Luther and the 95 Theses

For a long time, people generally pictured Luther hammering his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenburg on October 31, 1517, to have been a sensation, something like:

"What's this?! Someone's hammering something to the church door! Let's rush over and read it!"

and then a few hours later, Lutherism was in full swing.

Then, in certain circles, a correction began to spread: there was nothing unusual about nailing invitations to public debate to the front door of a church; furthermore, Luther's 95 theses were written in Latin, which meant that an immediate public uproar was unlikely.

I have a lot of German, Austrian and Swiss-German friends on Facebook, and in the German-speaking world Luther is HUGE, sort of like a combination of Shakespeare, Joan of Arc and George Washington. And so in 2017, when all of Central Europe was lavishly celebrating the 500th anniversary of Luther nailing his theses to the church door, another narrative began to spread in certain circles: Luther may not ever have nailed anything to any church door. Now, we who read the news in German were told, it seemed that what happened on the 31st of October, 1517, was that Luther sent a letter to the Archbishop of Mainz, and another letter to the Bishop of Magdeburg, and included a copy of the 95 theses with each letter.

It seems that the earliest mention anyone can find of the famous theses-nailing was written in 1547 by Philipp Melanchthon. Melanchthon was not in Wittenberg in 1517.

This doesn't seem to me to prove that the nailing never happened. Can I prove that it did? Not in the slightest.

As far as Lutherism getting into full swing, that seems to have happened after the 95 theses were translated from Latin to German, printed, and distributed across Germany. How fast this translation, printing and distribution happened, and how much it was Luther consciously making himself into a superstar, and how much him reluctantly following the urging of his friends in making the translation, and then the printing and distribution happening completely without his knowledge, let alone his consent, or how much it was somewhere in the middle, I don't know. Luther's later behavior seems to me like that of someone who had no problem at all with being a superstar, but I don't really know how exactly he went from humble monk and professor to one of the most famous people of his time in Europe.

I do know that many very popular tales posing as history are untrue.