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Even without Luther's "help"

Don't be coy. Luther changed Scripture to fit his doctrine, not to clarify St. Paul's writing. St. Paul is clearly teaching that works of the Old Testament Mosaic Law, like circumcision for instance, could not bring about salvation. Faith does bring about salvation, provided it is accompanied by charity. The New Testament makes this clear, despite Luther's editing, in Galatians, 1 Corinthians, John, Matthew, James and Ephesians.

These are just some examples of Scripture that refute Luther along with his own words: "We are obliged to yield many things to the Papists - that they possess the Word of God which we received from them, otherwise we should have known nothing at all about it." Commentary on St. John, Chapter 16.

This is just ignorant.

Scholars widely acknowledge that all the books in the New Testament were in common usage among ancient Christians at the time the canon was established. Moreover, the Orthodox church had preserved the Byzantize stream of manuscripts. I think that you can probably grasp that Luther's remarks about the "Papists" applies to Rome, not to the eastern Orthodox. Luther himself used a Textus Receptus in his translation work as did all the English, Spanish, French and Italian bibles produced in the Reformation era. So Luther's remarks in this instance prove very little. But I suppose such ahistorical notions provide comfort to those who like to pretend that Rome is the mistress of Christianity.

What the aborning Roman church did do was to stamp out heretical and corrupted manuscripts and to guard the canon. For that, Rome may be given some credit. However, in the course of stamping out other heresies, Rome perpetrated a great many massacres and allotted to her popes the right to overrule plainly written scripture and to add the Apocrypha to the canon at the Council of Trent after it had been rejected by the Council of Hippo which established the original canon. Obviously, something had changed over all those centuries. So you aren't left guessing, what changed was that Rome departed completely from scriptural practices. Rome established a religion of Papa (the pope) and the Protestants and their kind established a religion based on the Word.

I don't envy your manmade religion. Nor do I find its claims credible.

Frankly, I doubt that Luther actually believed that God's Word could have been destroyed had the church of Rome failed to become the state religion of the Roman Empire.

God preserves His Word. Regardless of what you or I or Luther think about it. God preserves it to this day against the attempts of heretics and apostate churches to destroy or alter His Word.

Don't be coy.

Well, then, don't be dishonest. Gosh,Romans 3:28 says PRECISELY what I said that it says. And it REFUTES the Romanist position concerning justification by faith-plus-works.

Luther's theology was correct on this point. This is why he and Calvin and all consistent Protestants since their day have regarded Roman Catholicism as hopelessly confused. You can't just "add" the statement by James to the statement by Paul--because Paul explicitly demands that you not do so!

The statement by James has to be fitted into the overarching teaching by Paul. And that means that Calvin was correct, as I have repeatedly pointed out.

I realize that this is impossibly bad news for RCs to hear, but I'm correct. Romanism is a terrible error. Puh-leez wake up to what is going on. There is more at stake in this than than you are willing to admit.