Also... Luther was no peasant. By the time he was 20, he had spent many years in his religious studies.
The defense of Luther’s statement is that MOST of his contact with the bible would have been under the direct supervision and guidance of someone else; he may not have been free to peruse his own bible. However, this defense is that the spirit of what he said is true, even if his words aren’t... but the spirit isn’t true, either.
Luther would have had a personal breviary, and he would have had to study from it eight times a day. It’s true that the breviary is not a bible; it is a condensation of it, emphasizing the prayers (Pslams, canticles, etc.), gospels and moral instructions. Combined with Lectionary, he would annually have studied the entirety of the New Testament, every Psalm, the Torah (minus “the begats,” etc.) , and every passage of the Old Testament quoted by the New. There’s no chance that he only discovered any portion of St. Paul’s writings as an adult. Paul’s justification by faith was repeated several times in the breviary and lectionary, for instance.
(The lectionary is a selection of biblical passages for use in masses; since monks went to mass daily, they would get almost 900 unique passages in a year.)
The defense of Luther’s statement is that MOST of his contact with the bible would have been under the direct supervision and guidance of someone else; he may not have been free to peruse his own bible.
______________________________________________
That’s what I meant by controlled...
Foxe says that Luther was at the Universirty of Erfurt and found a Latin Bible. He “read it over very greedily” That tells me that the Bibles printed in German were extremely thin. Foxe also said the Luther “was amazed to find that a small portion of the scriptures were rehearsed to the people” (John Foxe, Foxe’s Book of martyrs P 175)