Emser, Hieronymus

EMSER, HIERONYMUS. - Theologian and polemicist, b. at Weidenstetten near Ulm on 28 March 1478, d. at Dresden on 8 Nov. 1527. Magister artium (1499), a priest before 1502, he devoted all his energies to the Lutheran controversy. At first, when Luther, at the Leipzig disputation (1519), was accused of heresy and of agreements with the Bohemian Brethren, he published an open letter of his addressed to the ecclesiastical administrator of the archdiocese of Prague, Johann Żok, in which he justified Luther against such accusations and at the same time presented a defense of the Roman primacy. Luther saw in this a subtle attempt to force him either to take a position against the Bohemians or to abandon the theses he had defended at Leipzig; he therefore reacted in Sept. 1519 with: Ad aegocerotem Emserianum M. Lutheri additio, the most violent of all his polemical writings. E. replied again in the same year with: A venatione Lutherana aegocerotis assertio. The controversy thus begun continued in the most violent tone also in the years that followed. To every publication of Luther E. did not fail to oppose a new polemical writing. His early death left incomplete a writing against Luther's pamphlet Tröstungen an die Christen zu Halle (a writing that was completed and published in the same year by Alveldt under his own name).

E. is not a great theologian, still less a scholastic, but he is first of all a humanist. He possesses a good knowledge of Scripture and of the Fathers, and above all an ardent ecclesiastical spirit. But his polemic is almost exclusively negative, not constructive, and the truth is defended, but not deepened, nor positively set forth. His writings therefore had an echo and a scope quite different from those of his adversaries.

In 1527 E. also published a German translation of the New Testament, to be set against that of Luther. Literarily it depends greatly on that of the reformer, but it keeps much closer to the Vulgate and faithful to orthodoxy.