Martin Luther and Johannes Gutenberg

Ninety-five errors are what Martin Luther found in the doctrine of the Catholic church, or THE church at the time. He boldly put this list on the door of the church in Wittenburg. In consequence of this and other reasons related, the Diet of Worms (pronounced “Verms”) was held in 1521 for Luther to renounce or reaffirm his views and writings. Luther is said to have declared, “Here I stand, I can do no other,” before concluding with “God help me. Amen.”

Yesterday, my family and I went to view this Cathedral and talk about this event. We listened to his speech and his prayer the night before on the way to the cathedral. We discussed how his actions opened the door for other churches, including ours to one day be formed. It was a wonderful experience.

Here is a video of this speech:

I really like the movie Luther too.

About half an hour from Worms, Germany is the city of Mainz (pronounced Mine-tz). This city is home of Johannes Gutenberg, the man who invented the printing press to print the Bible. We visited the museum there and during the live demo (thank goodness the man spoke English too) Ben was called up to press a Bible page.

We have Bibles and books printed in our homes today because of Gutenberg. He was inspired by the winepresses of his day. It was a tedious job to write a book and before Gutenberg all the Bibles were hand written and hand illustrated.

Some neat facts we learned:

Before Gutenberg it took 3 years to hand copy the Bible.
Gutenberg only printed 150 Bibles.
Of those only 48 remain. 4 were in the museum that we saw. 10 in America, 1 in Japan, and the rest throughout Europe.
The paper that he printed on came from Italy.
It took 1 day to make one page.
The Bibles he printed were 1,286 pages.
It took 1,286 days to print one Bible.
The Bibles would then go to artist to hand paint designs on the pages.
Because of Martin Luther and his translation of the Bible from Latin to German, the people could read the Bible on their own and in their own homes. Without his invention, the Protestant Reformation would not have been possible.

The Gutenberg Printing Press