The Eric Metaxas Show - Eric Talks Martin Luther (Encore continued)

Episode Date: November 2, 2022

The Martin Luther edition of a Fun Facts Fridays encore continues with a look at a 16th century treasure trove of relics that would make Robert Ripley blush. (Encore Presentation)

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mataxis show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metaxos. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments.com. The Texas show with your host, Eric Metaxis. Hey, folks, welcome to the program. We've got a special treat for you today. As you know, yesterday was Reformation Day. And Albin and I thought that we would play the conversation we had when my Luther book came out a couple of years ago. I have been rereading the book. I'm really excited about some of the stuff that's in it,

and we thought we'd play that for you today. Also want to remind you, go to SalemNow.com. No vacancies is there. Border Battle is there. Salem now.com. Okay, now stay tuned for my interview with Albin or Albin's interview with me. Okay, so it's the Eric Mataxis show, folks, and we're doing a very special fun facts Friday.

Excuse me. The official instrument of Fun Facts Friday. We're doing a special Fun Facts Friday. If you listen to this show most days, we talk about a lot of serious issues. But on Fun Facts Friday, we have fun because it's Friday, and we like to share a lot of facts so you can learn a lot of things. But it was Albin's idea, not my idea, I promise you, to do a special Fun Facts Friday around my Luther book because Albin, and this means a lot to me, Albin, that you appreciate the weird quirkiness of the book. How come I not?

Oh, my goodness. Well, look, when I write this stuff, I appreciate it. It cracks me up, and I find it very interesting and entertaining. But you never know who out there. I mean, I'm sure there are some seminary students who are just rolling their eyes and thinking, why is Eric Metaxus dragging us down to this level? It's a really serious subject. Well, you know, after reading Bonhofer, and this, of course, was years and years ago,

I'm picking up Martin Luther thinking it's going to be serious. Bonhofer, but Bonhofer was in the age of the Nazis and the war. Yes. It was much less funny and interesting than the story of Luther. But there's a lot of weird interesting stuff in the story of Luther. And you, it was your idea that we should do a fun fact Friday. Yeah, and I labeled it the quirky life and times of Martin Luther because they certainly were. That, well, that's, yeah, that's the unofficial title of the Fun Facts Friday we're doing today. Although I've got to point out, this is our two of Fun Facts Friday special Martin Luther edition because we barely scratched the surface of the weird quirky fun fact. We were just going to do one hour.

And again, I have not even read the entire book yet. I'm about 125 pages in. I still have three fourths of the book to go. And just all this weird quirky stuff has jumped out. And I said, we've got to talk about it. And we're just scratching the surface, really. But it does thrill me that you have seen the quirkiness that you've appreciated. that you've appreciated it because I really

it just totally entertained me as I was writing the book. There's lots of, you know, goofy stuff. So what should we focus on today? Well, one thing to just wet people's appetite here, and I did want to ask you something because I know that you've been out on tour for several

weeks now and you've done, you know, dozens and dozens of interviews either on the phone, on radio and person. And by the way, today's interview, of course, it's kind of like a interview, right? It's so different from any of them because it is the kind of the quirky side of it. Well, I that's exactly right. I've done a lot of radio

interviews and some TV and nobody's asking me about this stuff. Right. Except for you, Alvin Seder. But I figured in all this time something unusual, let's put it that way, must have happened on the road to you. Well, a number of unusual things happen. One of the, one of the few

things, I can share two things with you. First of all, at an event in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a woman came up to me and she said she's so thrilled by my love for the Partridge family. She listens to this program all the time. I wish I could remember her name because this incredibly sweet woman gave me an envelope. Sometimes people give me an envelope with a note or something like that.

Well, I get back to my hotel room. I open up the envelope. Now there's no name or anything on it. It's just this really sweet woman who loved the Partridge family. So I assume she's around my age. And she hands me this envelope. when I get to the hotel, I'm I open it up, what is it? It is a bunch of Partridge family

plit cards, which they would issue when the Partridge family was on TV. I think I may have had some when I was a kid. Actually, no, I had Kung Fu cards with David Garrity. I had Gilligan Island cards. So, well, so this woman gives me these beautiful cards, and I almost wanted to say, you can't give this to me. This is so wonderful.

So I wanted to give it back to her because I thought this is too much. But I can't find her. And I just want to say, if she's listening, which maybe she is, that was such a gift. It just really touched my heart. And I'm thrilled. And I said, I've got to mention this on the year. I can't even believe that somebody would be so kind as to do that.

So thank you. And but that kind of stuff happens to me on the road. And it really is. And you said there was another thing, too. Yes. The other thing, I kind of touched on this the other day, but I didn't go into detail. The title of this is, the beginning. Beagles of John Smirak.

Ladies and gentlemen, I told you that John Smirak, he was on this program because, you know, I'm in Dallas. I was in Dallas earlier this week, but listen, John Smirak's Beagles, I got to visit the Beagles at his apartment. Anybody who listens to this program knows that one of our favorite guests is John Zemirac. And John Smirik has two Beagle puppies that I got to meet. They're named Finnegan and Rain. I think he said this on the year the other day. are so entertaining and delightful that we were watching something on TV at his apartment here in Dallas. The dogs crawl over you.

You're trying to watch TV and they're crawling and fighting on top of you, on top of me. It was they're the most entertaining, sweet little creatures. And I said, I've got to tell the audience I got to wrangle with, you know, to wrestle and wrangle with the beagles of the great John's Merrick. Really, really terrific. You had your own WWE going on there. Precisely. You took words right out of my mouth. There you go.

Now, yes. I guess, yeah. Well, I wanted to get people, give him a little taste because we're going to be going to a commercial break here shortly. But when, now this is from your book, of course, in the Bible. And it's not mentioned in the Bible, but before St. John went to Patmos, where he was exiled, right, as an apostle, apparently they cut off all his hair. Oh, wait a second. Wait, you jumped into that too quickly. in in one of the things in the luther book which i found very entertaining and i was excited to write about it was the issue of relics yes in the in the middle ages relics were a big thing in relics we simply mean that somebody would say this is you know the finger bone from st thomas or this is this is a tooth or something this is a tooth from st jerome and these things were were very highly regarded

as this is the, these are the, this is the body of the mortal remains of one of the holy saints, you know. And so, so the problem, of course, is that any time something like this excites people, there is corruption and fraud. And so people would traffic in relics, and it seems like every time you turn around, somebody would say, this is a piece of the true cross. And you'd say, well, I think Erasmus, who was a very faithful, Catholic, like of course, but he said that if all of the pieces of the true cross were assembled, I don't remember the joke, but he basically said that, you know, it would be the size of Noah's Ark or something crazy like that.

It would fill a freighter or whatever he said. But the point is that there was a lot of this abuse, but people loved relics. And Frederick the Wise, who is a very prominent figure in the book, because he's the one that really protects Luther from death. It really appears that he's part of the, Part of the big story is this incredible man named Frederick the Wise. But Frederick the Wise was a notorious collector of relics. And he had a collection in Wittenberg that eventually included 19,000 objects.

And I list some of them in the book because I find them so entertaining. Yeah, we'll get into that. Okay. So you were mentioning one of them has to do with St. John. Now, we know that John the Apostle is exiled a Potmos, where he writes Revelation, and he lived to be a great age. But at some point, it was said that tradition tells us that he went to Rome and that the Emperor Diocletian wanted to humiliate him and cut off all his hair, which was a way that you would humiliate a man whose hair was long, a holy man. And for some reason, that was what they wanted to do to John. So take it away, Alvin.

Okay. So here, and I'm going to read this from the book. So what happened, if any of the pilgrims to Rome doubted this, behold, here were the very scissors that snip, snap, snip, had done the fabled barbering. So they had the scissors that cut off the head. Here were the very scissors snip, snap, snip. That's right. That's written in the book. The fabled barboring.

