When did Martin Luther really post his 95 theses?

Question

I know that according to tradition he posted them October 31, 1517 but he actually wrote a letter to a friend that day. I'm curious as to the veracity of this fact.

Answer 1

The 95 theses was posted on 31th October 1517 only . As per the following wikipedia websites it was posted onthe door of the Castle church in German on that date. - read.

Luther is said to have posted the 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, on October 31st, 1517. Some scholars have questioned the accuracy of this account, noting that no contemporaneous evidence exists for it. Others have countered that no such evidence is necessary, because this action was the customary way of advertising an event on a university campus of Luther's day. Church doors functioned very much as bulletin boards function on a twenty-first century college campus. Still others suggest the posting may well have happened sometime in November 1517. Most agree that, at the very least, Luther mailed the theses to the Archbishop of Mainz, the pope, friends and other universities on that date.Regardless, the Theses were soon printed and had been widely read in Europe by 1518.

Answer 2

October 31, 1517: Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg with hammer strokes which echoed throughout all of Europe. This act has been portrayed numerous times thoughout the centuries, and until the 21st century it was accepted as fact. It has become a symbol of the Reformation as nothing else has.

It was like a slap in the face when the catholic Luther researcher, Erwin Iserloh, asserted in 1961 that the nailing of the theses to the door of the Castle Church belonged to the realm of legends.

The facts are convincing, the first written account of the event comes from Philipp Melanchthon who could not have been an eye-witness to the event since he was not called to Wittenberg University as a professor until 1518.

Also, this account appeared for the first time after Luther's death and he never commented on 'nailing anything up' in 1517.

Announcements of upcoming disputes were supposedly regularly hung on the door of the Castle Church. But, openly hanging the theses without waiting for a reaction from the Bishops could have been seen as a clear provocation of his superiors. Luther would not have done that because he only wanted to clear up some misunderstandings.

It is also worth noting, that there was no open discussion of the theses in Wittenberg and that no original printing of the theses could be found.

One thing is sure: Luther wrote a letter to his superiors on October 31, 1517 in which he denounced the sale of indulgence and asked for repayment and removal of the misunderstandings. With the letter he included 95 theses which were to be the basis for a discussion on the topic.

Today, the majority of Luther researchers see it as fact, that Luther did not nail his theses to the door of the Castle Church on that day. But the picture of Luther nailing the theses to the door of the church is still today the most common in regards to Luther, the reformation and Lutherstadt Wittenberg.

Answer 3

with a degree specializing in Reformation History, I like to say that Martin Luther is one of my favorite people in history. His 95 Theses are misunderstood by most people and what he planned to do with them is also misunderstood.

What he tacked on the Church door was a list of talking point, things to discuss in daily meetings that were held in that church, they were not meant to drive the Catholic Church asunder.

To discuss Luther's actions, one has to be familiar with Erasmus, a very popular and influential writer of the same period. Erasmus wrote criticism of the Catholic Church that were both very funny and and very correct. His intention was, as was Luther's, to reform Catholicism from within. Luther was unable to stay in the Church, having been kicked out, but Erasmus remained a Catholic.

Luther was just one of many reformers of the period, you have both John Calvin and Huldrych Zwingli with important movements, but there were not the other ones. The reformation actually started years prior, even allowing you to see Dante as a reformer some 250-300 years prior.

Reformation is an all encompassing term, it does not apply only to religion, it applies to governements in England. Spain went through a political reformation where in most of the provinces of Spain were brought together into one country, and the same thing happened in France at about the same time. England did not go through its reformation until the time of Henry VIII

Answer 4

On October 31, 1517, Luther wrote to Albert, Archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg, protesting the sale of indulgences. He enclosed in his letter a replica of his "Disputation of Martin Luther on the skill and Efficacy of Indulgences," which got here to be widely used widely used because the 95 Theses. Hans Hillerbrand writes that Luther had no purpose of confronting the church, yet stated his disputation as a scholarly objection to church practises, and the tone of the writing is hence "searching, incredibly than doctrinaire." Hillerbrand writes that there is though an undercurrent of mission in multiple of the theses, extremely in Thesis 86, which asks: "Why does no longer the pope, whose wealth as we talk is larger than the wealth of the richest Crassus, construct the basilica of St. Peter including his personal money incredibly than with the money of damaging believers?" the church is contained in the city of wittenburg

Answer 5

Does it matter? It's the effect of his actions that count. He was merely making a statement about the Catholic church at the time but the Catholic church got their panties in a wad and excommunicated him.