Marienbibliothek

As a young man, Boetius studied directly under Luther and Melanchthon in Wittenberg; he later succeeded Jonas as first pastor of the Marktkirche, and from 1554 served as superintendent of Halle. He used donated funds to buy books at the Leipzig book fair, building up the collection one volume at a time. The conventional account dates its founding to 1552; church records place its formal establishment in 1560.

The Neuwerk Monastery, founded in 1116, had been medieval Halle's spiritual center and the city's first institution licensed to teach; it was dissolved and demolished in 1530. Just over two decades later, books returned to the city in a different form — no longer housed in a monastery, but placed in a library open to the public. Until the university library was founded in 1696, this was the city's only public scholarly collection; it has remained open ever since, making it the oldest Protestant church library of its kind still operating in Germany, continuously open to the public.

Today the collection holds over 30,000 volumes, several hundred of them incunabula — books printed in the earliest years of the printing press — along with a first edition of Luther's 1534 Bible, the very first printing of Luther's German Bible.

A church spent its money on a library, because the Word must be read. Today, in this same city, we read that same Bible in Chinese.