This month marks a monumental anniversary. Five hundred years ago this month Martin Luther did something so radical that its effects are felt all over the world—no exaggeration—to this very day. He started his most revolutionary work, the one that above all else was the most dangerous, unleashing on the world a fire of ideas that still grows and burns out of control. In May 1521 Martin Luther sat down to translate the New Testament into his mother tongue, German. …
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Next month marks the 499th anniversary of what is typically called the dawn of the Protestant Reformation. On October 31st, 1517 Martin Luther pinned 95 theses to the Wittenberg castle-church door in the hopes of engaging other ecclesiastics in theological debate. The theses were originally written in Latin, the theological lingua franca of the day. His zealous students, however, seeing the value of a wider circulation, took the theses down, translated them into German—the local lingua vulgaris of the day—and rushed them off to this new thing called the “printing press.” From there many copies could be made and disseminated, eventually, all over Europe. ...
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