The marriage of Christianity to book publishing is a rather natural one. Christians are people of the book and were people of many books. In fact, where the gospel spreads, literacy also spreads with it. Reading and writing were core priorities for Christians even from the very beginning. And while the Greco-Roman world in the age of the New Testament was busy building and populating elaborate temple structures, Christians were gathering in remote places and homes, far more concerned with reading epistles together as an embodied metaphorical temple of God rather than establishing any sort of temple tourism of their own.

What we inherited from those very first Christians is not a list of places to visit, but a collection of precious letters to read. And that is a point well made in Larry Hurtado's new book, "Destroyer of the Gods, Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World." But the story doesn't end there.

Fast forward to the Protestant Reformation and there we find an innovative preacher and monk named Martin Luther, who single-handedly took the printing press from an economically perilous side industry to one of the central economic forces of his day. With the press, Luther was able to first popularize theological works for the laity.

He translated the Bible into the language of the people. He also mastered the art of writing in the vernacular of his day. And he mastered a style of short-form writing that exploded his popularity. In every area, it seems, Luther proved himself to be a publishing pioneer. And that incredible story is now told in an excellent new book by historian Dr.

Andrew Pettigree. I talked with him recently and today our conversation is being released in the Aspester John podcast series. Dr. Pettigree serves as professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where he is the founding director of the St. Andrews Reformation Studies Institute. He is the author of several books, but today we talk about his fascinating book that he wrote entitled, "Brand Luther, How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe, and Started the Protestant Reformation." If such a book sounds exaggerated, it's not.

In fact, one of the things I most appreciate about Dr. Pettigree is his willingness to demythologize Luther when appropriate. Going so far as to suggest instead of the famous 95 Theses being nailed to the castle church door by a hammer in Luther's hand, it was more likely gently stuck to the door with glue, and even possibly at the hands of a university assistant.

So to begin this interview, I asked Dr. Pettigree to explain his radical view of Luther's mythic moment. In fact, I'm taking quite a moderate middle way in suggesting that this was glued up. Because back in the '50s, a historian started a real controversy by suggesting the 95 Theses weren't displayed on the church door of Wittenberg at all.

I'm inclined to reject that, and the reason is that exhibiting Theses on the university notice board, which is exactly what the church door at Wittenberg was at this time, was so routine an operation that it's quite normal that nobody would have stated that they had witnessed this at the time.

So I don't think the fact that no one came forward in 1517 to say, "I saw Luther sticking them up," is all that material. We're also helped by the discovery, relatively recently, of a single surviving copy of his Theses on Scholastic Theology, which he put forward six weeks before the Theses on Indulgences, which completely bombed.

And these were known only from a much later version until this turned up. And that's not unusual. These sorts of fugitive pieces, broad sheets, single sheets printed on one side only, very often don't survive. They survive only in small numbers, and many editions have just simply been lost altogether.

So if Luther's original version of the Ninety-Five Theses has been lost, which I'm pretty certain it has, that's not extraordinary in itself, and I'm pretty sure they were stuck up in this way. And because so many pieces of paper would have been stuck up, pasted on top of each other, the use of a nail would soon have destroyed the door.

So that really is a romantic invention of the 19th century. - Well, yeah, not so ringing or dramatic. We've gotten ahead of ourselves, and it's my fault in this interview. Let's back up, rewind to pre-Reformation Wittenberg, Germany. It seems to be a most unlikely backdrop for the drama that will follow.

Sketch the story for us. I mean, what was the town like early on? How unlikely of a place was it to become the epicenter of cultural transformation and mass media? - Well, life was pretty slow. Wittenberg was a relatively tiny place. It probably had only about 2,000 inhabitants then, and it was regarded, not least by Luther himself, as very much on the fringes of civilization.

It was further north and east than other of the great cities of North Germany, like Erfurt and Leipzig. It was out of the way. It was off the beaten track. And such sophistication as there was, was to be found in these larger places, principally Leipzig, the established university town, and Erfurt, which was a major center of scholarship as well.

So when Luther was invited to go to Wittenberg to have a temporary position as a professor there in their new university, he thought he had really got the short straw. He wasn't at all pleased. And it's looking back on this experience many years later in life that he uses this expression about it being on the very boundaries of civilization.

