Appendix: Fact Check

The story you read was a dramatization of historical events. In the following, we present the historical facts that were the basis of this story along with their references. We encourage you to do your own research and verify them by yourself.

Tithe

A tithe is a one-tenth part of something, paid as a contribution to a religious organization or compulsory tax to the government.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithe

During the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther approved in general of paying tithes to the temporal sovereign, and the imposition of tithes continued for the benefit of Protestant as well as Roman Catholic churches.

Reference: https://www.britannica.com/topic/tithe

In addition, one would pay a sum to the church via the collection at the end of each service.

Reference: https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/the-reformation/roman-catholic-church-in-1500/

Serfdom

Serfdom was the status of many peasants under feudalism and similar systems. It was a condition of debt bondage and indentured servitude with similarities to and differences from slavery, which developed during the Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages in Europe and lasted in some countries until the mid-19th century.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom

Katharina von Bora

After several years of religious life, Katharina became interested in the growing reform movement and grew dissatisfied with her life in the convent. Conspiring with several other nuns to flee in secrecy, she contacted Luther and begged for his assistance. On Easter Eve, 4 April 1523, Luther sent a city councilman of Torgau and a merchant who regularly delivered herring to the convent. The nuns escaped by hiding in the covered wagon among the fish barrels and fled to Wittenberg. A local student wrote to a friend: “A wagon load of vestal virgins has just come to town, all more eager for marriage than for life. God grant them husbands lest worse befall.”

Katharina had a number of suitors, including the Wittenberg University alumnus Hieronymus Baumgärtner of Nuremberg. None of the proposed matches resulted in marriage. She told Luther’s friend and fellow reformer, Nikolaus von Amsdorf, that she would be willing to marry only Luther or von Amsdorf himself.

Martin Luther, and many of his friends as well, were at first unsure of whether he should even be married. Luther eventually came to the conclusion that “his marriage would please his father, rile the pope, cause the angels to laugh, and the devils to weep.” He married Katharina on 13 June 1525.

The couple took up residence in the Black Cloister, the former dormitory and educational institution for Augustinian friars studying in Wittenberg, given as a wedding gift by the reform-minded John, Elector of Saxony, who was the brother of Luther’s protector Frederick III, Elector of Saxony.

Katharina immediately took on the task of administering and managing the monastery’s vast holdings, breeding and selling cattle, running a brewery to provide for their family, the steady stream of students who boarded with them, and visitors seeking audiences with her husband. In times of widespread illness, Katharina operated a hospital on site, ministering to the sick alongside other nurses.

Katharina bore six children: Hans: June 1526; Elizabeth: 10 December 1527, who died within a few months; Magdalene: 1529, who died in Luther’s arms in 1542; Martin: 1531; Paul: January 1533; and Margaret: 1534

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharina_von_Bora

Johann Tetzel

“As soon as a coin in the coffer rings a soul from purgatory springs.”

This a famous quote from Johann Tetzel. He was appointed Inquisitor for Poland and Saxony, later becoming the Grand Commissioner for indulgences in Germany.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Tetzel

The 95 Theses

The 95 Theses or Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences is a list of propositions for an academic disputation written in 1517 by Martin Luther. The article, among many other things, attacks the belief allegedly propagated by the preachers that the indulgence could forgive one who had violated the Virgin Mary.

The historians agree on the power of the printing press in spreading The 95 Theses to the general public. It is, however, unknown who financed the distribution.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-five_Theses

Exsurge Domine and Decet Romanum

Exsurge Domine is a papal bull promulgated on 15 June 1520 by Pope Leo X. It was written in response to the teachings of Martin Luther which opposed the views of the Church. It censured forty-one propositions extracted from Luther’s Ninety-five Theses and subsequent writings, and threatened him with excommunication unless he recanted within a sixty-day period commencing upon the publication of the bull in Saxony and its neighboring regions. Luther refused to recant and responded instead by composing polemical tracts lashing out at the papacy and by publicly burning a copy of the bull on 10 December 1520. As a result, Decet Romanum bull excommunicates Martin Luther in 1521.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exsurge_Domine

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decet_Romanum_Pontificem

Diet of Worms

The Diet of Worms of 1521 was an imperial diet (a formal deliberative assembly) of the Holy Roman Empire called by Emperor Charles V and conducted in the Imperial Free City of Worms. Martin Luther was summoned to the Diet in order to renounce or reaffirm his views in response to a Papal bull of Pope Leo X.

