March 5-7, 1526

The beginning of March proved a turning point in Zurich for its handling of Anabaptism. Having grown impatient with the ineffectiveness of measures taken against Anabaptist leaders up to this point, the city council decided it would no longer show forbearance. Over the course of one day on March 5, Zurich had three prosecutors interview at least twelve men and six women that it held in its prisons on account of Anabaptist activities. The evidence-gathering task of the prosecutors appeared to be simple: ask the prisoners if they would remain by their Anabaptist positions or if they would desist and become obedient subjects of their government. Two days later, upon reading the prisoners’ responses, the council issued the sentence for those who would not change: they would be sent back to prison and served merely bread and water until they either died or recanted. Then the council issued a mandate leaving no room for ambiguity about the penalty for rebaptizing others: anyone convicted of rebaptizing would be executed by drowning.

The prosecutors and their clerks recorded the statements of the eighteen Anabaptist prisoners. Faced with the difficult choice, most showed remarkable willingness to die for their faith. For example, the tailor Hans Ockenfuss, who had been a part of initial Anabaptist Bible study and Zollikon gatherings, replied that “he would stay on the side of truth and seal the same with his blood just like his predecessor Christ.” Agli Ockenfuss, perhaps Hans’ wife or sister, also said that she still considered her adult baptism right, since Christ and “his apostles had so practiced it. And if they erred, she would err with them.”¹ Felix Mantz replied that he would confess his belief about baptism “to the end in the power of him who will strengthen me with his truth.”² George Blaurock, retaining his self-image as a prophet, retorted with a fiery condemnation of the authorities—that “all those who baptize infants are murderers and thieves against God”—and declared that he “will stay with that until death.” Conrad Grebel, the clerks noted, “persists in the belief that…the baptism he accepted is right. He will stay by that and let God rule.” Like Mantz, he asked for the opportunity to write from prison to “show that Zwingli errs.” But if he failed to do so, he was “willing to suffer whatever God wills.”³

The statements from the prosecutors’ interviews are also a revealing source for how the Anabaptists framed their rationales for desiring adult baptism in form. For Anthony Roggenacher—a furrier from Schwyz, who had accepted baptism from Blaurock in the early days of the Zollikon movement and had been instrumental in nourishing the faith of the first-known Anabaptist martyrs, Bolt Eberli and Johannes Krüsi—baptism was appropriate only when a person came to a conviction of his sins and formulated a desire to “forsake sin and diligently follow Christ.” “Otherwise,” the clerks recording him saying, “it is of no avail if God allows one to be given baptism when he always proceeds to sin against him and will not stay with it.” Baptism was a symbol that “God gives him much grace” by washing away his sins and assisting him to grow more like Christ.⁴

Others framed their conviction mainly according to a rigorous biblical hermeneutic about what outward acts of worship could be justified for Christians. Five members of the Hottinger family from Zollikon were among the prisoners. Uli Hottinger was typical in reiterating a regulative principle, seeking to avoid forms of worship not explicitly instructed in the Scriptures, and to do all that is explicitly commanded: “it cannot be found [in the Scriptures] that infants should be baptized,” he explained, “and because it cannot be found, one should not, in his opinion, baptize infants.” Elizabeth Hottinger, who likely married into the family, resolutely stated that she “considers the baptism that she had now accepted as good and right, for Christ had also practiced it so.” She would “stay with that to her death.” Margaret Hottinger, gave a similar response, adding a charge that whoever fought against the kind of baptism that Christ undertook was “a child of the devil.”⁵ Speaking in terms of a regulative principle posed a strong challenge to Zwinglian authorities, since they had undertaken a reform of church buildings and worship services motivated by the same principle.

