Martin Luther was raised in the church with a solid education in the church's teachings and in the art of scholarly debate. He spent time living as a monk, knowing the Catholic Church's spiritual path from that perspective. As a monk, he had traveled to Rome and seen the corruption that was evident there, which shocked him. He had studied deeply to become a Doctor of Theology and taught theology at the University of Wittenberg. He had the training and stature to contend with the powerful leaders within the Catholic Church, because his own scholarship and skill were second to none. And he personally had experienced the overwhelming sense of guilt that the scholastic theology of the church had imposed on him, in contrast to the message of grace in Christ that he found when studying the Bible itself.
The fertile crescent is a narrow strip of land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. mesopotamia is the name of the land in which the fertile crescent lies.