You could see that I fall in love with these funny words. Okay, folks, we're just going to, we're going to play a little Abba, and then, and then we're going to come back with more fun facts Friday on the Ericma Texas show. In case you haven't been paying attention, the Biden administration has caused a financial crisis and they have no clue how to fix it. Oil prices have skyrocketed, and when oil prices go up, the cost of transportation and shipping spikes, leading the prices of goods to rise. And when we're already seeing record inflation, that's the last thing we need. economy is in trouble and you need to take steps to protect yourself. If all your money is tied up in stocks, bonds, and traditional markets, you are vulnerable. Gold is one of the best ways to protect your retirement. No matter what happens, you own your gold. It is real, it is physical, it's always

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Just one more beer, and I don't hear. Hey there, folks. It's the Eric and Taxer Show. Fun Facts Friday edition. Can't get enough of Elton John. No. I would rather just listen to that. But unfortunately, I have to talk now.

I apologize. I do have to mention one thing about the scissors. And I don't know when scissors. Wait, wait, wait, wait. What scissors out there? Oh, right before the commercial. Okay, we were talking about the scissors that supposedly cut off all the hair of St. John to humiliate him, right, before he went to the...

The emperor Diocletian wanted to humiliate the great holy man who was standing against the Roman Empire, John, the Apostle. And so he had all his hair cut off. And yes, in the Middle Ages, they claimed to have the very scissors. And I thought, that seems anachronistic, doesn't it? Did they really have scissors back in 30 or 90 B? Well, this is what's so funny. AD. It's so funny because I actually don't know the answer to that question, but a lot of this stuff is just hilarious.

I mean, even if they had scissors, can you imagine that these are the very scissors that did the job? Like somebody said, hey, emperor, can I get those scissors? I think they may be valuable someday. There's a lot of that stuff in when I mentioned the relics that it's hilarious. I mean, the funniest thing that I read, and of course I put all the funny stuff in the book, is that they claimed to have a pinch of the very soil from Eden that was used. used to create atom. Now, let me point out the logical fallacy here, okay?

Because here's a pinch of soil. Okay, first of all, somebody says, oh, it's from Eden, and this is the very, very soil which was used to create atom. Okay. Obviously, if this is the soil that we used to create atom, it would have become part of atom. It would no longer be soil. So why is it considered the soil?

Okay, that's number one. Number two, did Adam and Eve carry the soil with them out of Eden and give it to their son and say, hey, son, I want to give you something valuable. It's going to be valuable someday. It's the soil that was used to create Papa. And this is what God used. And I want you to hang on to it and pass it down through the generation so that thousands of years from now it will be in Germany. Yeah. And somebody can say this is the soil.

And Adam and Eve were walking around naked. Where were the pockets, you know, to put the sun? So I win while they were walking around. Where, where indeed, for the pockets, in which to carry the soil. But there's a lot of this kind of stuff that is, it is hilarious. That there are, again, this is all in the book, and I hope people will read it for themselves because you can't even believe this. The soil is one of the craziest things. But there's other stuff that says that there's bread.

Yes, I had marked that specifically. There you go. Go ahead. Yeah. If it was desiccated food. Now, think about this. They've eaten the food at the last supper, but somehow there's some left over, right? So there was preserved a piece of the very bread served at the last supper in the upper room 15 centuries earlier,

as well as a vial containing drops of, this is really, this is incredible, drops of milk from the breast of the Virgin Mary. Okay, this is not a joke. In the 500 years ago, Luther, in his time, people claimed to have these relics. Now, we can laugh now because it seems absurd that how do you get breast milk from the Virgin Mary? And if you do get it, you're going to preserve it like what? In a Pyrex beaker, in a test tube. That's right. This is the year zero.

