Martin Luther
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Martin Luther (November 10, 1483 - February 18, 1546) was a Catholic priest and Augustinian monk who questioned certain policies and points of theology of the Roman Catholic Church of his time.
At the age of eighteen in 1501 he entered the University of Erfurt. In 1507 he was ordained to the priesthood. In 1508 he began teaching philosophy at the University of Wittenberg. He continued his theological studies. In 1517, he published a document known as the 95 Theses. This event is usually taken to mark the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, which split from the Catholic church in the largest division of western Christianity. Luther would only later realize that he was forming a new branch of Christianity.
The 95 Theses
Although many believe that Luther nailed these theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg, this notion has recently been criticized. In the 95 Theses, he objected to many policies and doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. Luther's action was in great part a response to the selling of indulgences by Johann Tetzel, a Dominican priest. Luther's charges directly challenged the position of the clergy as regards to individual salvation.
Heresy and Excommunication
From the viewpoint of the Church, Luther's views were at least schismatic, and possibly heretical. Consequently Luther was called to defend his theses at the Diet of Worms in 1521. Johann Eck would claim that he had forced Luther to admit the similarity between Luther's doctrine and that of John Huss, who had been burned at the stake. On January 3, 1521 Pope Leo X excommunicated Martin Luther.
Immediately after leaving the Diet Luther was pronounced a heretic and an outlaw. But Luther had powerful friends among the princes of Germany, one of whom was his own prince, Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony. The prince arranged for Luther to be seized on his way from the Diet by a company of masked horsemen, who carried him to the castle of the Wartburg, where he was kept about a year. During this period of forced retirement from the world, Luther was hard at work upon his celebrated translation of the Bible.
The Peasants' War
The Peasants' War (1524-1525) Before quite a year had passed, Luther was called from the Wartburg by the troubles caused by a new sect that had appeared, known as the Anabaptists, whose excesses were casting great discredit upon the whole reform movement.
Luther translated the New Testament into German. He used the recent critical Greek edition of Erasmus, a text which was later called textus receptus. The translation was published in 1521.
The translation of the Old Testament followed in 1534. He chose to omit parts of the Old Testament that were found in the Greek Septuagint but not in the Hebrew Masoretic texts then available. Those parts were eventually omitted by nearly all Protestants, and are known in Protestant circles as the Apocrypha. See Biblical canon.
Today most Protestant denominations follow ideas based in Luther's teachings, and the Lutheran Church in particular is directly descended from his work.
Martin Luther and the Jewish people
Luther initially preached tolerance towards the Jewish people, convinced that the reason they had never converted to Christianity was that they were discriminated against. However, after his overtures to Jews failed to convince Jewish people to adopt Christianity, he began preaching that the Jews were inherently evil, and that they should be destroyed. Luther called the Jewish people "venomous beasts, vipers, disgusting scum, canders, devils incarnate. Their private houses must be destroyed and devastated, they could be lodged in stables. Let the magistrates burn their synagogues and let whatever escapes be covered with sand and mud. Let them force to work, and if this avails nothing, we will be compelled to expel them like dogs in order not to expose ourselves to incurring divine wrath and eternal damnation from the Jews and their lies." (Source: Martin Luther, Tischreden (Table Talk) )
In recent years the Lutheran Church has apologized for, and officially renounced, Luther's antisemitism, which they conceded was one of the reasons that the Holocaust was possible in a largely Lutheran nation. In 1994, the Church Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America publicly rejected the parts of Luther's writings that advocated government action against practitioners of Judaism.
See also: Christian antisemitism