Early May, 1526

After leaving Konstanz, Balthasar Hubmaier journeyed on to Augsburg, another free imperial city with the autonomy to set its own religious policies. The city council had sought to avoid choosing sides among the developing theological allegiances, leaving it generally more tolerant of competing clergy than other cities that had politically coalesced around one favored confession or reformer.¹ Hubmaier might have enjoyed this freedom longer, but he ultimately stayed only two months due to the call to church leadership that he would receive from Nikolsburg in the summer. Still, the relationships he forged in Augsburg made an impact for the Anabaptists in the region. 

Most notably, Hubmaier connected with Hans Denck, a young Augsburg resident who had studied at the University of Ingolstadt soon after Hubmaier had served as prorector there. Denck had embraced the emphases of the humanists at the university, focusing on learning Hebrew and Greek. After leaving the university, he gravitated toward printers who were engaged in publishing texts that supported knowledge of the ancient biblical languages and the theology of early church fathers. Based on others’ reports of his conversations, he gained a reputation for a fondness of Origen, in particular, despite Origen’s condemnation as heterodox. One printer in Augsburg put him to work editing a Latin translation of the Greek grammar of Theodore Gaza, a Greek scholar who had emigrated to Italy in the 15th century and began teaching Greek to western European university students.  Erasmus had begun the project, but hadn’t completed it, and once Denck finished it—with four volumes—it became the leading textbook for western Europeans to learn Greek. Through this linguistic work, he became an acolyte of Johannes Oecolampadius, an evangelical humanist, and followed him from Augsburg to Basel. When Oecolampadius won an enthusiastic audience of 400 students who gathered to hear his lectures on Isaiah based on the Hebrew texts, Denck sat among them.² He might have assisted him for a time on his project to translate the writings of John Chrysostom from Greek into Latin, as well.³ On Oecolampadius’ recommendation, in 1523 Denck was appointed headmaster of a humanist-leaning school in Nuremberg, despite his young age in his lower 20s.⁴

Within a year, though, Denck ran afoul of the firmly Lutheran clergy in Nuremberg because of his opinion that a person’s faith and pursuit of Christ determined whether the sacraments of baptism and communion had spiritual value. The city expelled him in January 1525, but he was able to find work as a schoolteacher in Augsburg by the fall.⁵ During the summer in between, Denck visited St. Gall, where Anabaptism was generating a good deal of excitement.  According to the St. Gall chronicler Johannes Kessler, Denck lodged and associated with Anabaptists there, although he had not yet “much to do” with them. Kessler indicated that Denck made a good first impression on people:  “Hans Denck, a Bavarian, was a learned, eloquent and humble man. … He was tall, very friendly, and of modest conduct. He was to be praised very much, had he not defiled himself and his teaching with terrible errors. … He was exceedingly trained in the word of the Scriptures and educated in the three main languages.”⁶ With his interest in editing texts in the biblical languages, it would have been natural for Denck to meet Ludwig Haetzer briefly when he arrived back in Augsburg in the fall of 1525—though Haetzer soon fled the city. They would have a chance for a deeper collaboration later when they lived in Strasbourg and Worms at the same time. 

Since Haetzer had never aligned enough with Anabaptists to undertake rebaptism, he was not the man to build upon Denck’s encounter with Anabaptism in St. Gall and lead Denck to rebaptism. But after Hubmaier’s interactions with him in early May, Denck asked for rebaptism. This act seems to be a step that can be rooted in the concern, which he had voiced before his expulsion from Nuremberg, that the sacraments be related to individuals’ personal faith and yearning for Christ to replace their sinfulness with his righteousness. As he had told the Nuremberg clergy when they queried his beliefs: “From my childhood I learned the faith through my parents and I spoke regularly about it; later on I also read many books and I praised myself still more for having faith, but in truth I never had really faced the opposite, the fact of sin, which is inborn to me by nature, although it was pointed out to me many times.”⁷ Now he was making it clearer that he wished to claim the Christian faith for his own.  

Denck would go on to lead others to Anabaptism during the remaining four months that he spent in Augsburg, although his beliefs would become quite anomalous among Anabaptists and other humanist reformers alike.

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.  P. J. Broadhead, “Guildsmen, Religious Reform and the Search for the Common Good: The Role of the Guilds in the Early Reformation in Augsburg,” The Historical Journal 39 (1996): 577-597. ↩︎
2. Jan J. Kiwiet, “The Life of Hans Denck (ca. 1500-1527),” Mennonite Quarterly Review 31 (1957): 234 ↩︎
3. Ibid., 233. ↩︎
4.  Ibid., 235. ↩︎
5. Ibid., 239-41. ↩︎
6. Johannes Kessler, Sabbata, eds. Emil Egli & Rudolf Schoch (St. Gall, 1902): 151, translated and quoted in Ibid., 242. ↩︎
7. Hans Denck, Testimony (Nuremberg, Jan. 14, 1525), quoted in Ibid., 230. ↩︎