Where are you going to put the breast milk? It's just the weirdest stuff. It's so. But my favorite of all, Eric, and it comes at the end of this paragraph that you have. And again, this is under the title of Frederick the Wise is Relics. Okay. It might as well be called, you know, Ripley's Believe it or not, or Frederick's believe it or not, relics. It's kind of like the Ripley's Museum.

It really is. But this one, this one I really love. It's the very feather of an angel. Okay? They have a feather of an angel that they've collected. Now, they don't say which angel. don't know if it's Michael or Gabriel or, right? But an angel, somehow, they've got a feather. There's a feather. Yeah, here it is. And if you don't believe in angels, look, here's a feather right here.

Hey, hey, here it is. But there's a lot of this kind of stuff, and I had to put it in the book because, first of all, I find it, of course, very entertaining and it's perfect for Fun Facts Friday, but also because it gives you a flavor of the era. In that era, people were very gullible with regard to faith, and you can see how the church, which was very powerful, was able to hold sway over people, because they themselves, they weren't told, hey, you should question this. They were told you should never question this. And so people, even like Frederick the Wise, you don't think he spent millions of dollars to get this and he thought these were fakes. No, he himself was convinced that these things were the real McCoy. And what's really great, too, he had a catalog. This is

woodcut illustrations, okay? 124 woodcut illustrations for a catalog for the relics so that a pilgrim could come and he gets the catalog like we do today, like in a museum, and he can walk through and see the relics, see the verifications, and this is this and that's that, right? And this gets into indulgences, which is the whole reason why there is a Martin Luther and a reformation, and we'll have to get into some of the quirkiness about indulgences here today, too. But the whole thing is if you actually see some of these things or experience them or touch them or gaze upon them or pray to them or about them, you will start to get some indulgences. And that's something that can be explained.

This is very important. This is important because I would have forgotten to say this. Thank you. That the reason that Frederick the Wise, one of the reasons he was a big relic collector, was that he would display all these relics in this beautiful new church he made, called the Wittenberg Castle Church on the doors of which Luther nailed his thesis in 1517, exactly 500 years ago. In that church, he would display the relics and people would come to view the relics. And if you viewed the relics, you would earn indulgences. And I think it's probably right there in the book, how many days of purgatory you could escape. Or when Luther went to Rome,

he was able to do X and Y and Z. And by doing these things, you would get a certificate, in a sense, an indulgence certificate that could buy you thousands of years less time. It's actually right. It's 1,902,202 years and 720 days. 270 days, sorry. Okay. So now that's not a joke.

That was actually calculated by the church. Well, he was in competition, too. Well, yes, if you view these relics, you will earn the church can officially dispense this kind of stuff. And this is the grand controversy, really, that led Luther, you know, into the trouble of this questioning this, because he said, wait a second, how does the church have the right to determine these things? And the church was saying, no, no, no, we have the right. We've been given the right by Christ. They call these things, you know, the keys, the fabled keys of the kingdom when St. Peter is given the keys of the kingdom. They had really misinterpreted that to the point where they said, we control these things.

We can tell you exactly how many days less you will spend in purgatory because we have the authority given to us by God. And guess what? They believed it. This was not all fraud. They believed this. So it's fascinating how strange things got. Right. and he was in competition for indulgences too

because people were paying money for indulgences elsewhere, but he was trying to pull them away and attract them to his... It was big money. This is not, this is no joke. This situation that Martin Luther found himself in. It was one of those things he didn't want to be the guy, right? He was a humble, he was a humble monk, and he didn't want to be the guy that brought these things up.

And he did it in a, you know, like surely we can, you know, change the direction of what's going on here in the world that we live in. You can't buy your way into heaven. That's very clear in the Bible. It's the other way around. God is the one that has purchased us for heaven. You've been reading very carefully. You're making me happy because this is the point I'm trying to get across in the book.

And again, this is all true. In other words, this is not my interpretation. I try to be very careful, you know, to put in the book what is very clear. And so you can imagine people like Luther and some of these really intelligent, educated people beginning to question and wonder, is the church right in some of this? In fact, when Luther was in Rome in 1510, he climbs up the Sancta Scala. These are the very stairs upon which Jesus was supposed to have climbed. They'd been transported. All the marble stairs had been transported from Jerusalem to Rome.