Prince Frederick III, Elector of Saxony obtained an agreement that if Luther appeared he would be promised safe passage to and from the meeting. This guarantee was essential after the treatment of Jan Hus, who was tried and executed at the Council of Constance in 1415 despite a promise of safe conduct.

In answer to questioning, Luther defended these views and refused to recant them.

After his dismissal, he departed for his home in Wittenberg. However, fearing for Luther’s safety, Frederick III sent men to fake a highway attack and abduct Luther, hiding him away at Wartburg Castle.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_of_Worms

Iconoclasm

The first iconoclastic wave happened in Wittenberg in the early 1520s under reformers Thomas Müntzer and Andreas Karlstadt. It prompted Martin Luther, then concealing as Junker Jorg, to intervene. Luther argued that the mental picturing of Christ when reading the Scriptures was similar in character to artistic renderings of Christ.

In contrast to the Lutherans who favored sacred art in their churches and homes, the Reformed (Calvinist) leaders, in particular Andreas Karlstadt, Huldrych Zwingli, and John Calvin, encouraged the removal of religious images by invoking the Decalogue’s prohibition of idolatry and the manufacture of graven (sculpted) images of God. As a result, individuals attacked statues and images. However, in most cases, civil authorities removed images in an orderly manner in the newly Reformed Protestant cities and territories of Europe.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconoclasm

Sola Fide

During his stay at Wartburg, Luther translated the New Testament from Greek into German and poured out doctrinal and polemical writings. These included a renewed attack on Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, whom he shamed into halting the sale of indulgences in his episcopates, and a ‘Refutation of the Argument of Latomus,’ in which he expounded the principle of justification to Jacobus Latomus, an orthodox theologian from Louvain. In this work, one of his most emphatic statements on faith, he argued that every good work designed to attract God’s favor is a sin.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther

Justificatio sola fide (or simply sola fide), meaning justification by faith alone, is a Christian theological doctrine commonly held to distinguish many Protestant denominations from the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox churches. The doctrine asserts that it is on the basis of their faith that believers are forgiven their transgressions of the law of God rather than on the basis of good works which they have done. This forgiveness is known as ‘justification’. In classical Lutheran and Reformed theologies, good works are seen to be evidence of faith, but the good works themselves do not determine salvation.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sola_fide

When Luther was criticized for inserting the word ‘alone’ after ‘faith’ in his translation of Romans 3:28, he replied in part: “The text itself and the meaning of St. Paul urgently require and demand it. For in that very passage he is dealing with the main point of Christian doctrine, namely, that we are justified by faith in Christ without any works of the Law. … But when works are so completely cut away—and that must mean that faith alone justifies—whoever would speak plainly and clearly about this cutting away of works will have to say, ‘Faith alone justifies us, and not works’.”

Reference: Luther’s Works. St. Louis: Concordia/Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955-86. ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 35. pp. 182, 187-89, 195.

Invocavit Sermons

Luther secretly returned to Wittenberg on 6 March 1522. He wrote to the Elector: “During my absence, Satan has entered my sheepfold, and committed ravages which I cannot repair by writing, but only by my personal presence and living word.” For eight days in Lent, beginning on Invocavit Sunday, 9 March, Luther preached eight sermons, which became known as the Invocavit Sermons.

The effect of Luther’s intervention was immediate. After the sixth sermon, the Wittenberg jurist Jerome Schurf wrote to the elector: “Oh, what joy has Dr. Martin’s return spread among us! His words, through divine mercy, are bringing back every day misguided people into the way of the truth.”

