Bible Order: Why Luther Failed to Change It

Lesson Transcript

The order of our books and our Bibles today is not Luther's orders. He tried to—Hebrews, he tried to shove it and James all the way to the very back. He had Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation. Those were the last four books. But he didn't succeed. That was one of the things he tried, and it didn't work. And the reason it didn't work is because the order that we have was the order in the Latin Vulgate that Western Europe had used for a thousand years. It's pretty hard to change something that entrenched.

So even though Luther tried to change the order of the New Testament books, it fell back to the way Western Europeans had had them in the Vulgate.