The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
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 Prov. xxii. 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 (Gen. xxxix. 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 characteristic of the Lollard ethics to use a word which already corresponded to the later usage of the Reformation. Tyndale's translation of 1534, on the other hand, interprets the idea in terms of status: "in the same state wherein he was called", as also does the Geneva Bible of 1557. Cranmer's official translation of 1539 substituted calling for state, while the (Catholic) Bible of Rheims (1582), as well as the Anglican Court Bibles of the Elizabethan era, characteristically return to vocation, following the Vulgate.
That for England, Cranmer's Bible translation is the source of the Puritan conception of calling in the sense of Beruf, trade, has already, quite correctly, been pointed out by Murray. As early as the middle of the sixteenth century calling is used in that sense. In 1588 unlawful callings are referred to, and in 1603 greater callings in the sense of higher occupations, etc. (see Murray). Quite remarkable is Brentano's idea (op. cit., p. 139), that in the Middle Ages vocatio was not translated with Beruf, and that this concept was not known, because only a free man could engage in a Beruf, and freemen, in the middle-class professions, did not exist at that time. Since the
