Martin Luther Quotes

“Unlike other reformers, Luther rarely claimed divine inspiration for his ideas. It is interesting too that he uses the word Kunst—art—for it suggests that the insight, like the skill of a craftsman or artist, opened up a whole new ability to accomplish things in a different way.”
― Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet

“The Gotha sermon takes us closer than any other testimony to the religious despair and overwhelming sinfulness that Luther felt as a monk. And it was at this point that he had begun to study Paul’s Letter to the Romans, an intellectual and devotional exercise that would transform his spirituality.”
― Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet

“Luther describes how backbiters are like hyenas or dogs who dig up stinking human corpses, pullulating with decay and full of worms, and bite into them—“Ugh, what a dreadful monster the backbiter is!”
― Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet

“Luther claims. Having lost their status as the chosen people and therefore no longer truly “Jews,” the Jews are “even changed into another people altogether, with nothing [of the original] left but a lazy remnant” of foreign rascals or gypsies”
― Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet

“Luther’s views were not a medieval relic but a development of it. Even more disturbing, it was not incidental to his theology, a lamentable prejudice taken over from contemporary attitudes. Rather, it was integral to his thought; his insistence that the true Christians—that is, the evangelicals—had become the chosen people and had displaced the Jews would become fundamental to Protestant identity.”
― Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet

“When Judas Schariot hanged himself, so that his guts ripped, and as happens to those who are hanged, his bladder burst, then the Jews had their golden cans and silver bowls ready, to catch the Judas piss (as one calls it) with the other relics, and afterwards together they ate the shit and drank, from which they got such sharp sight that they are able to see such complex glosses in Scripture.”38”
― Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet

“Luther argued that the Jews were a people who had been punished by God for 1,500 years, since the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, because they did not recognize Jesus as the Messiah.”
― Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet

“He ordered them to “read how you treated your King David and all pious kings, yes, the holy prophets and people, and don’t treat us heathens as dogs,” positioning the Jews as the enemies of the Old Testament heroes and repeatedly invoking Jesus as the Messiah who had been crucified by the Jews.”
― Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet

“However, the last passages of the tract of 1523 made it clear that toleration of the Jews was dependent ultimately on the dissolution of Jewry: “If the Jews should take offense because we confess our Jesus to be a man, and yet true God, we will deal forcefully with that from Scripture in due time. But this is too harsh for a beginning. Let them first be suckled with milk, and begin by recognizing this man Jesus as the true Messiah; after that they may drink wine, and learn also that he is true God.”21”
― Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet

“Men have broad shoulders and narrow hips, and accordingly they possess intelligence. Women have narrow shoulders and broad hips. Women ought to stay at home; the way they were created indicates this, for they have broad hips and a wide fundament to sit upon.”
― Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet