Exploration Or Reformation Research Paper

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Exploration or Reformation:
Which Was the More Important Consequence of the Printing Press?

Historians around the world believe that the printing press was one of the greatest and most rebellious advances in world history. The printing press was created around the 1450s by a goldsmith, Johannes Gutenberg. However, woodwork printing was first modernized by the Chinese in 600 CE. The Chinese experimented with this because they believed that it would be an easier way to keep their 50,000 characters rather than having to carve them. After time, Gutenberg decided to start a printing press that would be able to last for a long time and will be easy to distribute more writings. Therefore, many writings and books like the Bible were spread and sold. …show more content…

His major objection about his church are the indulgences because he knew that they were false. “Indulgences were payments to the Roman Catholic Church in return for pardons for one’s sins and grants of salvation in the afterlife.” Martin Luther stated that he didn’t approve of indulgences because they were false as well as expensive, so he didn’t want people to buy meaningless pieces of papers. Luther believed that getting rid of your sins with paper was not the right thing to be doing and that the church had been receiving money for lying. He said that the people who buy these indulgences will be “eternally damned” with those who taught them. Therefore, Luther decided to post 95 Theses, against indulgences and church policies, on October 31, 1517 on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. So due to the printing press, he was able to spread out his statements all over Germany between two weeks, and in Europe throughout a month. Basically Luther’s movement was the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. The printing press helped Luther expand his writings like sermons, tracts, and polemics. The presses printed hundreds of thousands of writings by Luther. In document B, it states that approximately one third of the books printed in Germany were by Luther between 1518 to 1525. “Germany at that time was turning out about a million books a year, of which a third-300,000-were by Luther.” Another thing that Luther accomplished was to translate the Bible into the language of the people, German, rather than Latin. The printing press extended in an affordable way for people to buy it and learn it. As a result, this led to the first Protestant faith which was known as Lutheranism. After all, the printing press affected the Protestant Reformation with the spread of Luther’s ideas and teachings leading to a new religion and