The Ninety-five Theses or Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences is a list of propositions for an academic disputation written in 1517 by Martin Luther, then a professor of moral theology at the University of Wittenberg, Germany. The Theses are retrospectively considered to have launched the Protestant Reformation and the birth of Protestantism, despite various quasi- or proto-Protestant groups having existed previously.