Top 11 Martin Luther Facts!

Introducing a new series: Creative Facts!

1. Prior to Luther’s trials against the Catholic church, a man named Johan Hus leveled similar complaints against the church. He did not have the same political connections Luther did, and therefore was burned at the stake.
2. Luther’s primary concern was with the Pope’s amount of power and the burgeoning business of selling indulgences, promising to shorten the amount of time spent in purgatory.
3. Luther claimed to fart toward the devil and thus “chase him away.”
4. In one notebook discovered after his death, Luther drew a picture of the Pope being peeled and eaten by a giant banana.
5. Martin Luther never blinked, for it was, according to him, “odious to even conceive of shutting my eyes during wakeful hours on the wonderful creation granted us by the overflow of the love of the Trinity.”
6. Luther kept a collection of his own hair clippings stuffed into his mattress. This wasn’t known until after his death in 1546, when his wife Katharina was moving some things around and saw some hairs under the bedding. What’s this? she thought to herself, lifting the edge of the mattress. She swept the hairs away but noticed that they were just replaced by more hairs falling from the seam. She realized her late husband had stuffed decades of his antisemitic locks into the pad, and she cherished them as a keepsake of her former lover.
7. As a boy, young Martin was the first human to conceive of the idea of a bicycle. Doodles were discovered in his notebooks of a four-wheeled mechanism with a bench in the middle. His design had the hands powering the front two wheels and the legs powering the rear. The operator would lie on his stomach in a prone position and make a swimming motion to power the vehicle. Beneath the illustration, in Luther’s hand in German, he wrote, “Cursed be he who dares to swim upon dry land like a filthy and accursed four-armed fish. Should this structure come into being, it will be a blight upon mankind and spittle on the face of God himself.” Because of this caption, bicycles would not come to be invented for another 300 years when Protestants realized it was not, in fact, orthopractical heresy to pedal a bicycle.
8. After being accused of heresy, Luther was protected in the Wartburg castle under the protective hand of Prince Frederick III for over a year until some of his controversy died down.
9. While in protective custody in the castle, Luther began to engage in daily meditation. According to his diary entries, he began to commune with an alien race known as “Die Zeitflauchers” who initially appeared to his as various speaking fruits and vegetables. They walked on legs made of raw poultry and confirmed his suspicions of the misdeeds of the Catholic church. According to an unconfirmed rumor, Phil Vischer read these diary entries prior to conceiving his acclaimed children’s program Veggie Tales, however, the poultry appendages were removed and the anthropomorphized produce hopped instead.
10. Martin Luther never slept more than 20 minutes at a time for fear of slipping into a Zoroastrian conception of the afterlife known as the River of Dreams, in which inductees are held underwater by large animated undergarments chanting the names of various types of tree.
11. Luther’s 95 theses spread throughout all of Europe within 2 months of publication thanks to the recent invention of the printing press, making them perhaps the first “viral” piece of media in history.

Come back next week for the top Jonathan Edwards Facts!