Did 16th-century Reformers laugh? In their portraits they seldom even smile. Times have changed: modern Western clerics (the Reverend Ian Paisley notoriously excepted) vie with secular celebs in conveying toothy approachability.Mateyness is the mode now, even for Popes, but Martin Luther's portraits obey the 16th-century rule of sanctified grimness.
In 1521 Hans Baldung Grien made a famous engraving of him, reproduced in Derek Wilson's new biography: Luther was still a tonsured Augustinian monk, although already enemy to the Pope, and Grien portrayed a gaunt, austere reforming saint, his eyes searching a far horizon, the Holy Spirit hovering dove-style above him, fuelling his fight against the Devil.
Even after Luther married, and his wife Katie's catering inspired the German proverb 'as fat as Martin Luther', there was no question of a public smile when he was painted.
Luther's only external accreditation for leading a Europe-wide revolution was his Doctorate of Theology, and DDs shouldn't be seen to titter - still less should God's chosen successor to such prophets of old as Elijah.
Recently the veteran Lutheran historian Eric Gritsch published a little study entitled The Wit of Martin Luther. It is difficult to imagine the wit of John Calvin, Martin Bucer or Thomas Cranmer occupying much more than a visiting card. Luther, who inspired and often infuriated them all, powered his Reformation by making Europe laugh at the Pope: angry, injured laughter, bitter with a deep sense of betrayal.
Erasmus, the tidy-minded scholar and wit, had already sniggered at the Church's folly, but Luther's laughter had a prophetic ferocity about it. He had been shocked into realising that the Holy Father in Rome was in fact an agent of Antichrist.
How could the Pope be anything else, demanded Luther, when he ordered silence on a loyal son of the Church who had rediscovered the most important truth about the human condition?
This was the truth found in Scripture, especially in the urgent words of Paul of Tarsus to the Romans and Galatians: we humans are so trapped in sin - tangled up in ourselves - that nothing we do merits God's love.
A loving judge, God wills to choose some of us out of this doomed, undeserving rabble, to receive his gift of saving grace: then we may enter his presence for ever as his children, saved by faith in the crucified Jesus Christ. In Reformation jargon, that is justification by faith through grace: it is the heart of Reformation Protestantism.
It was a hand-grenade lobbed into the medieval Western Church, levelling all the corridors past death into heaven so artfully constructed by medieval Catholic theologians.
Their modern Catholic successors mostly agree that Luther was true to tradition in this matter, and Rome no longer officially classes him as a heretic. Small consolation for Pope Leo X and his immediate successors, who failed to shut Luther up, and struggled with the collapse of united Western Christendom.
Luther's laughter makes him one of the most fascinating (not always the most likeable) of Protestant Reformers. He was generous, passionate, impulsive, inconsistent, intuitive - so his theology is a mess, leaving four centuries-worth of vexations and puzzles for those Christians labelled Lutherans.
No one can excuse his anti-Semitism, so convenient for Adolf Hitler in outflanking the German Lutheran establishment: historians can help to explain it, showing how wrapped up he was in the then-common notion that God was about to bring this world to its end. For Luther, Jews were wilfully getting in the way, by not converting to Christianity.
Only the blockheaded have found the whole man easy to understand - yet his hymns, his majestic German Bible translation, his anger and laughter, can be startlingly direct in conveying his love of God.
Small wonder that people are always writing biographies of him: there have been at least three in English in the last four years.
This latest, by Derek Wilson, scores highly in thoroughness, clarity and human sympathy.
If you want a model of how to defy uncomprehending power - your equivalent of Luther's Pope, Emperor, Church - or a model of how to laugh at the Devil, Wilson has provided a reliable guide as to how Luther did it.
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