In verse 29 follows the remark that time is shortened, followed by the well-known commandments motivated by eschatological expectations: (31) to possess women as though one did not have them, to buy as though one did not have what one had bought, etc. In verse 20 Luther, following the older German translations, even in 1523 in his exigesis of this chapter, renders κλῆσις with Beruf, and interprets it with Stand. (Erlangen ed., LI, p. 51.)
In fact it is evident that the word κλῆσις at this point, and only at this, corresponds approximately to the Latin status and the German Stand (status of marriage, status of a servant, etc.). But of course not as Brentano, Die Anfänge des modernen Kapitalismus p. 137, assumes, in the modern sense of Beruf. Brentano can hardly have read this passage, or what I have said about it, very carefully. In a sense at least suggesting it this word, which is etymologically related to ἐκκλησία, an assembly which has been called, occurs in Greek literature, so far as the lexicons tell, only once in a passage from Dionysius of Halicarnassus, where it corresponds to the Latin classis, a word borrowed from the Greek, meaning that part of the citizenry which has been called to the colours. Theophylaktos (eleventh-twelfth century) interprets 1 Corinthians 7:20: ἐν οἷῳ βιῳ καὶ ἐν οἷῳ τάγματι καὶ πολιτεύματι ὢν ἐπίστευσεν. (My colleague Professor Deissmann called my attention to this passage.) Now, even in our passage, κλῆσις does not correspond to the modern Beruf. But having translated κλῆσις with Beruf in the eschatologically motivated exhortation, that everyone should remain in his present status, Luther, when he later came to translate the Apocrypha, would naturally, on account of the similar content of the exhortations alone, also use Beruf for πόνος in the traditionalistic and anti-chrematistic commandment of Jesus Sirach, that everyone should remain in the same business. This is what is important and characteristic. The passage in 1 Corinthians 7:17 does not, as has been pointed out, use κλῆσις at all in the sense of Beruf, a definite field of activity.
In the meantime (or about the same time), in the “Augsburg Confession,” the Protestant dogma of the uselessness of the Catholic attempt to excel worldly morality was established, and in it the expression “einem jeglichen nach seinem Beruf” was used (see previous note). In Luther’s translation, both this and the positive valuation of the order in which the individual was placed, as holy, which was gaining ground just about the beginning of the 1530’s, stand out. It was a result of his more and more sharply defined belief in special Divine Providence, even in the details of life, and at the same time of his increasing inclination to accept the existing order of things in the world as immutably willed by God. Vocatio, in the traditional Latin, meant the divine call to a life of holiness, especially in a monastery or as a priest. But now, under the influence of this dogma, life in a worldly calling came for Luther to have the same connotation. For he now translated πόνος and ἔργον in Jesus Sirach with Beruf, for which, up to that time, there had been only the (Latin) analogy, coming from the monastic translation. But a few years earlier, in Proverbs 22:29, he had still translated the Hebrew מְלָאכָה, which was the original of ἔργον in the Greek text of Jesus Sirach, and which, like the German Beruf and the Scandinavian kald, kallelse, originally related to a spiritual call (Beruf), as in other passages (Genesis 39:11), with Geschäft (Septuagint ἔργον, Vulgate opus, English Bibles business, and correspondingly in the Scandinavian and all the other translations before me).
The word Beruf, in the modern sense which he had finally created, remained for the time being entirely Lutheran. To the Calvinists the Apocrypha are entirely uncanonical. It was only as a result of the development which brought the interest in proof of salvation to the fore that Luther’s concept was taken over, and then strongly emphasized by them. But in their first (Romance) translations they had no such word available, and no power to create one in the usage of a language already so stereotyped.
As early as the sixteenth century the concept of Beruf in its present sense became established in secular literature. The Bible translators before Luther had used the word Berufung for κλῆσις (as for instance in the Heidelberg versions of 1462–66 and 1485), and the Eck translation of 1537 says “in dem Ruf, worin er beruft ist.” Most of the later Catholic translators directly follow Luther. In England, the first of all, Wyclif’s translation (1382), used cleping (the Old English word which was later replaced by the borrowed “calling”). It is quite
