A revision of a revision. The German churches had agreed a single text of Luther's Bible in 1892, the first official church revision, and within a few years it was being called insufficient. The complaints were the old ones: too many archaisms, and a spelling that no longer matched anybody's. That second point was what carried the day. The Duden had given the German Empire a binding orthography taught in the schools, and a Luther Bible that departed from it was awkward to put in front of a class. In 1906 the German Protestant church conference agreed to another revision and instructed that it be gentle and preserving. A commission of theologians went through every book by 1910, and in 1912 the conference adopted the result.
The work took barely more than two years, which tells you what kind of revision it was. Nobody was trying to make a new Luther Bible, philologically or otherwise. A later reviser, Fritz Tschirch, dismissed it as a schoolmasterly revision, and the label is not wrong about the method — spelling brought into line, the most obviously dead words replaced, the wording otherwise left where Luther had it. What the label misses is how well it lasted. Through the decades of partial revisions that followed, the 1912 text stayed put, and it is still read and still sold. Some of that is the 1912 Jubiläumsbibel, the Württemberg Bible Institute's centenary edition with explanatory notes, reprinted in Fraktur well into this century. Some of it is that the copyright has lapsed, so the text costs nothing to reproduce and turns up everywhere — including here.
One thing above all keeps it in use among conservative readers: it is the last Luther revision built on the Textus Receptus, the Greek New Testament of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Everything after it moved to the critical text. That makes this edition an unusually clean rung to stand on in a ladder, because the Greek under it is the same Greek that is under Luther's own 1545 and under the Geneva and the King James — the whole tower shares a floor rather than swapping one out halfway up.
In the lineage rungs this edition sits directly above Luther Bibel 1545 and has exactly one recorded parent, which is that. Open one rung beneath a 1912 verse and Luther's own wording of 1545 appears under it; open another and the ladder reaches the Textus Receptus for the Greek and the Westminster Leningrad Codex for the Hebrew. Three hundred and sixty-seven years of revision, verse by verse, in two clicks. What this edition is not is the Bible a German interface opens on — German has no curated default, so the reader takes the first German Bible in the catalogue and that is the Elberfelder.