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther

Andreas Karlstadt

In 1511 Andreas Karlstadt became chancellor of Wittenberg University. In 1512 he awarded Martin Luther his doctorate.

After the Diet of Worms and while Luther was hiding at Wartburg Castle, Karlstadt worked toward reform in Wittenberg. On Christmas Day 1521, he performed the first reformed communion service.

In the first week of March, Luther returned from Wartburg. From 9 to 16 March Luther gave eight sermons in which he stressed some theological similarities with Karlstadt, but, in hindsight, urged caution. This was a major turning point between Karlstadt and Luther. Karlstadt reasserted some of his moderately mystical leanings, continued wearing peasants’ clothing, asked to be called Brother Andreas, and became disillusioned with academic life.

From Spring 1524, Luther started to campaign against Karlstadt, denying his right to publish and preach without Luther’s authorization. In June, Karlstadt resigned as archdeacon. In July, Luther published the Letter to the Saxon Princes, in which he argued that Thomas Müntzer and Karlstadt agreed, and were both dangerous sectarians with revolutionary tendencies.

In September 1524 Karlstadt was exiled from Saxony by Frederick the Wise and George, Duke of Saxony. Luther also wrote against Karlstadt in his 1526 ‘The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ—Against the Fanatics’.

When the Peasant War broke out, Karlstadt was threatened and wrote to Luther and asked for assistance. Luther took him in, and Karlstadt lived secretly in Luther’s house for eight weeks. However, Karlstadt had to sign a pseudo retraction, titled ‘Apology by Dr. Andreas Karlstadt Regarding the False Charge of Insurrection Which has Unjustly Been Made Against Him.’ It also contained a preface by Luther.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Karlstadt

Thomas Müntzer

In the autumn of 1517, he was in Wittenberg, met with Martin Luther, and became involved in the great discussions which preceded the posting of Luther’s 95 Theses.

In June 1519, Müntzer attended the disputation in Leipzig between the reformers of Wittenberg (Luther, Karlstadt, and Philip Melanchthon) and the Catholic Church hierarchy (represented by Johann Eck). This was one of the high points of the early Reformation. Müntzer did not go unnoticed by Luther, who recommended him to a temporary post in the town of Zwickau.

In early April 1523, through the patronage of Selmenitz, he was appointed as the preacher at St John’s Church in Allstedt in Saxony. In the spring of 1524, supporters of Müntzer burned down a small pilgrimage chapel at Mallerbach, much to the annoyance of the abbess of the Naundorf nunnery.

Luther did not hold back: he published his Letter to the Princes of Saxony about the Rebellious Spirit demanding the radical’s banishment from Saxony. On the night of 7 August 1524, Müntzer slipped out of Allstedt and headed for the self-ruling Imperial Free City of Mühlhausen.

In 1525, Müntzer founded the ‘Eternal League of God’ in late March. This was an armed militia, designed not just as a defense league, but also as a God-fearing cadre for the coming apocalypse. In the surrounding countryside and neighboring small towns, the events in Mühlhausen found a ready echo, for the peasantry and the urban poor had had news of the great uprising in southwest Germany, and many were ready to join in.

Luther sympathized with some of the peasants’ grievances, but he reminded the aggrieved to obey the temporal authorities. He made a tour of southern Saxony in an attempt to dissuade the rebels from the action, although in some of these places he was roundly heckled. He became enraged at the widespread burning of convents, monasteries, bishops’ palaces, and libraries. He followed this up with his pamphlet ‘Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants’, calling for the ruthless suppression of the revolt.

Therefore let everyone who can smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel… Our peasants, however, want to make the goods of other men common and keep their own for themselves. Fine Christians they are! I think there is not a devil left in hell; they have all gone into the peasants. Their raving has gone beyond all measure.

