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Hans Denck Baptizes Hans Hut in Augsburg

Hans Leaman — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:34:35 +0000

May 26, 1526 Within a few weeks of undergoing baptism from Balthasar Hubmaier, Hans Denck held a conversation with an old acquaintance who had recently shown up in Augsburg. That acquaintance was Hans Hut, erstwhile supporter of Thomas Müntzer who followed him into the deadly debacle at Frankenhausen. Ever since escaping the nobles’ onslaught against the revolting peasants at Frankenhausen and learning of Müntzer’s subsequent death, Hut had to adjust his apocalyptic beliefs that God was going to initiate a reign of justice by leading the peasants to military victory over their lords. But he still held apocalyptic expectations of Christ’s imminent return. Hut had returned to his home town of Bibra after escaping Frankenhausen uninjured in May 1525, but Hut’s willingness to speak publicly against clerical authorities in Bibra now proved to be a liability once most people recognized the dangers of being associated with leaders of the peasant revolts. By May 1526, he relocated to Augsburg, which was a familiar town from his earlier journeys for his book trade. Here he came into contact again with Hans Denck; the two had met in 1524 in Nuremberg, where Denck was working as a teacher. The two likely met since Denck kept close associations with printers in Nuremberg who published evangelical literature, which Hut had been eager to trade. Now, with his familiarity with Hubmaier and other Anabaptists in Augsburg, Denck apparently convinced Hut that the nascent Anabaptist group in the city was committed to living out church life in a fashion that would bring about the reign of Christ that Hut had been longing to see. Hut had already been convinced that infant baptism was in error, since he had spoken against it in Bibra and refused to baptize his child two years earlier. But he had doubts about the need for rebaptism. One of the first known Anabaptists in Augsburg, Kaspar Färber from the Tyrol, joined the conversation, and eventually Hut decided he wished to join the new congregation through rebaptism. Denck baptized him three days before Pentecost. Feeling filled with a Pentecostal gift from the Holy Spirit, Hut proceeded to evangelize and preach in many towns throughout southern and central Germany over the ensuing months, baptizing numerous people in these regions who would go on to be leaders in the free-church movement. 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.

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Hubmaier Baptizes Hans Denck in Augsburg

Hans Leaman — Fri, 08 May 2026 17:00:42 +0000

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. 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. He might have assisted him for a time on his project to translate the writings of John Chrysostom from Greek into Latin, as well. On Oecolampadius’ recommendation, in 1523 Denck was appointed headmaster of a humanist-leaning school in Nuremberg, despite his young age in his lower 20s. 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. 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.” 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.” 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.

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Imprisoned Women Agree to Abandon Anabaptism

Hans Leaman — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 19:13:13 +0000

