotional use or spiritual formation, and readers looking for Luther's pastoral or catechetical voice should go to the catechisms, the sermons, or The Freedom of a Christian instead.