This had a title and timing that could not have been more ill-considered since it was the German peasantry who at that time died in their thousands at the hands of the princely armies. Estimates put the figure at 70,000-75,000, possibly even as high as 100,000.

At length, on 11 May, Müntzer and what remained of his troops arrived outside the town of Frankenhausen, meeting up with rebels there who had been asking for help for some time. No sooner had they set up camp on a hill than the prince’s army arrived, having already crushed the rebellion in southern Thuringia. On 15 May, the battle was joined. It lasted only a few minutes and left the streams of the hill running with blood. Six thousand rebels were killed, but only a few soldiers. Many more rebels were executed in the following days. On 27 May, after torture and confession, Müntzer was executed, outside the walls of Mühlhausen, his heads being displayed prominently for years to come as a warning to others.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_M%C3%BCntzer

In 1526 Luther wrote: “I, Martin Luther, have during the rebellion slain all the peasants, for it was I who ordered them to be struck dead.”

Reference: Erlangen Edition of Luther’s Works, Vol. 59, p. 284

Luther’s Health

Luther had been suffering from ill health for years, including Meniere’s disease, vertigo, fainting, tinnitus, constipation, and a cataract in one eye. From 1531 to 1546 his health deteriorated further. In 1536, he began to suffer from kidney and bladder stones, arthritis, and an ear infection that ruptured an eardrum. In December 1544, he began to feel the effects of angina. His poor physical health made him short-tempered and even harsher in his writings and comments.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther

During the last 19 years of his life, in addition to these natural diseases, Luther also suffered from recurring attacks of a peculiar symptomatology. The first of these attacks occurred on July 6, 1527, when Luther was 43 years of age.

He was entertaining friends for dinner when he felt an intense buzzing in his left ear. It began with a roaring tinnitus in his left ear, which increased dramatically and seemed to occupy the left half of his head. Then a state of sickness and collapse followed. He had to be carried to bed, where he frantically called for water or else, he believed, he would die. After a night’s rest, all the symptoms had subsided, except the tinnitus, which, from that day on, continued for all the following years in varying intensity. Similar attacks with an increase of tinnitus and vertigo as the leading symptoms seized Luther at irregular intervals and distressed him extremely.

Reference: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2529669/

Reference: https://www.ligonier.org/blog/theology-learned-flames-adversity/

Looking back on one of his bouts, he wrote his friend Melanchthon, “I spent more than a week in death and hell. My entire body was in pain, and I still tremble. Completely abandoned by Christ, I labored under the vacillations and storms of desperation and blasphemy against God. But through the prayers of the saints [his friends], God began to have mercy on me and pulled my soul from the inferno below.”

Reference: https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-39/weak-man-behind-mighty-fortress.html

Luther’s Anti-Semitism

In his 1523 essay That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, Luther condemned the inhuman treatment of the Jews and urged Christians to treat them kindly. Luther’s fervent desire was that Jews would hear the Gospel proclaimed clearly and be moved to convert to Christianity. Thus he argued:

“If I had been a Jew and had seen such dolts and blockheads govern and teach the Christian faith, I would sooner have become a hog than a Christian. They have dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs rather than human beings; they have done little else than deride them and seize their property. When they baptize them, they show them nothing of Christian doctrine or life, but only subject them to popishness and mockery … If the apostles, who also were Jews, had dealt with us Gentiles as we Gentiles deal with the Jews, there would never have been a Christian among the Gentiles … When we are inclined to boast of our position [as Christians] we should remember that we are but Gentiles, while the Jews are of the lineage of Christ. We are aliens and in-laws; they are blood relatives, cousins, and brothers of our Lord. Therefore, if one is to boast of flesh and blood the Jews are actually nearer to Christ than we are … If we really want to help them, we must be guided in our dealings with them not by papal law but by the law of Christian love. We must receive them cordially, and permit them to trade and work with us, that they may have occasion and opportunity to associate with us, hear our Christian teaching, and witness our Christian life. If some of them should prove stiff-necked, what of it? After all, we ourselves are not all good Christians either.”