Late April, 1526 Following the Anabaptist men’s surprising escape from Zurich’s New Tower prison, the City Council turned a new level of scrutiny upon the presence of the women it had put into lifelong detention on bread and water. The Council likely suspected that the men found their way out of the tower with the aid of a guard who did not think they were justly sentenced to die in prison. It would have been natural for councilors to wonder: could such sympathies among commoners lead to the women’s escape as well? They appear to have decided to exert strong pressure on the women to recant at this juncture. For most of these women who recanted, they disappear from the record after their release. Whether they blended into the state parish churches or found a way to participate in free churches without further detection from authorities remains unknown. But for a few others, such as Margaret Hottinger, their release brought them back into a network of people living in the canton who continued to foster Anabaptist ideas about worship even if they became more cautious about rebaptizing new participants. Agli Ockenfuss, who had a clear testimony of her willingness to stick with her rebaptism in March, now agreed to the following statement placed in the record books during the week after Easter: “Agli Ockenfuss acknowledges that infant baptism is right and that rebaptism is wrong, and she wishes to be obedient to my lords [i.e. the city councilors]. And if she should ever again speak or teach anything more about rebaptism, or think of it in any way—whether in word or deed—then they should deal with her according to what she deserves and according to my lords’ judgment.” Unstated in this release note was the important factor that Agli was pregnant. Soon after her sentencing in March, she had petitioned the Council for a change in her sentence to a diet of bread and water, given her condition; she noted she had been with child for ten weeks at that point, and she feared that “if she is kept in this manner, it might possibly harm the fruit” (alluding to the “fruit of her womb”). At that point, she reiterated that she remained “firm in her earlier position” regarding baptism. But she was appealing to the consciences of the councilors not to punish her unborn child for her own choice of civil disobedience; after her pregnancy, she said, she would be “willing to carry out whatever my lords decide further concerning her.” The Zurich authorities apparently refused her request. After more than one month on bread and water, she decided for the sake of her unborn child to bend to their demands. For other women, we know less about the particular family circumstances that they mulled over during their imprisonment. In March, Elizabeth Hottinger had told authorities that she would stay with her Anabaptist beliefs “to her death.” But now, in late April, she “submitted herself” to her lords’ confession. So did Regula Gletzli, Anna Widerkehr’s maid who had undergone baptism after Heinrich Aberli’s Bible studies in December. The records do not reveal whether Anna Widerkehr recanted at this point, as well. In any case, the home that she provided for several Anabaptist evangelists and Bible studies before her arrest was surely subject to surveillance thereafter. It is no longer mentioned as a meeting place for them. Dorothea Kürsiner, the wife of Antony Roggenacher, had been rebaptized in Zollikon in 1525 around the same time as her husband. She had given authorities a statement in March that baptism should be connected to an individual’s belief. But on the Saturday after Easter, she consented to a new statement: “she is now sufficiently instructed that she wishes to have the children baptized and considers this to be right.” Were “the children” just a theological category for her, or did this phrase indicate that she had her own young unbaptized children who were going without the care of their mother while she sat in prison indefinitely? Did she know that her husband had escaped from his prison? If so, did she worry that he would need to live as a fugitive even further from his family than he was while in prison? The records do not tell us, nor do they ever trace her husband after his escape from prison. These uncertainties all surely weighed upon her as she relinquished her prior stance. In one case, family members exerted their own pressure to conform to the government’s aims: on the Monday after Easter, Winbrat Fanwiler’s brother came before the council and asked it to be “merciful” and hand his sister over to him, pledging that he would “provide for her and oversee her in such a way that my lords would have no further trouble with her.” Upon this petition, the record indicates, she was released into her brother’s care in St. Gall with the admonition “that if she should return again and involve herself with rebaptism or speak of it, she would from that moment on, and without any mercy, be drowned.” She does not reappear in Swiss disciplinary records. Margaret Hottinger, who had been in prison longer than any other Anabaptist on record at the time, also held out the longest. But on May 1, she too gave authorities the statement they desired in order to be released: “Margrett Hottinger acknowledges that she has erred, considers infant baptism to be right and rebaptism to be useless and wrong, and asks my lords to be gracious to her and to do what is best. She now wishes to be obedient to them.” Over the past year, several male members of her family had already recanted in order to be released from prison, but headed promptly back to Anabaptist activities. Margaret aimed for more consistency beforehand, but finally she gave herself permission to do the same. In her earlier refusal to recant, she aimed to show the government the limits of its […]

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Hubmaier Is Released from Prison and Taken to Konstanz

Hans Leaman — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 18:02:35 +0000

