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 text, in a church, 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 drew lines in the margin, underlined, wrote NB beside what struck him, and occasionally added a remark of his own. The passages he marked are overwhelmingly Luther's explanations rather than the biblical text itself: this is Bach reading scripture through Luther's lens.
In 1985 Howard H. Cox published The Calov Bible of J. S. Bach, with an English translation of the marked passages by Ellis Finger and black-and-white facsimiles. The German text itself was neither transcribed nor published. A reader who wants to know what Bach actually read — 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 — introduction
How the markings are shown
Bach's most frequent gesture is a line in the margin beside a passage. Since it is the marked text that matters rather than the mark itself, such passages are shown with a tint behind them. Underlining is reproduced as underlining, and an NB is placed where Bach placed it. Editorial comment — mine — is set in a different typeface, so that it can never be mistaken for something Bach or Calov wrote.
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 being 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.
Scan and OCR errors in the English text have not all been corrected, and the biblical references are being added gradually. The text is offered as it stands.
In Dutch: cantatas and biography
Commentary on individual cantatas, the accompanying homilies, and a full biography of Bach are on my Dutch site, bach.wursten.be. A number of pages here are in Dutch as well — see Nederlands.