Did Luther Really Nail His 95 Theses to a Church Door?

Martin Luther almost certainly wrote his 95 Theses against the sale of indulgences in 1517, but nobody who was in Wittenberg that autumn ever described him hammering them to the door of the Castle Church. The oldest written mention of a posting dates from around 1540, more than two decades later, and its author was not there.

What is firmly documented is a letter. On 31 October 1517 Luther wrote to Albrecht, Archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg, protesting the way indulgences were being preached in his territory, and he enclosed his theses. The original letter still exists and has been kept in the Swedish National Archives in Stockholm since 1604. An English translation is on Wikisource.

The famous hammer scene comes mainly from Philip Melanchthon, Luther's close colleague, who described the posting in a preface to Luther's collected Latin writings published in 1546, shortly after Luther's death. Melanchthon only arrived in Wittenberg in 1518, so he was repeating what he had heard, not what he had seen.

In 1961 the Catholic church historian Erwin Iserloh went further and argued that the posting never happened at all. His case, later published as Luthers Thesenanschlag: Tatsache oder Legende?, leaned on Luther's own words. Writing to Pope Leo X in May 1518, Luther said he had first warned church leaders privately and only issued his disputation sheet after they ignored him. A public notice on the very day he mailed the archbishop fits awkwardly with that account, and the reformation historian Martin Brecht suggested that any posting would more likely have happened in November 1517.

Then, in 2006, Martin Treu of the Luther Memorials Foundation spotted a forgotten handwritten line in a 1540 New Testament held by the university library in Jena. Luther's secretary Georg Rörer had noted, in Latin, that on the eve of All Saints in 1517 Luther's theses on indulgences were posted on the doors of Wittenberg's churches. Der Spiegel reported the find as new evidence, since the note was written while Luther was still alive.

Even so, historians such as Volker Leppin of the University of Jena cautioned that Rörer was a student in Leipzig in 1517 and only reached Wittenberg in 1522. The note is early, but it is not an eyewitness account. It does match a mundane detail: university rules in Wittenberg required notices of academic disputations to be displayed on church doors, so a posting would have been routine paperwork rather than a dramatic act of defiance.

What spread Luther's ideas was not a door but the printing press. No Wittenberg first print has ever been identified, yet handwritten copies circulated, and by the end of 1517 printers in Nuremberg and Leipzig had produced editions from them.

The door that tourists photograph today is not the original either. The wooden door was lost when the Castle Church burned in 1760, during the Seven Years' War. In 1858 the Prussian king Frederick William IV donated the bronze door now in place, with the Latin text of the 95 Theses cast into its panels.

Sources: Schlosskirche Wittenberg, Thesentür; Der Spiegel (2007); Spektrum der Wissenschaft; Volker Leppin, University of Tübingen repository; Erwin Iserloh (1962); Evangelische Zeitung. Cover: The bronze Theses Door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.jpg).