Mid-April, 1526 April 10 was Easter Sunday in 1526, and it was during Holy Week beforehand that Zurich’s leading clergy prepared for Hubmaier’s departure from their canton. On April 6, he received release from his prison cell in the Wellenburg tower after he reiterated his willingness to recant from his position on baptism and to discontinue relations with other Anabaptists. One week later, he performed the tasks of public recantation that he failed to do properly back in December. The Zurich Council now required him to give an oral retraction of his doctrines of baptism in the two most prominent churches in the city—the Grossmünster and Fraumünster—as well as in a parish church in Gossau, a town in the Grüningen district of the canton where Grebel and other Anabaptist evangelists had cultivated a strong following. The location of this third recantation was surely designed to demoralize the rural adherents of Anabaptism here, where Hubmaier’s tract on baptism had been circulating. Hubmaier completed the city recantations by April 15 and was taken to Gossau a few days afterward to complete the third. Upon winning a pledge from Hubmaier never to enter Zurich’s territory again, Zurich officers then followed through on Zwingli’s proposal to convey Hubmaier secretly out of the canton’s territory. They took him northward, but they did not place him into Habsburg territory surrounding Waldshut, where Hubmaier was a “wanted” man. Instead, they delivered him to the city of Konstanz (Constance), which was a “free imperial city” with its own governance. The town council there had begun to adopt evangelical reforms largely aligned with Zwinglian positions. But they were willing to provide Hubmaier refuge in order to take him off of Zurich’s hands. This act of coordination was a testament that reforming town councilors and pastors in the early years of the evangelical movement typically viewed each other as sufficiently on the “same team” that they protected each other from Catholic rulers; since they were trying to work out their visions of what church reform should look like in these very years, many of them, like Konstanz’s reformed clergy, were willing to give time for men whom they did not entirely agree with—like Hubmaier—to form and re-form their views through debate. Konstanz’s leading evangelical cleric, Ambrosius Blaurer, empathized with Zwingli’s exasperation with the Anabaptists, but he believed unity should be achieved by continuing efforts at indoctrination, and banishment of dissidents when teaching and discussion failed. He did not agree with the increasing harshness of Zurich’s corporal punishments for Anabaptists. Perhaps he hoped that Hubmaier would eventually align himself with his own visions of reform after enjoying the hospitality of Konstanz’s clergy. Moreover, since Konstanz was hosting a large contingent of evangelicals who had fled Waldshut when it fell to the Habsburgs, he likely hoped Hubmaier would lead them into alignment with the church in Konstanz, despite their earlier embrace of rebaptism. But Blaurer and other clergymen apparently soon got the impression that Hubmaier was not malleable to the Reformed consensus emerging among them and the Konstanz city council: he did not sound like the person who had admitted error about his teaching on baptism just a few days earlier. One of them reported back to Zwingli some of the comments that Hubmaier made in Konstanz about his time in Zurich. Zwingli reflected his feelings about what he learned in a letter that he wrote to a follower a few months later: “with how great generosity we treated the fellow and with what treachery he responded. For as soon as he reached Constance he so calumniated me before the ministers of the Word and boasted of his victory that I do not know but he turned some of them against me.” Zwingli considered Hubmaier to be a man in search of social prominence, something he could gain if he could find a secure city where he could be the leading reformer as he was in Waldshut. “I see in him…nothing more than an immoderate thirst for money and notoriety,” Zwingli wrote, predicting that Hubmaier would keep journeying on till he found the leadership he craved. “May the Omnipotent extinguish by celestial dew this desire for glory which glows in the hearts of some!” In any case, the Konstanz clergy did not get a good enough impression of Hubmaier to conclude that his presence would have a unifying effect upon their reform program. By the start of May, he moved onward—toward Augsburg—in search of a territory whose rulers would want him to lead their reformation. Surprisingly, he would find one by summertime, presenting Anabaptism with the opportunity, for the first time, to be privileged as a state church. That opportunity would, in turn, present Anabaptists with a great test of doctrine about whether the church the apostles founded was always meant to be a free church or not. 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.

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Hubmaier Pens Prayers in Prison

Hans Leaman — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:21:06 +0000