Reference: Martin Luther, “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew,” Trans. Walter I. Brandt, in Luther’s Works (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1962), pp. 200-201, 229.

Luther successfully campaigned against the Jews in Saxony, Brandenburg, and Silesia. In August 1536 Luther’s prince, Elector of Saxony, John Frederick, issued a mandate that prohibited Jews from inhabiting, engaging in business in, or passing through his realm.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_and_antisemitism

In 1543 Luther published On the Jews and Their Lies in which he says that the Jews are a “base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth.” They are full of the “devil’s feces … which they wallow in like swine.” The synagogue was a “defiled bride, yes, an incorrigible whore and an evil slut …” He argues that their synagogues and schools be set on fire, their prayer books destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, homes razed, and property and money confiscated. They should be shown no mercy or kindness, afforded no legal protection, and these “poisonous envenomed worms” should be drafted into forced labor or expelled for all time. He also seems to advocate their murder, writing “we are at fault in not slaying them”. Luther claims that Jewish history was “assailed by much heresy”, and that Christ swept away the Jewish heresy and goes on to do so, “as it still does daily before our eyes.” He stigmatizes Jewish Prayer as being “blasphemous” and a lie, and vilifies Jews in general as being spiritually “blind” and “surely possessed by all devils.”

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Jews_and_Their_Lies

Reference: Luther, Martin. On the Jews and Their Lies, 154, 167, 229

Shortly before his death on February 18, 1546, Luther preached four sermons in Eisleben. He appended to the second to the last what he called his “final warning” against the Jews. The main point of this short work is that authorities who could expel the Jews from their lands should do so if they would not convert to Christianity. Otherwise, Luther indicated, such authorities would make themselves “partners in another’s sins”.

“However, if they are converted, abandon their usury, and receive Christ, then we will willingly regard them our brothers. Otherwise, nothing will come out of it, for they do it to excess.”

Luther followed this with accusations:

“They are our public enemies. They do not stop blaspheming our Lord Christ, calling the Virgin Mary a whore, Christ, a bastard, and us changelings or abortions. If they could kill us all, they would gladly do it. They do it often, especially those who pose as physicians—though sometimes they help—for the devil helps to finish it in the end. They can also practice medicine as in French Switzerland. They administer poison to someone from which he could die in an hour, a month, a year, ten or twenty years. They are able to practice this art.”

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_and_antisemitism

Reference: Weimar Ausgabe 51:194-196; J.G. Walch, Dr. Martin Luthers Sammtliche Schriften, 23 vols. (St. Louis: Concordia, 1883), 12:1264—1267.

Four hundred years after it was written, the Nazis displayed ‘On the Jews and Their Lies’ during Nuremberg rallies, and the city of Nuremberg presented a first edition to Julius Streicher, editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer, the newspaper describing it, on Streicher’s first encounter with the treatise in 1937, as the most radically antisemitic tract ever published.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Jews_and_Their_Lies

Reference: Ellis, Marc H. “Hitler and the Holocaust, Christian Anti-Semitism” Archived 2007-07-10 at the Wayback Machine, Baylor University Center for American and Jewish Studies, Spring 2004, slide 14

Against this view, theologian Johannes Wallmann writes that the treatise had no continuity of influence in Germany, and was in fact largely ignored during the 18th and 19th centuries. Hans Hillerbrand argues that to focus on Luther’s role in the development of German antisemitism is to underestimate the “larger peculiarities of German history”.

Since the 1980s, some Lutheran church bodies have formally denounced and dissociated themselves from Luther’s vitriol about Jews. In November 1998, on the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria issued a statement: “It is imperative for the Lutheran Church, which knows itself to be indebted to the work and tradition of Martin Luther, to take seriously also his anti-Jewish utterances, to acknowledge their theological function, and to reflect on their consequences. It has to distance itself from every [expression of] anti-Judaism in Lutheran theology.”