EMSER, HIERONYMUS. — Theologian and controversialist
b. at Weidenstetten near Ulm on 28 March 1478,
d. at Dresden on 8 November 1527. Magister artium (1499),
a priest before 1502, he devoted all his energies
to the Lutheran controversy. At first, when Lu-
ther, at the Leipzig disputation (1519), was accused
of the Hussite heresy and of agreement with the Bohemian
Brethren, he published an open letter addressed to
the ecclesiastical administrator of the archdiocese of
Prague, Giovanni Żok, in which he justified Luther
against these accusations and at the same time
presented a defence of the Roman primacy. Lu-
ther saw in this an insidious attempt to force him
either to take a position against the Bohemians or to aban-
don the theses he had defended at Leipzig; he therefore
reacted in Sept. 1519 with: Ad aegocerotem Emserianum M. Lu-
theri additio, the most violent of all his polemical
writings. E. replied again in the same year with: A
venatione Lutherana aegocerois assertio. The controversy
thus begun continued in the most violent tone even
in the years that followed. To every publication by Lu-
ther, E. did not fail to oppose a new polemical writing.
His premature death left incomplete a work against
Luther’s pamphlet Trä-
stungen an die Christen zu Halle (a work that was in the
same year completed and published by Alveldt under
his own name).
E. was not a great theologian, still less a scholastic, but
was above all a humanist. He possessed a good know-
ledge of Scripture and the Fathers, and especially an ar-
dent ecclesiastical spirit. But his polemics were almost
entirely negative, not constructive; truth was defended
but neither deepened nor positively expounded.
His writings consequently had an influence and scope
quite different from those of his opponents.
In 1527 E. also published a German translation
of the New Testament, intended as a counterweight to that
of Luther. Literarily, it depended heavily on that
of the reformer, but remained much closer to the
Vulgate and faithful to orthodoxy.