March-April, 1526 While other Anabaptist men escaped from prison in March, Balthasar Hubmaier remained in his cell, wondering when Zurich authorities would release him. He had been kept separate from the others, not subject to the restricted diet of bread and water due to his stated willingness to defer to Zurich’s pastors on the matters of baptism. Unlike the other prisoners, he had also been given pen and paper. During this time he penned a unique pair of prayers, which he published later once he had access to a printing press: a prayer expanding upon the Lord’s Prayer and a prayer based on the Apostle’s Creed. For the Lord’s Prayer, he strongly emphasized the individual’s – and his own – need for grace. Right from the start, expanding on the phrase “Our Father,” he wrote: “I am not worthy that I should be called thy child, or that I should call thee my Father. I have not fulfilled thy fatherly will but rather the will of the father of liars. Pardon me, O merciful Father, and make me thy child in faith.” Each subsequent petition prompted him to reflect on the corruption that man’s will worked upon God’s good world. “We publicly confess that thy fatherly will is not being done in us earthly humans, for our will is fully and completely in contradiction to thy divine will.” The solution was to pray that the Holy Spirit “might work in us genuine faith, constant hope and fervent love, that we might make our will in all things to be subject to thy fatherly will.” He understood Christ’s model prayer for “daily bread” to be prompting his disciples to cry out for the nourishment of the Word, asking God to “bring it to life in our soul.” In his prayer based on the Apostles’ Creed, Hubmaier struck a similar point of emphasis. When stating his belief in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, he recognized that God’s own act of creating him as His child was an act of grace. “Yet, I confess,” he continued, “we humans have lost this gracious sonship, dignity, and heritage, through the disobedience of Adam. Nonetheless I place in thee, in my most gracious Father, all my consolation, hope, and confidence, and know surely and certainly that this Fall will be harmless and no source of condemnation for me.” Hubmaier also included one of the foremost themes of both Reformed and Anabaptist leaders: the access that humans have to Christ, through prayer, at all places on earth. For Hubmaier, a former preacher at an immensely popular pilgrimage shrine, this theme showed his personal conversion from the Catholic “cult of the saints” that he now believed had been misguiding many lay people. “Thou dost command all those who are burdened to come to thee, for thou willst give them rest. It is therefore needless, my meek Christ, to worship thee either here or there, yea neither in bread nor in wine, for thou art to be found sitting at the right of thy heavenly Father, just as also the holy Stephen saw thee and worshipped thee. It is also vain to seek another intercessor.” Christ desired to be our one and only intercessor, Hubmaier declared, reminding those who prayed with him that they should not seek nearness to God through the mediation of saints or material things, even the consecrated host in the Eucharist or sites said to be holy because of miracles that had once occurred there. By invoking Stephen’s vision of Christ sitting at the right hand of the Father, Hubmaier hit upon a phrase that was important to Reformed theologians in their objections to Lutheran and Catholic teachings about the presence of Christ in the elements of Eucharist: Christ had now transcended the terrestrial realm, they contended, so the Eucharist should just be considered a memorial symbolically remembering Christ’s body and blood, sacrificed on the cross. Covering the “holy universal Christian church,” Hubmaier also prayed that members would “root out everything contrary that thou hast not planted,” a phrase from Matthew 15 where Christ responds to Pharisees’ concerns about dietary restrictions and ritual cleanliness. This phrase became a rally call for Reformed and Anabaptist theologians desiring to reform worship practices more than Luther had. The potential for using the phrase to justify abandoning many centuries-old ecclesiastical traditions and teachings can be seen in the rest of Hubmaier’s meditation on the character of the Church, where he prayed that “we might not be led into error by any kind of respect of persons, human dogmas, or doctrine of the ancient fathers, popes, councils, universities, or old customs.” By indicating that even councils or doctrines of ancient fathers could lead Christians into error, Hubmaier showed great confidence in the universal clarity of the Scriptures alone (sola scriptura). Hubmaier might also have been trying to show greater commonality with Zurich’s Reformed theologians than they had credited to him. The Apostoles’ Creed, after all, was one product of ancient fathers’ doctrines that they both held to be without error. But as both Hubmaier and the Zurich reformers surely appreciated, the idea that sola scriptura could provide a stable basis for evangelical ecclesiastical bodies was itself under strain by the disagreements that had emerged between them over the purpose and meaning of baptism. 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.

