Is it true that Martin Luther used some bad language in his own writings?

I wouldn't be surprised if Martin Luther did that because, surprise, surprise, God Himself uses extremely strong language that would make people faint by today's standards.

First off, He compares Israel's "good works" without faith to "filthy rags". The even more specific translation of that is "filthy rags filled with menstrual fluid". Translated to today, God basically said, "Your good works are as useless to me as a woman's bloody discharge filled with unused egg cells."

Jesus Himself used very, very harsh language towards the Pharisees. He called them a "brood of vipers". To modernize that would be "sons of snakes". To make that phrase completely accurate today would be to call someone "sons of bitches".

Jesus even called Herod, one of the tetrarchs at the time, a fox. Again, calling someone an animal was to call them less than a human, or basically an insult. By today's standards, Jesus called His human king a "filthy bitch".

But you see, in the Bible, God always has a reason for using strong language: to bring people to repentance and to call out the ugly truth as He sees it happening.

The imagery of unused bloody egg cells was to make Israel realize their frailty, idolatry, and need for God, the same God they had rejected time and again.

Jesus called the Pharisees "snakes" because they were acting like animals (in their time like vipers poisoning what was good)! They knew the law but twisted it to fill their own cravings of greed and power. These "holy men of God" were stealing properties from widows and orphans and even stealing from their own people with the exhorbitant seller fees at the temple. Charging interest to your own people was a crime by Jewish law. Yep, Caiaphas the high priest was in on that too so he could gain money. Yet, despite their corrupt behavior they were oh-so pious on the outside. No wonder they were called hypocrites. They were great actors (hypocrite's Greek meaning is basically "an actor")!

Jesus called Herod a "fox" because a fox was ritually unclean to eat back in their day. Herod, a Jew, forewent what he knew about this moral and cultural law and instead acted like a pagan. Here's some of what he did per Richard Floyd's blog:

"Though Herod often tried to appear the pious Jewish leader, he had more than a few problems maintaining the loyalty of his Jewish subjects. His first problem was his very authority. He had been put in power by Caesar Augustus, the Roman Emperor, in 4 BC. And then in 17 AD, to honor his Roman overlords, he build a grand new capital city named Tiberius, after the current emperer, only to discover that it was built on top of an old Jewish cemetery. No pious Jew ever entered it, and it was inhabited almost exclusively by Greeks and Romans.

Then he also had serious women problems. He divorced his first wife, which had been a political union, as she was the daughter of an Arab ruler, in order to marry Herodius. She had been the wife of his half brother, also called Herod just to confuse us. It was not unheard of in those days to marry the ex-wife of one’s brother, but she was also the daughter of another half-brother, Aristobulus. Marriage to one’s niece was also permitted, but marriage to a woman who was both one’s sister-in-law and ones’ niece was irregular, or as my kids might say, “sketchy.”

It was this Herod who had John the Baptist killed. John had been a persistent critic of Herod for his dubious marriage and his general immorality. The Gospels say he had John killed because he had promised his daughter Salome anything she wanted if she danced for him, and John’s head on a platter is what she wanted. The historian Josephus wrote that Herod’s subjects believed that the war that broke out in 36 AD with the Arabs (recall the first divorced wife), and the subsequent Arab military successes, were divine punishment for Herod’s many transgressions."

How does this coincide with Martin Luther? Well, noting the examples mentioned above, it seems Luther did what the Lord also did as well: calling sin as it is and using very strong language to bring people to repentance, even if by today's standards it doesn't seem "proper" or "polite" or the Roman Catholic authorities who heard him got offended instead of repenting.

Luther was against the "sanitized" religion of his time and...to the best of his ability...wanted to bring it back to what was in the Bible.

Yes it is, Martin Luther was after all: angry and upset at the Pope and the Catholic clergy. Some examples would be: "no sooner do I pass a motion than they smell it in rome. Saying in effect that Rome was a cess pool. Many times does he call Monks the "lice placed by the devil on God's almighty fur coat." There are of course many other things I won't repeat out of decency.

Martin Luther also would curse Rome and the Pope, comparing them to villains in the bible. These phrases of themselves are not "extreme" by todays standards of course, however when the remarks were made they were directed at the Holy men of the time, something many people just thought as heresy. So it's easy to believe that a lot of the things he said were taken to be just so foul.