Bach in his Lutheran context
This site explores Johann Sebastian Bach within his theological and historical context: Lutheranism. That background is not decoration. Without it the great Passions and the cantatas are easily misread — as pious sentiment, or as abstract craftsmanship. With it, they become what they were meant to be: the exposition of a biblical text, in a church service, on a particular Sunday. You will find general essays on these themes here. But the heart of the site is something more specific:
The Calov bible
Bach owned a three-volume Bible commentary by Abraham Calov (1681-82), and he read it with a pen in his hand. He marked passages with a pair of oblique strokes in the margin, repeated beside every line; he underlined words and whole phrases; he occasionally wrote NB beside what struck him; and on a few occasions he added a remark of his own. What he marked is almost always Luther’s explanations, exhortations or musings, rather than the biblical text itself. So what we have here is Bach reading Scripture — and, by the look of it, thoroughly taken with reading it through Luther’s lens.
Bach's markings
Bach’s most frequent gesture is a pair of oblique strokes in the margin, and underlining. Occasionally there is an NB, and sometimes there is an annotation. I publish the marked texts, with some editorial (historical, exegetical) comment.
In 1985 Howard H. Cox published a scholarly edition dedicated to The Calov Bible of J. S. Bach, with an English translation of all passages marked by Bach, together with 285 black-and-white facsimiles of the relevant pages. The German text itself was neither transcribed nor published. A reader who wants to know what Bach actually read, and what 'triggered him' — the words on the page, in Luther’s German — still cannot find them in print.
That gap is what this project is trying to close. Finger’s complete English translation is available here, arranged in nine parts, and the original German is being added alongside it, column by column.
Start here: Bach’s markings — an introduction
Essays
Alongside the transcription there are studies of particular questions: the St Matthew Passion and its liturgical setting; Christoph Birkmann, the student who sang in Bach’s cantatas and turned out to have written a number of the librettos; Good Friday 1724, a reconstruction of the afternoon on which the St John Passion was first heard. The full list is under All pages.
In Dutch
Commentary on individual cantatas, the homilies that go with them, and a full biography of Bach are on my Dutch site, bach.wursten.be. Where an English version of a page here also exists in Dutch, the two link to each other.
Work in progress
This is unfinished, visibly so. Where a column still shows an empty box on the left, the German original has not yet been added. Facsimile images are included as the work proceeds; they are reproduced by way of example from the facsimile edition published by Van Wijnen (2017), with the kind permission of the publisher. Errors in the English text have not all been corrected; it is offered as it stands.