It was rescued by the fact that Wittenberg was also the capital of a very important principality, that is, electoral Saxony. And its elector, Frederick the Wise, was determined to make something of it. And so he did what princes do. He founded a choir for his chapel. He imported a court painter, and that, of course, would be very significant in Luther's life when that was Lucas Cranach, important in Luther's life.

And he started a big library. And most of all, he started a university, because there was no university on his territory. Leipzig was in the part of Saxony which had been carved up for his cousin. So it was really important for him as one of the most important princes of the German Empire that he should have a university.

And it was this that brought Luther to Wittenberg in the first place. But it was a very modest little place. It was probably no more than two or three streets at this point. The streets weren't even paved. And crucially, Wittenberg didn't really have, like the great cities Augsburg and Nuremberg, an elite.

It didn't really have an elite of merchants who ruled the place. The leading traders of Wittenberg were quite modest people. There were a lot of people working in farming and breweries. So it was fairly agricultural and really not very sophisticated at all. Among other things, you're an expert on the history of European books.

Sketch a little history of Gutenberg's press, his printing press, from 1436 to Luther in 1517. Books existed already. Mostly they were handwritten manuscripts in academic libraries. So books were common and accessible in universities. Prior to Luther, what was the printing press used for during this early era? Well, yes, it's a good thing to start with the reflection that medieval Europe was already full of books, handwritten books, which were often very beautiful and were very flexible.

And this is one of the things about the manuscript. Basically, the owner of a text would pretty much decide the contents. They didn't need to have the whole of a book copied for them. They could have the bits they wanted. They could then put it in a volume with other bits from other books.

So it was a very flexible medium. It also facilitated decoration. So when printing came along, it wasn't immediately obvious to the existing owners of manuscripts that they'd be much better off. The new medium of print, Gutenberg really solved the technical difficulties of printing very, very early. It was a masterpiece of technology, but it proved to be a very difficult sale.

Because here you have, instead of having one copy of a manuscript, which has been desired by the person who brings it into being, you have two or three hundred copies, probably even more, which had now to be sold to people who, until that moment, hadn't even known that they wanted it.

Furthermore, those two or three hundred people might be spread all around Europe. And furthermore, instead of the multicolored object that was their manuscript book, they were being offered something in black and white. In many respects, this represented a step backwards for book culture rather than a step forwards. And it's important to recognize that.

Because the publishers of the first books very often went bankrupt. Gutenberg's the shining example, but it happens over and over again in Europe. Because they now had too many books which they wanted to sell to too few people. So in order for books to survive, in order for print to survive as a technology, they had to find a way to reach new markets.

And this happened in two stages. First of all, it turned out that the ruling powers, the church and the governors of Germany and elsewhere, were print's best friend, because they provided lots of regular work. Furthermore, this was work which was often being done for a single client who would pay for the whole job.

Instead of having these two or three hundred copies for complex Latin text to sell to people all over Europe, the local print's would come in and say, "I need two hundred copies of an ordinance against beggars." And so you print this up for them, his secretary would come and get it, and you'd get paid.

So it was the ideal job for a printer. The church too was a very good client, not least in its sale of indulgences. Because the indulgence sales required enormous amounts of print. Sermons, announcements, copies of the papal bull, and most of all, the indulgence certificates themselves. So one of the ironies of Luther's movement is that he was attacking one of the major sources of income of the print industry.

And he had therefore to be a better bet for them than what he was urging them to discontinue. And this worked. A lot of the people who printed for Luther had in the years before the Reformation, printed for the church and printed indulgences. So what the Reformation does, and why this is critical to the history of printing, is it inculcates the habit of buying books into many people who would not previously have owned books, and certainly not have owned a collection of books.

And Luther managed this by his instinctive sense that it was a way to present theology in German to a wider audience in short texts. And all of these things were new, and together they were a revolutionary cocktail. Incredible. I mean, that's such a fascinating story. And I want to talk about indulgences a little later, but I want to underline this point here because I think we take it for granted.

