EMSER, HERONYMUS. – Theologian and polemicist, b. at Weidenstetten near Ulm on 28 March 1475, d. at Dresden on 8 Nov. 1527. Magister artium (1499), priest before 1502, he devoted all his energies to the polemic against Luther. At first, when Luther, at the Leipzig Disputation (1519), was accused of Hussite heresy and of agreements with the Bohemian Brethren, Emser published an open letter addressed to the ecclesiastical administrator of the archdiocese of Prague, Giovanni Zak, in which he justified Luther from such accusations and presented a defense of the Roman primacy. Luther saw in this a sly attempt to force him either to take a stand against the Bohemians or to abandon the theses he had defended at Leipzig; he therefore reacted in Sept. 1519 with: Ad egeocroisem Emersianum M. Lutheri additio, the most violent of all his polemical writings. And he replied again in the same year with: A veneratione Lutherana egeocrois asserito. The controversy thus begun continued with the most violent tone in the years that followed. To every publication of Luther’s, Emser did not fail to counter with a new polemical writing. His premature death left incomplete a work against Luther’s opuscule Tybingen an die Christen zu Halle (which was completed and published in the same year by Alveldt under his own name).
Emser is not a great theologian, still less a scholastic, but above all a humanist. He possessed a good knowledge of Scripture and the Fathers, and above all a fervent ecclesiastical spirit. But his polemic is almost entirely negative, not constructive, and the truth is defended but not deepened or positively expounded. His writings therefore had an echo and scope quite different from those of his adversaries.
In 1527 Emser also published a German translation of the New Testament, intended as a counter to Luther’s. Literarily it depends greatly on that of the reformer, yet it remains much closer to the Vulgate and faithful to orthodoxy.