Three others explained their uncompromising position on believers’ baptism in terms akin to a regulative principle. Anna Widerker, the innkeeper who had hosted Balthasar Hubmaier when he first fled to Zurich in December, was one of the women in the prison at this time. In January, Zurich authorities fined her and her maid five pounds each for undergoing rebaptism. She had permitted Heinrich Aberli to hold Bible studies in her inn, and she was baptized by him there around the time that she hosted Hubmaier. Now faced with life in prison, she continued to consider her believer’s baptism “as right and good; for Christ and his apostles had commanded it.”⁶ A visitor from Silesia, Ernst von Glätz, just been baptized less than two weeks before, yet he also replied that he would “stay with his baptism” because “one finds it nowhere in the Scriptures that infants should be baptized.”⁷ A woman from St. Gallen named Winbrat Fanwiler articulated her understanding of a regulative principle, as well—with a fervor that matched some of the Zwinglians who believed it was their role to cast the saints’ images in their church sanctuaries to the flames: “that what God her heavenly Father had not planted must be uprooted and burned with eternal fire. Inasmuch as no word can be found in Scriptures that infants should be baptized, the same infant baptism was not right but the baptism that she received is right; for God had declared it and also commanded it to be observed.”⁸

Out of those interviewed, only Balthasar Hubmaier indicated a willingness to conform to a position desired by the council, as he had indicated a few weeks earlier after torture. “[H]e would put the [matter of] baptism to rest and be peaceable in word and deed.” He begged the members of the council “that where he has otherwise provoked them and acted contrary to them, they would for God’s sake forgive him for that,” and he proposed to write four articles on government, the collecting of interest on loans, tithes, and community of goods in a fashion that would urge other Anabaptists back to positions that the Zurich council viewed favorably.⁹

On March 7, the council issued a unitary sentence for all those who refused to yield to their prosecutorial pressure: “[I]t is declared that upon their answers which each one gave…that they shall be put together in the New Tower; and they shall be given nothing to eat but bread and water and bedded on straw. And the attendant who guards them shall under oath let no one come to them…Thus let them die in the Tower unless anyone desists from his acts and error and intends to be obedient.” In addition, the council declared that “anyone who baptizes hereafter will be drowned without mercy and thus brought from life to death.”¹⁰

Zwingli wrote to Joachim Vadian in St. Gall soon afterward, informing him of the punishment that Grebel and his fellow “Anabaptist ringleaders” had incurred. “Thus patience has endured enough and finally erupted,” he concluded. From Zwingli’s perspective, this was a necessary move to save the evangelical reformation that he had initiated. “The incorrigibly impetuous audacity of these people first pains then irks me,” he wrote Vadian. “I could wish that the newly reviving Christianity would not be inaugurated with a rumble of this sort; but we are not God, who is pleased in this way to provide against evils that are to come, as he once slew Ananias with a sudden and terrible death when he lied to Peter, so that he might cut off from us all who dare to deceive.”¹¹

About This Series

This post is part of a series entitled “The Reformation at 500: Timeline of the Free-Church Movement.” Click here for more information on this series.

Featured image courtesy of the Wick’sche Sammlung, ca. 1575, Zentralbibliothek Zurich, Ms. F 23, fol. 294.

1. Trial testimonies of Anabaptists, Mar. 5, 1526, in Leland Harder, ed., The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism: The Grebel Letters and Related Documents (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1985), 445-46. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 444. Mantz’s mother Anna, who hosted the prayer meeting where Grebel and Blaurock initiated believers’ baptisms, had also been brought in to prison less than a week before the interview. She admitted to being baptized by Grebel and to spending time recently with Heinrich Aberli, but indicated she would stand by her adult baptism. Ibid., 446-47. ↩︎
3. Ibid., 444. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 445. Already arrested and released in early 1525, Roggenacher was given a warning from Zurich at that time that he would be banished to his home canton, where he now knew he would likely meet a martyr’s end, like Eberli did there. But Zurich decided to keep him in their own prison instead. See Harder, 563. ↩︎
5. Ibid., 444-46. ↩︎
6. Ibid., 447. On Anna Widerker, see also Harder, 572. ↩︎
7. Ibid, 445. ↩︎
8. Ibid., 446. The same “planted” and “uprooted” imagery appears in Hans Hottinger’s testimony. Ibid., 445. ↩︎
9. Ibid., 445. ↩︎
10. Sentence of the Council, Mar. 7, 1525, in ibid., 447-48. ↩︎
11. Ulrich Zwingli to Joachim Vadian, after Mar. 7, 1525, Zurich, in ibid., 449. ↩︎