Luther's use of the printing press brought about the new need to sell books to people who didn't know what was inside of the book. And that meant broadening the market. So what drew new book buyers to Luther's works? That's right at the beginning. And what would have sold the books to these people is the scandal of Luther, the sense that was buzzing around the news world that something very odd was going on in this tiny place in North Germany, and this monk was standing up against the whole church.

I think what attracted people to Luther was, first of all, curiosity. Now, it's also true that for Luther's protest to become a movement, it needed other people to join in. And it was because ministers would stand up in their own pulpits, priests would stand up in their own pulpit and say, "You've heard of this man Martin Luther, and I have to tell you that what he's teaching is right, and his criticisms of the church are justified." The Reformation actually doesn't really establish itself successfully in many places where there isn't a local minister preaching in support of Luther.

So that's where Luther's Latin works are important. He's still a very effective Latin writer, and that is persuading his fellow priests that his criticisms are justified. And then this has a sort of snowball effect. Once their respected local preacher is preaching in this way, people begin to go out, buy Luther's works.

And once they buy one, they buy many. Because one of the things about Luther is he writes an extraordinary number of different original works in this first five years of the Reformation. And these are printed all around Germany in a sort of sequence. First in Wittenberg, then in Leipzig, then in Augsburg and Nuremberg, Basel and Strausberg.

So they ricochet in this way around all of the major printing centers of Germany. Yes, so fascinating. So Luther's books became more than just books. They seem to signify the growing momentum of the man and his movement. Yes, it's an opportunity for inquiring minds to delve deeper. And it also becomes, as people become more convinced of Luther, a way in which people can make a token, if you like, of allegiance.

That people may already have decided, based on what they hear in the pulpit and based on what they hear about Luther, that he was a holy man. And you respect him and you worry about his fate. Maybe you've seen him on one of his great journeys across Germany in the first years of the Reformation.

So you buy a book in order to attach yourself to a party. I've said before, it's almost like buying the program when you go to a major sports event. It's not as if by buying the program you can affect the outcome of what's going to happen. But it is a way of signaling allegiance.

And I think books become in this way badges of identity. Fascinating. All right, so Gutenberg himself, as I understand it, was a devout Roman Catholic. As you mentioned earlier, his printing press was employed by the church to churn out certificates of indulgences. So now take us forward to 1517.

Luther was a preacher in Wittenberg. Now in 1517 or thereabouts, he launches his brand, as you call it, in using the printing press. And in a nutshell, how did Luther pull together his press to support his ambitions from the very rudimentary printing press that was available to him locally?

Well, this is actually quite difficult, and this is one of the major obstacles to the spread of the Reformation. The first press isn't established in Wittenberg until 1502. That's right at the beginning of the university and a full 50 years since printing had been operating in other parts of Germany.

Until that point, any books required in this small place would have been supplied from either Erfurt or from Leipzig. And to be honest, things didn't much change. I think in the first 15 years of the press, this one single press, which goes through several pairs of hands, is turning out fewer than 10 works a year.

Most of these are very small, so it wouldn't even have been fully occupied. The works were of quite a rudimentary quality, and even the professors, if they wanted something done which was more serious, wouldn't use the Wittenberg press to do it. It wasn't very loyal, but it was a mark that academic ambition doesn't always go with local loyalty.

And so when Luther came along, he did use the local printer, Johannes Raugrünnenberg, but it simply wasn't satisfactory. Raugrünnenberg had a single press, he was rather slow, he was rather deliberate, and though he was a faithful supporter of Luther, and Luther was quite faithful to him too, he simply couldn't keep up with the pace of events, and Luther was forced to send books to Leipzig to get them printed.

Now, in the first days of the Reformation, this worked by this sort of ricochet effect I've been describing, that Raugrünnenberg's first editions were reprinted quickly elsewhere, and this was quite an effective way of spreading the word. But Luther realized that he just couldn't stay like this, that he had to have a better source of printing in Wittenberg.

So he actually took the personal initiative of ensuring that a second print shop was established in Wittenberg. He got one of the established Leipzig, one of the most experienced Leipzig printers, to send his son to start a branch office in Wittenberg. And then, with this much better equipped shop, the press at Wittenberg improved enormously.