They're still there today, and you can see them today. and Luther was told that he can save, you know, somebody in purgatory by climbing up these stairs on his knees and reciting the Paternoster, the Our Father. And the fact of the matter is, when he gets to the end of the climb, he kind of wonders, what, what if this isn't true? I think we're at a time in the segment. Folks, it's fun facts Friday special Martin Luther edition. Thank you for listening. We'll be right back. You've heard and seen the raw uncut truth about the brave men and women, patriots that were wrongfully arrested on January 6th by the terrarians.

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Thank you, and God bless you. Hey there, folks. It's the Eric Metaxus show. It's Fun Facts Friday, special Martin Luther edition. Albin, you're in New York, and I'm in a hotel room someplace in America. But I've got to tell you, this was not my idea to do Fun Facts Friday on Martin Luther. And it thrills me because there's so much quirky stuff in the book and the fact that you appreciated it. So we're sharing the quirky stuff in the Luther book, which I'm not sharing on any of the other interviews.

No, no. It's very serious what you do with the other interviews. That's why people have to, if they missed hour one, they have to catch hour one of this whole. discussion because there's so much fun, good, juicy stuff there. And like I keep mentioning, I haven't even gone through, I've read maybe one-fourth of the book, and there's still like three-quarters of this crazy stuff to go. Who knew that it was loaded with goofy gags? Exactly. You know, Bonhofer, very serious, German, the Nazis and all that. But we have a, and the other thing is this is an age, of course, that we really know very little about, although what Michael

Angel was doing David. He just completed doing the David statue. Yeah, it's an extraordinary thing when you think that Luther, you know, visits Rome, but on the way to Rome, he goes through Florence. And there's no doubt that he saw the just completed David of Michelangelo. Isn't that crazy? It's 17 and a half feet tall. I saw it when I was in Florence in 1984. And I have to say, no. kidding. It took my breath away. I've never experienced this with a work of art. I walked into the room and I gasped because it's so beautiful and so awesome. Luther laid his own eyes on it just as it had been completed. Yeah, before the dust settled, right? Before there was any dust on it. Yeah, so there's a lot of weird and interesting stuff, I think. And then there's some animated clock that had just been completed, that's still there today, you write? That actually this is, this is, this is. This is, this is one of the most amazing things. There's certain things that when you do the research,

you suddenly can't believe what you're reading. There's a clock in, I think it's Monheim. I think you may have the book in front of you. But he's making his journey south from Wittenberg. Right. He's on an 800-mile walking tour as it were. His father confessor, Johannes von Schaup, it says, hey, this kid needs to get out of the house. Why don't you go take a walk, pal? And he sends him on an 800-mile journey, 1,600 miles around trip, obviously, to Rome. And on the way to Rome, Luther passes through Monheim and sees the recently created Frauenkirche, which is the Our Ladies, the Church of Our Lady. And it is, I think, this is from memory, I think it's 530 feet tall.

Yeah, I don't have a page mark in here. I want to say that it was, in Luther's Day, it was the tallest church on planet Earth. And guess what, Albin? What? today, 500 years later, it is still the tallest church on planet Earth. And you have been inside it, have you not? No, I've not visited that. But on the outside of the church, it had this extraordinary medieval clockwork with all of this, you know, like these automatons that come out and shoot ray guns.

No, sorry, with these automaton. It's like very good gold burghast in a way. Yeah. But it's beautiful. It's classic, you know. high middle ages, and they built this clock where when the clock struck 12 or the clock struck any hour, these figures would come out, these huge figures, which of course very, very high up, so they don't look huge when you're on the ground.

