Luther Favored Death For Heresy (Transcript)

**Photo credit**: copyright 2025 by *Lux Veritatis*.

This is a written transcript of the video, Did Martin Luther support the DEATH PENALTY for heretics? (Lux Veritatis, 10 minutes, 5-1-25; production by Kenny Burchard). Martin Luther’s words will be in blue.

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Examining unsavory occurrences in Christian history on all sides is necessary for honest, fair historical appraisal. Historical facts are what they are and most Protestants are unaware of the skeletons in their own closet, while on the other hand, one always hears about the embarrassing and scandalous Catholic stuff and not often very accurately or fairly at that. We are what we eat, as the saying goes. There are very few if any Christian groups that never persecuted other Christians, including capital punishment. By the mid 18th century, it had stopped for various reasons.

more so. The belief that heresy is bad and soul-destroying is still believed today among serious Christians. But the understanding of the motives of the heretic and thereby the treatment we give them is very different. The “heretic”: as we may view someone, is not always acting in bad faith or insincerely and most often is simply ignorant about the Bible and/or the historic faith.

Dr. Jordan Cooper, a prominent Lutheran professor and YouTube apologist, stated in his video called “A Further Critique of Offering Prayers to the Saints” (10-5-20) at the 10-minute mark, “Luther was opposed to the killing of heretics.” This is simply untrue, and he ought to know that. I learned about this in 1984 when I read [as a fervent Protestant evangelical] the most famous Protestant biography of Luther in English, Here I Stand, by Roland Bainton.

In that book on pages 376 to 378, Bainton documented how Luther advocated the death penalty for Anabaptists in 1530, 1531, and 1536. Luther thought other dissenting behavior, not just heresy, could be met with death as well. Now, let’s document what he himself wrote about it. In his work, The Estate of Marriage, from 1522, found in the 55-volume Luther’s Works: Volume 45 on page 32, Luther wrote, “The temporal sword and government should therefore still put adulterers to death.”

And on page 33, he stated, “Why do they not put adulterers to death?” Then Luther discusses wives who have deprived their husbands because the Bible says, “The wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does” (1 Corinthians 7:4), and concludes on page 34, “The civil government must compel the wife or put her to death.” Luther, by the way, doesn’t say this about a man who acted in the same way [even though the same verse also states, “likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does”]. In 15:26, in his Sermon on Exodus 22:18, Luther preached, “Concerning the female sorcerer, let them be killed.”

In Luther’s region of Saxony, Anabaptists had been executed as early as 1527 and later also in 1530, 1532, and 1538. Anabaptists were Christians who

believed in adult “believer’s” baptism and [were] in that respect the same as Baptists today. Evidence exists that in November 1529, Luther and his right-hand man, Philip Melanchthon, writing to their elector, favored the death penalty for Anabaptists. Bainton noted that in 1530, Luther advanced the view that blasphemy could be punished by death and that a rejection of an article of the Apostles Creed is blasphemy. This is seen in Luther’s Commentary on the 82nd Psalm (Luther’s Works, Volume 13, pages 39 to 72).

Luther added, “I assent. Although it seems cruel to punish them with the sword, it is crueler that they condemn the ministry of the word and have no well-grounded doctrine and suppress the true and in this way seek to subvert the civil order.” Luther’s general thought on the question of execution of heretics was expressed in a chilling statement from his Home Postils in 1533:

The worldly authorities bear the sword with orders to prevent all scandal, so that it may not enter and inflict harm, but the most dangerous and horrible scandal is where false doctrine and worship penetrates.

Then a little later he writes,

They, that is state officials, must resist it, that is such scandal, stoutly, and realize that nothing else will avail save their use of the sword and of the full extent of their power in order to preserve the doctrine pure and the worship clean and undefiled.

In a second memorandum, written in 1536 by Melanchthon and again signed by Luther, there is no distinction between peaceful and a small minority of violent Anabaptists. And it noted that in cases of a denial of infant baptism and original sin, “The stubborn sectaries must be put to death.” By 1536, Luther advised Landgraf Philip of Hess, which is close to Saxony, to execute by the sword Anabaptists discovered in his domain. On the 16th of June 1536 in Zwickau, a town in southwest Saxony about 99 miles from Wittenberg, where Luther lived, a man named Peter Pestel was executed by the sword, mainly due to his denial of the Lutheran doctrine of the [Real Presence in the] Eucharist: a view that even Melanchthon adopted shortly thereafter.

On the 20th of August 1538, [Georg] Spalatin, a good friend of Luther’s, recorded him as saying, “One should hasten to put such witches to death,” and seemingly sanctioning these alleged witches, being “examined by torture,” and opining that “an example should be made of them to terrify others.” Luther is also reported to have said on the 25th of August 1538, about alleged witches, “No mercy is to be shown them. I myself would begin to burn them according to the law that the priest should begin to stone culprits.”

Both of these purported statements of Luther come from the book of his sayings, called Table Talk. We know that a woman accused of witchcraft [and of having poisoned cattle; in fact, a drought had killed the cattle] named Prista Frühbottin was, along with three purported accomplices [her son and two farmhands], tortured and burned to death on the 29th of June 1540 in Wittenberg. Luther lived there until his death in 1546. So it’s quite possible — if not plausible — that he approved of these particular burnings.

In another excerpt in Table Talk, from the Weimar German edition of Luther’s writings, dated between 1538 and 1540, he again advocates torture: this time applied to prostitutes, “If I were a judge, I would have such a poisonous syphilitic tortured by being broken on the wheel and having her veins lacerated.”

Biographer Roland Bainton believes that Luther’s views in this regard softened in the last six years of his life. Maybe so. But if so, that doesn’t lessen the great harm he [had] already [done].

Related Articles

Luther: Execute Frigid Wives; Torture & Burn Witches: Including Two Examples of Luther’s Espousal of Capital Punishment for Wrong or Aberrant Behavior Prior to 1530.

Luther Favored Execution of Heretics (vs. Jordan Cooper).

Luther Favored the Death Penalty for Anabaptists.

Luther on the Deaths of Zwingli, St. Thomas More, & St. John Fisher.

Martin Luther and Anabaptist Executions in the 1530s.

Related Books

Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther, Roland Bainton, New York: Mentor, 1950 (see pages 376-378).

Martin Luther: Catholic Critical Analysis and Praise (my book, April 2008, 264 pages; available in paperback or for only $2.99 as an e-book)

The “Catholic” Luther : An Ecumenical Collection of His “Traditional” Utterances (my book, Dec. 2014, 166 pages; available only as an e-book, for $3.99; see details at the link)

Related Web Pages

Martin Luther: a Catholic Critique & Appraisal

Lutheranism: Catholic Critique

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Summary: I thoroughly document how Luther favored the death penalty for not only heresy (e.g., Anabaptists, who practiced adult baptism) but for witches, prostitutes, & adulteresses.