But perhaps the critical element of this was not the Leipzig shop itself moving to Wittenberg, it was the involvement of the painter Lukas Kranach. Kranach was by this point one of the richest people in Wittenberg. He built a huge workshop factory where he turned out art for the print.

But he also was extremely shrewd financially, and he recognized in printing a big growth area to get into. And this is what creates the brand, because Kranach creates for Wittenberg works beautiful title pages with exquisite Renaissance borders. And into these woodcut frames can then be placed the title with Luther's name, Martin Luther, and below Wittenberg.

And it's this which I think brands Luther's works very effectively. I think I'm more sure of this actually than when I wrote the book, because one of my students has been working on this material here. And he's discovered not only the vast number of books which appeared in this uniform with these wonderful woodcuts, but the number of times that these Wittenberg images were plagiarized by printers outside Wittenberg.

And not only did they recut the woodcuts to give them the appearance of Kranach's work, but they actually put Wittenberg on the title pages as well. So they were appropriating the Wittenberg brand in order to sell books which weren't printed in Wittenberg. I think that must have been very frustrating for Kranach, but it was a mark of just how successful this had been.

Yeah, that's very interesting. Designers have really been important in the history of the Reformation, book printing even from the beginning 500 years ago. And of course, Kranach is most famous for Luther's portraits. And Luther himself was very clearly a master of book aesthetics and design himself. These are big deals for him.

So the popularity of Luther's works generate massive sales that benefit the press and push his further works. Give us a sense of the economics of Luther's publishing momentum. Well, the economics, I think, are that there is some absolute growth in the market in the sense that people spent more to put disposable income on books.

But there's also an extent to which these sums were being redirected to the buying of Luther pamphlets from other purposes, whether it was longer Latin books or indeed indulgence certificates. Because a single page, your certificate of indulgence might actually cost you a very considerable sum. Just before 1517, the German church had introduced a sort of sliding scale, sort of income related tax which you had to pay for your indulgence.

So if you decided that on theological grounds you would no longer supply yourself with indulgence, that left quite a lot of disposable income which could then be redeployed into other sorts of books. So in general terms, the market grows in absolute terms and also shifts from Latin to German.

It's also the case that so many of Luther's texts are very short that you actually can buy quite a lot of texts for the same amount of money that you would want to spend on a single Latin text. So the economics are very much in favor of the Reformation.

And the good thing about these small books is the rate of return. If you publish a 16-page quarto pamphlet, that needs only two pieces of paper printed front and back and then folded. So that's basically two days' work. So within three or four days of getting the text into the shop and getting your compositor to make up the printed pages, you've got something to sell.

And Luther sold so well that you might sell out the whole edition without the need to send it anywhere but where your shop was, whether that was Wittenberg or Augsburg. Compare that to a major Latin text which would have been required perhaps nine months to complete the printing. It would then have to be sent to other major towns in order to sell the entire edition, which means that in order to make back your costs might cost the best part of two years.

And indeed, you might not make back the whole cost because by the time all these larger books have been sold, there were so many other people involved, the carters who carried them along, the booksellers who sold them, the wholesalers who took stock off your hands, the money changers who brought the cash back to you in terms of bills of exchange.

All of this was eroding profit. With Luther's books, because of their local sales and because it was so rapid, you got a very, very rapid rate of return. And that meant that these small print shops in places like Wittenberg were quickly building capital to take on the bigger projects like Luther's translation of the Bible.

Yeah, really important projects to come. And the translation and printing of that Bible is no small footnote in Luther's legacy. But you actually use one of those key short works to date the real beginning of the Protestant Reformation to the spring of 1518 is when you would date it.

And I'm talking about Luther's short book titled The Sermon on Indulgences and Grace. It's a very short book of just 1,500 words. Writing theology for the masses through short form writings was a particular innovation of Luther's, as you say in your book. So for Luther, I mean, how fast could Luther turn out a new book like this one, this 1,500-word one, from writing to printing?

How long did it take? Well, that's a very interesting question. You have to think that he was writing extremely fast because he published, I think, something like 45 original writings in the first three years of the Reformation. Wow. Astonishing achievements. And all of these were very reactive. They were responses to other people.

