To the Leipzig Goat

An den Bock zu Leipzig is a brief open letter Luther wrote at the beginning of 1521, the first salvo in a year-long pamphlet war with Hieronymus Emser, the Leipzig priest and secretary to Duke George of Saxony. Emser had attacked Luther's 1520 treatise To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation in a book of his own, charging that Luther was inciting the laity against the clergy and sowing rebellion. Emser's family arms bore a goat, and his title page carried the device with a warning that the goat butts. Luther had already dubbed him the Aegoceros in a Latin reply after the Leipzig Debate of 1519; now he took up the name in German and made it the running joke of the whole exchange. The letter was written before Luther had the full text of Emser's book in hand, on the strength of what he had heard was being printed.

The piece does little systematic theology. Its work is to seize the ground of the argument before Emser can. Luther scorns Emser's professed motive of brotherly correction, observing that a brother who wished to admonish would have come privately, as Matthew 18 directs, rather than running to the press. He denies flatly that he has preached revolt, insisting that he addressed the lawful nobility precisely because they bear responsibility for reform, and that he has always warned the common people against violence. He mocks the goat's threat to butt and declares himself unafraid of it. And he announces that a full answer will follow once he has read the whole book, a promise he kept several times over in the months that followed, as Emser answered with To the Bull in Wittenberg and Luther replied in turn. The letter is thus less a treatise than an opening move: short, sharp, and calculated to make Emser look both cowardly and ridiculous in the eyes of the German reading public.

The Emser controversy matters because it is one of the earliest places where the Reformation was fought in vernacular print, in real time, before an audience of ordinary readers, and this letter shows Luther learning the form. The weapons that would mark his later polemics are already present: the nickname that sticks, the appeal to Scripture against clerical pretension, the refusal to be cast as a rebel, and the delight in a good insult. Readers who want the theological substance of the quarrel over the priesthood of all believers should go to Luther's longer rejoinders of that spring, where the exegetical case is actually made.

Who should read this: students of Reformation pamphlet culture and of Luther's rhetoric, and anyone tracing the Emser exchange from its start. It is not for devotional reading, nor for those seeking Luther's constructive teaching, which this letter only promises rather than delivers.