5 Myths about Luther

503 years ago, Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. Since then, numerous lies have been made to discredit him and the Reformation he sparked. Having been around many discussions online, I have found a couple of myths that are constantly repeated by Roman Catholics. It gets annoying after you hear of them enough, so let us examine these claims in this blog post.

Luther started 30,000 denominations

If we were to take the argument at face value, Luther is being blamed for all the groups that broke off from his movement, as well as all the groups that broke off from the groups that broke off from that movement. By that logic, Rome can be blamed for 30,001 ‘schisms’ and more simply because it happened.

Contrary to popular belief, the Reformation was not a monolithic movement that split into sects along the way. While the other reformations influenced and interacted with each other, they were still separate nonetheless and were never a part of each other to have the alleged schisms to begin with.

Luther had a Scat Fetish

This has been repeated ad nauseam in attacking the character of the Reformer. They argue that since Luther writes about faeces a lot in his writings, he somehow has an obsession with poop.

Like the typical German of his day, Luther was coarse in his language. This does not in anyway show that he had a poop fetish in any way. It is not uncommon even today to compare something to excrement. Even the term shitposting is thrown around a lot on the internet and it does not actually involve anyone literally posting pictures of defecation.

Luther broke his monastic vows

It is commonly claimed that Luther broke his vow of celibacy in order to marry a nun. He was actually released from his religious vows by his father confessor, Johann von Staupitz.

Luther called Christ an adulterer

“Christ was an adulterer for the first time with the woman at the well, for it was said, ‘Nobody knows what he’s doing with her’ [John 4:27]. Again [he was an adulterer] with Magdalene, and still again with the adulterous woman in John 8 [:2–11], whom he let off so easily. So the good Christ had to become an adulterer before he died.”

LW 54:154

Luther’s Table Talk, from which the quote is derived, consists of recorded conversations Luther has had with people on the dinner table on various topics. However, because of its nature, many of the recorded quotes are isolated from its original context which will explain why one would find a few questionable quotes here and there.

Hence, to understand what he is more likely to mean from the quote in question, you will need to get a grasp on his overall theology.

Wolfmueller demonstrates in his blog that Luther took the 6th commandment seriously and that adultery is a sin. He also wrote in various works that Christ is ‘entirely without sin’. Hence, the quote in question is to be understood in the context of how our sins are imputed to Christ and that His righteousness is imputed to us. The three women that Luther mentioned were all adulterers and Christ took their sins as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Wolfmueller notes that Luther had made similar comments on Galatians:

And all the prophets saw this, that Christ was to become the greatest thief, murderer, adulterer, robber, desecrator, blasphemer, etc., there has ever been anywhere in the world. He is not acting in His own Person now. Now He is not the Son of God, born of the Virgin. But He is a sinner, who has and bears the sin of Paul, the former blasphemer, persecutor, and assaulter; of Peter, who denied Christ; of David, who was an adulterer and a murderer, and who caused the Gentiles to blaspheme the name of the Lord (Rom. 2:24). In short, He has and bears all the sins of all men in His body—not in the sense that He has committed them but in the sense that He took these sins, committed by us, upon His own body, in order to make satisfaction for them with His own blood.

Martin Luther, On Galatians 3:13 (LW 26:277)

Luther hung himself

Of all the false claims about Luther, I find this to be the most ridiculous. They claim that there was a widespread conspiracy among the Protestants to cover up Luther’s suicide which was why you could not find the alleged quote from anywhere else other than Roman Catholic sources that have every reason to smear his name. Furthermore, the name ‘Ambrosio Kudtfeld’, the alleged witness to the suicide, does not show up anywhere else apart from the polemical pamphlets that claim he committed suicide, which makes it unlikely that such a person even existed to begin with. There is no reason to doubt that Luther died a natural death as documented by his deathbed confessor, Justus Jonas.