But you look up and you hear the bells and it's just this magical thing. And if it's magical to us, can you imagine what this look like to Martin Luther, a humble monk from Wittenberg? It must have been amazing. So there's a lot of cool stuff from the period, and I try to put it. that in the book just to give us a flavor of what it would have been like for Luther at the time. And by the way, you took some lovely pictures, too, that are also in the book, photo credit, the author. So you did some nice work there too as well.

Well, I thank you because you save money as an author. People don't know this, but you have to, you know, you have to pay for photo rights and credits and stuff. And I thought, hey, I'll take my own photos if I can. Save a few. And a couple of times I did. And then I'll take the family out to, you know, Ponderance. Rosa for steak dinner. Yeah, there you go. On the money we saved. Yeah. So now you also have a part of the book where you talk about some of the things that we believe are true about Martin Luther down through the ages, but really are not. I think you had to put a number on it like seven. I think

there ended up being seven things that I, by the way, I identify this right in the preface, in the introduction. So it's not, you don't have to read the whole book. It's right in the beginning. I say that there's seven things that I saw were not true, which is hilarious. And the most colorful one probably everybody talks about how he married a nun named Katie. And when she escaped from the nunnery. Now, people don't know that in those days nuns were held against their will, that she was sent there as a five-year-old. And then you're in your 20s, and you might say, hey, you know, I don't want to be a nun. And they say, well, tough luck, kiddo.

You are a nun. escape under penalty of death. It's like escaping from a prison. And so Luther thought this is not right. If somebody has not made the choice themselves to take a life in holy orders, they should have the freedom to leave. So he actually finds out that these nuns in Nimshin, which is not too far away, that they want to get out. And so he figures out a plan to bust them out of the nunnery. And everybody says that he traveled in a wagon of barrels that had held herrings, smelly fish barrels. They hid in the fish barrels, and you hear this over and over. It's in every single book, and I discovered that is absolutely not true. Never happened. There you go. We'll be right

back. Fun Facts Friday special, Martin Luther Edition. With the overturn of Roe v. Wade, lots of companies are coming out saying they'll pay for employee abortion travel and expenses. Most of you've heard about some of these companies. You've decided to stop shopping or doing business there, but did you know that you most likely own stock in those companies through. your 401k's, IRAs, and other investment accounts. Folks, this is a huge problem, and we need to do something about this to send a message to Wall Street through our investments. You need to go to inspireadvisors.com slash Eric and get a free Inspire Impact report.

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promo code Eric at mypillow.com. Promocode Eric at my pillow.com. A pretty face, another face. Hey there, folks. It is Fun Facts Friday on the Eric Mataxis show. Fun Facts Friday starring Albin SADAR. Oh, can we lower the music? Hey, pal. Hey, pal.

No, I thought it was starring Martin Luther. No, it's starring Albin Seder with the slide whistle. And, of course, Martin Luther, it's a special Fun Facts Friday, Martin Luther edition. Okay. Because there's a lot of fun facts in the Luther. book. I'm glad you picked that up because I keep saying that to me that's one of the fun parts of writing the book. But what else should we talk about? About the stuff that didn't happen? Yeah, some of the stuff that didn't happen. Yeah, I think that's because like you mentioned seven,

although I got to tell you, and you did mention that it's at the beginning of the book you say, there are these seven things. But I'm reading along and of course, I don't know Martin Luther very well at all, but I'm reading something saying like, wait a minute, I thought that was true about him. Oh, that's not true about him. So I think there were more than seven. As you go along, you start to reveal a few other things, of course. Well, it's been said over and over and over that he was a gigantic Three Stooges fan, that he had posters and collectibles from the Three Stooges. That's simply not true.

No, he didn't like Joe Besser, for example. Well, can I tell you nobody like Curly Joe Besser? No, no. Any Stooges fan fumes at the idea of anybody besides the original Curly. Martin Luther did not. He accepted everybody, and that was part of his. Yeah, he was magnanimous. And, of course, Curly Joe Besser also played stinky in the Abbotton Costello TV program.

