The Ninety-Five Theses
Ninety-five propositions on indulgences that Martin Luther, a friar and professor at Wittenberg, put forward for academic debate in the autumn of 1517. Their rapid circulation in print is the usual starting point for the history of the Reformation.
Read the text at projectwittenberg.org ↗Latin text from the Weimar edition (Project Wittenberg) ↗
The full title is Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences. The theses are written in Latin in the form used for a university disputation: a list of statements that the author offers to defend. Luther sent them on 31 October 1517 to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz with a letter that survives. That he also posted them on the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg was first stated in print by Philip Melanchthon in 1546, after Luther’s death; Melanchthon was not in Wittenberg in 1517, and historians disagree about whether the posting happened. By the end of 1517 the theses had been printed in several cities.
The text is Luther’s own and shows what he held at that moment. It questions what indulgences can do and how they were being preached; it does not reject the papacy or purgatory, and later Lutheran teaching should not be read back into it. The opening thesis, that the whole life of believers should be repentance, sets the theme.
Cited in
- 31 October 1517, firm date