It's also the case that none of this work reduced his normal duties, his duties in the university, his preaching in town church. And I read a letter recently where Luther's complaining about his work. He was overwhelmed by all this, not least his correspondence because, of course, responding to people personally, he wrote him to say, "I'm very troubled by what you've been saying," or "I'm very enthusiastic about what you've been saying." All of these letters required an individual response.

And then he tells us he's actually teaching the children of Wittenberg their catechisms on a daily basis. So the sheer physical resilience of this man at a time of extreme stress must have been quite remarkable. By about 1530, he was pretty sick. And although he lived until 1546, he was really never in good health again.

I think the first years was just a sort of wild, adrenalized ride, helped by the fact that he was fairly phlegmatic about the outcomes for himself. He didn't really expect to survive this confrontation. No, he did not. And that's an important point in the story. Marshall McLuhan, the late Roman Catholic media ecologist, is less impressed by this whole story.

He once said on the rise of the printing press by Luther, "The church was destroyed or dismembered in that era by a stupid historical blunder by a technology." Luther, I presume, did not think of the printing press as a stupid historical blunder, but as a divine gift. But from Rome's view, what do you think McLuhan means here?

Well, I'm not sure what Marshall McLuhan means there. I mean, if he means that the blunder from the point of view of the church was not to embrace the press themselves, then they may have something. Because before the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, was the major client of the press.

Forty percent of everything that was produced on the press was produced for the church. But the difficulty for opponents of Luther was that they really didn't think that this sort of popular theology was appropriate. They didn't think that theology should be discussed with lay people. They thought this should be kept in the clerical family.

And it was that which really hamstrung people who disapproved of Luther. Luther's opponents were actually very capable, but they were by and large writing in Latin. And the historical blunder of the church was the refusal to follow Luther into the vernacular. And by the time they woke up to that fact and began producing vernacular works, Luther had so much of an advantage that by and large their works didn't sell.

And if you like, you know, the test is the marketplace here. And Luther and his supporters sold nine books for every one that their Catholic opponents sold. And it was that imbalance that really made it very difficult to restrain the impact of the Reformation. Yeah, absolutely. Luther's vernacular works, even today, are just loaded with a profound amount of his personal verve, his unction, his magnetism, quite a bit of his profanity.

I can only imagine what he was like in person. And, I mean, unlike other Reformation leaders, Luther's personality, for good or bad, really oozes from the printed page. I mean, where did Luther learn how to transfer his personality onto the page like this? Well, that's one of the miracles of the Reformation.

I mean, there's nothing in Luther's training to suggest this astonishing facility as a vernacular writer. He was in his 30s before he'd published anything. He'd had a perfectly conventional theological education, and he was known famously for having been assailed by prodigious doubts about his own salvation and about his relationship with God.

And that doesn't suggest someone who would bring to the written world tremendous clarity. So this is a gift, and it's an unpredictable gift, but the reward, as has always been the case for early adopters of technological innovation, they get the feel to themselves, much in the sense that the first politicians to look good on television are still inscribed in our memory because they've sensed something which is not yet a completely formed being.

And somehow Luther did this. And it's quite right to say that until Luther, theological writing was never brief and never had this extraordinary directness. How did Luther find this? I think what's important, but doesn't explain it, what is important is his experience as a parish minister. That he was not just a professor, but he was also the minister of the parish church.

So he would have had the experience of standing in front of the congregation in the one and only parish church in Wittenberg, seeing the congregation in front of him, seeing their reactions, and knowing when they were listening and when they were not. And I see something of this same sense of what the people could understand in his early work, even in the 95 Theses themselves.

I mean, 10 of the Theses towards the end basically are quotes of what people have said to them. People complain that. People say this about Rome. And that's quite unusual, particularly in the original Latin, in an academic document like dissertation theses. That was Dr. Andrew Pettigree, professor of modern history at the University of St.

Andrews, speaking with me from his office in Scotland. We've been talking about his fascinating book titled "The Brand Luther, How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe, and Started the Protestant Reformation." You should check it out.

It's on Amazon. And thank you for listening to this extended conversation and special episode of the Ask Pastor John podcast. I'm your host, Tony Reinke, and we'll see you next week with John Piper. We'll see you then.