Now, that I didn't know. Yeah. Okay. And not to be confused with Curly Joe Derrida. That's right. Who was the worst of all the curleys? Yeah, okay. We don't want to say.

Yeah, he was one that when the Three Stooges made movies like, you know, the Three Stooges go to the moon. Yeah. Curly Joe Besser was the original Curly had died by then. Yes. And so, and of course, Shimp was that. out of the picture. Alas, Shimp was out of the picture. He was a different breed of stooge.

You know, it just dawned on, it just dawned on me. Yeah. We're not talking about Martin Luther. Yeah, now let's get back to Martin Luther. I hear the sirens in the background. You would think that's coming from New York City, but no, that's coming from your hotel room.

This is coming from my hotel room. The sirens, hard to believe, are literally inside the room. It's not on the street below here they're in the room, but, all right. Okay, so we're doing fun facts. The untrue facts that we thought were true about Martin Luther, but were not. Maybe you could share at least one more. Oh, yeah.

This is a big one. There was a book written in 1958 by a guy named Eric Erickson, a psychoanalyst, and he wrote a very popular book about Luther, and I read the book, and I hate it, because it was very influential and completely horribly misleading. And so for 50-plus years, people have understood the story of Luther through this fake, trendy lens of mid-20th century psychoanalysis. And I've got to tell you, this, the book is full of such foolishness that I had to quote some of it in my book, just to make fun of it, because it's so ridiculous. But this, but psychoanalysis was so trendy in the 1950s that people thought, oh,

Luther, of course, he had a really cruel father, and this was an Oedipal rebellion against his father. And in the spasm of his edible rebellion against his father, he ended up rebellious. against God and in rebelling against God, he changed the world. Well, guess what, folks? That never happened. Right. It's just good. In fact, in fact, is that siren in the studio in New York? No, no, definitely not. Is it coming from my hotel room again? It's got to be your hotel room. Yeah. Well, I guess they didn't catch the guy. I need to, I need to, I need to call down to the front desk and ask him about, what the heck is this? Okay, but I got to tell you that when I read this part, I died, because

the book is very scatologically oriented and people who've read the book, you know, you recognize that there's a lot of this kind of, there's a lot of scatology and scatological humor in the book. And one of the things is Luther's famous bouts with constipation. And it gets very graphic. It's not for the faint of heart.

It gets extraordinarily dramatic. dramatically graphic, but the author of this terrible book in 1958 called Young Luther, Eric Erickson, he claimed that Luther's constipation had to do with his repression, and I'm not going to go into the details, but you can read the book. But I've got to tell you, it's so absurd. And also the whole thing, in case you know, you're tempted to believe it, the whole thing is premised on. a lie, which is that Luther had a cruel father and a difficult upbringing. The reality, and this is easily provable, and I quote Luther, and I quote, you know, plenty of things to prove this, so this is not my point of view. God forbid this is just my point of view. It's either true or it's not.

Luther's father, Luther loved his father, his father loved his son. There is no doubt that Luther esteemed his father, treasured his father, and he wrote glowingly of how he. how his father had sacrificed for him, and he knew him into his old age. The father, you know, doesn't go out of the picture early on. And so this is completely ridiculous that Luther had some kind of cruel father who wailed the tar out of him every chance he got. And it makes sense. His father wanted him to be a lawyer, right?

And when he didn't become a lawyer and became a monk instead, of course there's going to be some disappointment, shall we say, but it wasn't, you know. Well, the thing is that. that that blew over pretty quickly because two years after that, or not even two years, I think the father comes to the monastery when Luther, you know, does his first mass. And so it's really, but what I'm saying is that nothing makes me more angry when somebody writes a book on history and they make up stuff or they twist the facts. And Eric Erickson did that in his 1958 book, which is so influential. In my book, I try to set the record straight. There's nothing more important than setting history straight.

