Note 478 — Chapter XIV

Not βδελυρίαν, debauchery, as was thought, but βωμολοχίαν, is the correct reading. The latter might perhaps be translated as “the passion for making coarse jests.” This is the opinion of G. Kawerau in “Deutsch-Evangelische Blätter,” 1906, “Luther und Melanchthon” (in the reprint, p. 37), who remarks that the only thing damning for Luther in this letter was Melanchthon’s statement “concerning the coarse jests to which Luther was given in his bachelor days, and which had so often scandalised his friend.” Kawerau, for this very reason, thinks that this much-discussed letter, “which Camerarius only ventured to print after much revision” (p. 34), is much better calculated to “make us acquainted with Melanchthon than with Luther, and simply bears witness to the former’s sensitiveness” (p. 37). It is true that “some of Luther’s talk appears to us to-day frightfully coarse, and Melanchthon felt as we do on the subject”; but apart from the fact that Melanchthon’s views were not representative of his age, Mathesius declares that “he never heard an immodest word from Luther’s lips.” We shall return later to the question of that age as a linguistic standard of morality and to Mathesius’s statement, which, we may remark, refers to a later period.