Martin Luther added a word to the Bible.
In his 1522 German translation, he inserted "allein" — alone — into Romans 3:28, making it read: "a man is justified by faith alone apart from works of the law."
The Greek text does not contain that word. The word μόνον (alone) does not appear in the verse. Luther knew this. He did it anyway. And when challenged, he did not apologize. He doubled down.
In his Open Letter on Translating (1530), Luther wrote: "If your papist wishes to make a great fuss about the word 'alone,' say to him straight out: Dr. Martin Luther will have it so." That is a direct quote. The father of the Reformation justified altering the text of Sacred Scripture on the grounds of his own authority. Not on the Greek. Not on manuscript tradition. On his will.
Think about that for a moment. The man who claimed Scripture alone as his authority changed Scripture to match his theology.
The irony is devastating, but the evidence against Sola Fide goes far deeper than Luther's translation.
There is exactly one verse in all of Scripture where the words "faith" and "alone" appear together. One. It is James 2:24: "You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone." The only time the Bible puts "faith" and "alone" in the same sentence, it is to deny the very doctrine Luther built his theology around.
Luther's response? He called the Epistle of James "an epistle of straw" and tried to remove it from the canon entirely. When Scripture contradicted his doctrine, he did not revise the doctrine. He tried to revise Scripture.
Every Church Father who wrote on justification understood faith as St. Paul himself described it in Galatians 5:6: "faith working through love." Not bare intellectual assent. Not a one-time decision. A living faith that produces works as its fruit — and those works matter.
The Council of Trent (1547) formally condemned the doctrine of justification by faith alone, affirming what every Father had taught: that faith without works is dead, exactly as James wrote.
If "faith alone" is so clearly taught in Scripture that it justified splitting the Church in two, why did Martin Luther have to add a word to the Bible to make it say what he wanted — and why is the only verse that actually uses the phrase "faith alone" a direct refutation of his doctrine?