Martin Luther was born in 1483 in Eisleben, in the Holy Roman Empire, the son of a copper miner who harbored ambitions for his son's legal career. A thunderstorm near Stotternheim in 1505, which Luther later described as a moment of mortal terror, caused him to vow entry into an Augustinian monastery instead. He was ordained a priest, pursued advanced theological study, and eventually joined the faculty at the newly founded University of Wittenberg, where he lectured on the Psalms and the Pauline epistles.
It was that close engagement with Paul's letter to the Romans that unsettled Luther's understanding of salvation. The medieval penitential system, and in particular the sale of indulgences promoted by Johann Tetzel, struck him as a corruption of the gospel's promise that the righteous shall live by faith. In October 1517 he composed his Ninety-Five Theses, a Latin disputation intended for academic debate, which circulated far beyond university walls through the new technology of the printing press. His subsequent refusal to recant before the Diet of Worms in 1521 — "Here I stand," in the famous summary, though the precise words are disputed — set him irrevocably outside the Roman Church.
During his protective confinement at Wartburg Castle, Luther translated the New Testament into German in roughly eleven weeks, drawing on the spoken language of common people rather than regional dialects. The completed Bible, finished with collaborators in 1534, did as much to standardize written German as it did to place scripture in ordinary hands. His hymns, catechisms, and voluminous correspondence shaped Lutheran piety for generations, even as his later writings against Jews and peasants reveal a figure capable of serious moral failure alongside genuine spiritual insight.
Luther died in 1546 in the same town where he had been born, leaving behind a fractured Western church and a tradition of vernacular Christianity that permanently altered how millions of people read, pray, and worship.