What really brought about this great division in Christendom?

Your igorance is remarkable, but as common as dirt. How stupid - for this is beyond mere ignorance - do you have to be to imagine that priests were not reading Scripture before Luther? And that is not merely reading the Bible in Latin, which all educated men in the time could do. before Luther began his translation into German to push his new doctrine sola fide, there were some 6-10 different translations of the Bible in German (as most were only of part of the Bible [say, New Testament or Gospels and Psalms or Books of Moses and Isaiah or Acts and Pauline epistles or Gospels and Old Testament messianic prophecies] differerent people number them differently.

Dozens of people, including some Bishops who had banned indulgence sales in their areas, had opposed indulgences sales for decades. None of those people were excommunicated. Luther was not excommunicated for opposing indulgences; Luther was excommunicated for concocting the doctrine sola fide and refusing tio stop teaching it after it was declared heretical. It was only when the Vatican declared Luther's pet new creation heretical that Luther labeled the Church 'the wh*re of Babylon.'

Your ignorance of indulgences is even worse. I have no idea if it is preferable to be as ignorant as you are and repeat nonsense, or to know better and spew trash. Indulgences sales were fund raising events. The era was one of great new wealth, and much work was required of the Church. Not only were many of the older buildings in new of repair, but there was a huge new to build countless numbers of new buildings around the globe. In addition, there was need of money to build the growing number of new colleges and universities, such as the one at which Luther taught.

That is the need for money, and the theological defense of the practice comes from the knowledge that sin has two costs, one temporal (earthly) and one eternal. For example, adultery can have many temporal costs: VDs (even those that kill), illegitimate children, destroyed marriages and resulting costs to family and friends. The temporal costs to sin sometimes harm much more than just the sinner.

Just as sin has temporal costs and potential eternal costs, good works have temporal blessings with eternal connections. Failure to do good works is sin of omission, and the doing of those good works blesses many, including the doer.

Indulgences were sold with all that in mind: people were making donations for various major good works (renovation of cathedrals, building churches in the Americas or India, building new colleges or orphanages, paying for missionaries to go to Asia or America or Africa), knowing that just as sin has two arenas of consequences, so does the doing of good.

Servetus declared that Trinitrianism was pagan. Is that what you mean? Other Protestants declared that Hell was pagan. Some Protestants declared private property pagan and demanded its abolition. Others demanded 'free love' and declared marriage as taught by historic Christianity pagan. The best of the Protestants were like the Anglicans: they rejected all the above and stole 100% of the Catholic Church property in the country and about 75% of the private property of Catholics who refused to convert, all the while executing and imprisoning as necessary in order to expand the revolution against historic Christianity.

The only fund raising a church should ever need is to minister to the poor.  The building of temples and colleges is beyond the scope of Christs commission to us.

If God wanted us to build churches to him he would have laid down specific instructions for its construction.. just like he did for his temple in Jerusalem.  God was extremely specific.  I fail to see how he would have absent minded in forgetting about such a detail in the New Testament.  God does not change..

As far as which reformer was write and which was wrong.. I honest do not care because they all had problems.

Ignorance mean being "uninformed". By your own admission, in another thread you said that you felt no need to verify the accusations you make against others. That is a perfect definition of "ignorance", the desire to remain uninformed. It does not mean "stupid", in means uninformed. In that regard, it was you, and not jake, who freely admitted that you wish to remain in that state, did you not?

Once again, I have made no accusations against others.  I try very hard not to do that.  It generally serves no purpose.  If I have made any such accusations, then I apologize for that.  I said I have no need to know what the others such as the RCC teach.  I need only to respond to what you or others here state or write.  It has nothing to do with ignorance or being uninformed.  It has to do with what you write here at this forum.

If you wish to enlighten others, it would be best if you didn't preface it by calling them ignorant.  For no matter how you wish to define the word "ignorant" after having used it, it will almost always be issued and received as derogatory.

Yes, Luther was a heretic by definition:  and a lot of people think that was to his credit.  Whether or not any of his conclusions were wrong or his doctines were false is a separate and unrelated issue.

Luther and the birth of the Protestant Reformation are much more complicated than most of what's been said here so far. Indulgences and the abuses of the Catholic Church (which many other Catholic clergy-such as the venerable Erasmus of Rotterdam-of the time were pointing out) were surface symptoms of a deeper shift in Luther's thinking. Luther's shift in thinking was much more fundamental. Reformation scholar Patrick Collinson, in The Reformation, addresses this:

We know that the experience [Luther's conversion and the beginning of the Reformation] arose from a strenuous engagement with the theology of Paul to the Romans: the sufficiently technical, but for Luther thoroughly existential, problem of how the justicia Dei, the punitive righteousness of God, was to be satisfied. Luther knew that Christ had already made satisfaction, as Christianity has always affirmed, "for the sins of the whole world." But how was that satisfaction to be applied to the individual Christian believer? Only, Luther discovered, by faith in Christ's sacrifice. Human moral striving was actually counterproductive, turning the soul ever more in upon itself. That was as much as to say that God himself works in us. This has been called a kind of Copernican revolution in thinking about God. God, not man, is the center and prime mover of all things, including human salvation. Theologically, that had never been in doubt. In practice, however, the system of medieval Christianity emphaszed moral effort, in effect a journey toward a God, who, Luther insisted, is actually reaching out to us. - (p. 7)

Pax.