On the road home, Luther was intercepted by armed men and taken to the Wartburg castle, a staged abduction arranged by Frederick of Saxony to put an outlaw somewhere safe. He spent nearly a year there in disguise, ill, restless and prolific, and among what he produced was a translation of the New Testament from Greek into German, drafted in about eleven weeks and printed in September 1522.
Its significance is not only religious. Luther translated for the market woman and the children in the street, as he put it, and made choices about vocabulary and rhythm that shaped written German for centuries. A movement whose principle was the authority of scripture required a scripture ordinary people could read, and supplying one did more to spread the Reformation than any pamphlet.
Meanwhile his own movement ran ahead of him in Wittenberg, with images destroyed, monastic vows abandoned and the mass altered by colleagues who read his principles more radically than he did. He returned in 1522 without the elector's permission to slow it down, preaching a series of sermons on proceeding gently with those whose consciences were not yet ready. The pattern set there, of a reformer restraining the reformation he had begun, recurs throughout the period and is one of the reasons the movement fragmented.