So I try to do that. Okay, we're going to go to a break, I think. No? Oh, we got a moment. Okay. Yeah, we saw a moment. So we're going to go break. Before we go to the break, I just want to say that Luther's parents, another thing that's not true,

everybody says that Luther was raised by a poor minor. He was a peasant stock, and Luther often would say this over and over and over again. And it's not true. He would say it just kind of as a way to, like, when a politician brags about coming from humble beginnings, Luther was raised in an upper middle class home. His father was a successful businessman in the mining business. And I don't know if the music is too loud for people to hear me because I'm, but I got to tell you, folks, Luther was not raised in a poor home, and they did some archaeology in 2003,

and they determined that his childhood home was, in fact, three times as big as they thought for 400 plus years. So very interesting. We'll be right back. It's Fun Facts Friday. One final segment on Fun Facts Friday, special Martin Luther edition. Tell me quick, ain't love a kick in the head. The sun's going to shine in my life once more. Love's going to live here again.

Things are going to be the way they were before. Life's going to live here again. Life's going to live here. Life's going to live here. Hey there, folks. It's fun facts Friday special Martin Luther edition. This is actually a special 500th anniversary, Martin Luther edition of Fun Facts. Five hundred years in the making. 500 years ago, Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the castle church door in Wittenberg, setting off what we now know is called the Reformation.

But, Albin, you know, in terms of Fun Facts Friday, one of the five. fun facts that I put in my book, which is, it's extraordinary, is that the way that that entire thing has been perceived of him nailing the 95 Theses to the castle door is completely wrong. People picture him as doing this heroic thing as if he's saying to the, to the Pope and to the church, hey, I'm going to, you know, stick my finger in your eye and I'm going to say, I'm going to nail these things here and speak the truth to power and, you know, complete nonsense. I know. You get the, it's like there's a hammer and you hear an echoing effect every time that pounding goes on. He's pounding. He's pounding the message through history and through the ages. And the reality is simple that didn't happen.

What I love is that you put the 95 Csaths in the book. So people can read all 95 of them. And they can tear the pages out and nail them to any place that they want. The bedroom door. You could. Your own church door. Go ahead. Hey, we're not going to stop you. But let me say this. Let me say this. What actually happened 500 years ago is that Luther, as a humble monk, wanted to have a debate with his fellow academics, his fellow theologians, on the subject of indulgences. He wanted to correct what he saw as some wrongs, and he thought that he could help the situation by calling for a debate, but only among his fellow theologians. And so he posts 95 points in Latin. In Latin, right.

on the local bulletin board. So he was tacking this stuff up to the local bulletin board. But guess where was the local bulletin board? It was the castle church door. Right. Of Wittenberg. So people act like he was nailing it on the church door making a statement. People put, you know, if you were missing your cat and you'd say, please help me find smoky or sparky.

And, you know, tear off this phone number and give me a call if you find sparky. Well, the reality is it was just the bulletin board. People posted stuff. In fact, not only did it probably not happen as it's described. I mean, we know it didn't happen in this heroic fashion that is a humble monk just tacking something up to a bulletin board. And in retrospect, it's perceived that way. But not only that, but he may have used paste. He may not have used paste. He may not have used paste. I mean, paste is not that heroic. You said, it could have been like the church janitor. He could have given it to him and said, could you have posted for me. That's absolutely true. He could have given it to the custodian of the church or the sexton, whoever it is. and said, please post this stuff. Anyway, we're just about out of time, but folks, I've got to tell you, the truth of history is more fascinating than the legends. All the legends.

I mean, another one is that everybody says that Luther threw an ink pot at the devil when he was at the Vartburg. Never happened. No. That he, throwing ink of the devil, he was talking about using his ink by writing against the devil, not throwing a literal... I thought he threw a stuffed monkey or something, no? Yeah, people say that, too.

Are we at a time? Well, it's a special 500th anniversary, Fun Facts Friday. We may have to re-air this because this is, it's 500th anniversary special edition. Well, Alvin, thank you for helping me with this. This has been a lot of fun. Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure. And, well, I guess that's the end of the show.