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Concerning Scholars and Those Who Burn Them: A Study of the Early Anabaptists’ Rejection of Higher Education

Titus Murphy — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 02:58:03 +0000

A Movement Born from Scholars When one surveys the early Anabaptists, it is almost shocking how many early leaders were educated and knew a multitude of languages. Among them are well-known names – Felix Mantz, Conrad Grebel, Balthasar Hubmaier, and Michael Sattler – all of whom are recorded as being knowledgeable of at least Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, showcasing that they had spent quite a few years in study. However, this educated start did not last, and instead, many of the later Anabaptists would have only a lower-level education, only able to read and write (in their native tongue) sufficiently to study Scripture, but not much else (despite exceptionally strong Bible memorization, as exemplified in their testimonies). This vast disconnect should cause us to ask: What happened? Why did these initially highly educated leaders not encourage education among those they brought to believe as they did? What thought process caused these humanistically trained leaders to form a group that would popularize the saying, “Die Gelehrter, die Verkehrter” and hang onto it even to the present day? An analysis of several Anabaptist and Protestant documents shows that there were three primary theoretical motivations for their avoidance of higher education, all of which dealt with then-current problems among the scholarly class. Firstly, they saw scholarship and hierarchical clergy as a scheme seeking money, fame, and titles, which they considered unbiblical. Secondly, and relatedly, they equated being well educated with being rich and thus considered that the more educated one was, the harder it would be to enter the kingdom of heaven. Finally, they saw scholars as deviating from a treasured simplicity of faith, causing corruption and alienating the lay people. These three factors, when combined with practical concerns such as persecution and the need to provide for their families despite oppression, are the primary reasons that Anabaptists, by and large, did not attempt to keep their leaders and themselves highly educated. It would not be fair to continue without mentioning that while these decriers of higher education painted with a broad brush, they did mention that it was good to be educated enough to read and write. In addition, some who were well educated were innocent of the abuses and attacks and were carefully excluded from the anti-education rhetoric. Pious leaders such as Paul, Luke, Michael Sattler, Felix Mantz, and Conrad Grebel, who happened to be well educated, were not the target of these sayings and opinions, but unfortunately, they were the exception rather than the rule. Why Early Anabaptists Distrusted the Learned The quest for fame, riches, and titles is nothing new to scholarship, and Anabaptists identified this trend quite well. In a document by Menno Simons titled “Foundations,” he addresses his learned companions as follows: “And I turn to you, O learned ones, you who think that you have the keys of heaven and are the eyes and light of the people. … I see plainly that both you and those you teach run confidently into the eternal destruction of your poor souls.” His critique of them was essentially that as “learned ones,” they thought that they were secure from error, and since Menno believed them in error, he pointed out that this was a false view. While he doesn’t directly accuse them of seeking fame here, he argues against a common understanding amongst them that being learned would allow the clergy to be the “eyes and light of the people.” Since Anabaptists considered many clergy to be in error, it could easily make for some measure of dissatisfaction with scholarship. A problem more obvious than seeking fame in the Anabaptists’ eyes, however, would be seeking riches, in opposition to Matthew 19:24. This subject comes up a few times in a poem written by Valentin Ickelsamer that was likely well circulated among the Anabaptists. For example, it reads, “Who collected the treasures of this world, / with indulgences and Turkish money? / Indeed, none other than the scribes.” The practice of indulgences, of course, referred to the oft-decried practice of buying one’s way out of purgatory that caused Martin Luther’s 1518 head-to-head with Cardinal Cajetan, both learned men, which would soon lead to his excommunication. Ickelsamer, then, was feeding off of this widely known problem and pointing out that the clergy were the ones responsible for collecting those indulgences, and since the clergy tended to have the best education, it seemed like an easy tie to make. Ickelsamer would also point out another problem with higher education specifically – that of seeking titles, (supposedly) in violation of Matthew 23:8. Tying in the earlier theme of fame, he writes, “likewise be masters of God’s congregation,thinking they are the only ones that know anything.Because they have the proper title,they are called master and doctor,even though it is writtenthat all Christians are taught of God.Among them no one should be called master; Mt 23 (8)” It seems clear that Ickelsamer considered the pursuit of titles to be vanity and an attempt for those who had the titles to dictate what was being taught in the church. In opposition to this, reformers like Grebel had early on already refused to use titles when addressing others, expecting that since both were brothers, that should be enough to go on for them to correspond as equals – no title(s) should be needed nor sought. Their interpretation of Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers was at play here, causing the comment that “all Christians are taught of God” – it shouldn’t take a special education to see basic biblical truths, as some clergy seem to have been claiming. When Education Became Spiritually Suspicious Another major reason for the Anabaptists’ aversion to higher education was their equation of being highly educated with being rich, making it hard to enter the kingdom of heaven. Ickelsamer points this out, saying, “What Christ says of the wealthyalso applies to the learned ones and their ilk,that they can enter the kingdom of heavenonly with much difficulty and grief. Mk […]

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Anabaptist Leaders Escape from their Zurich Prison

Hans Leaman — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 01:52:13 +0000

March 21, 1526 Just two weeks after their sentence to prison on bread and water alone, the convicted Anabaptist men made a surprising escape from the Zurich prison where they had been held. They had all been held together in the same cell in the “New Tower,” which allowed them to escape as a group. Most of the group fled the city immediately, going in different directions, in pairs or trios. Two members of the group, however, were already so weak from their diet of bread and water that they could not manage to flee the city. As soon as prison guards realized the escape, they sent out search parties and discovered the two that same night. These men—Wilhelm Exell and Fridli Ab-Iberg, who had baptized him shortly before their arrest—were placed back in prison and put on trial two weeks later. Their testimony at the trial allows the daring escape to be reconstructed. Exell told the Council at his trial that Karl Brennwald—who had just accepted baptism from Anthony Roggenacher in January 1526 and began baptizing others shortly before his arrest—noticed a window shutter was unlocked. Grebel, Blaurock, Mantz, and Ockenfuss, as well as Exell, initially thought that they should not try to take advantage of the situation, but rather “die in the Tower.” But apparently their minds changed when another member of the group broke loose a different shutter and, with it, pried the first shutter open. Using books and blocks of wood that they had with them in the cell, they propped the shutter open wide enough so that several prisoners could fit through the gap and climb up a wall. From their perch, the first ones up, including Felix Mantz, saw a prison guard close the drawbridge over the prison moat, lock it, and leave the area. Informing the others that there seemed to be a free opportunity to escape, they obtained a rope and a capstan to pull other members of the group up the wall and then lower them down the other side. Although the New Tower was surrounded by a moat, the moat happened to be drained at the time, meaning that as soon as they were down the last wall they could run free. The group quickly had a discussion about where they would go. Exell recalled that some “joked among themselves and said they would go to the red Indians across the sea.” Joking aside, this is an interesting piece of evidence about their consciousness of the people in the New World and the tantalizing possibilities that the faraway lands posed for those who felt they could no longer fit into their own society in Europe. Although some of the individuals who escaped that night never appear in records again, there is no evidence that any made it to sea. For Exell and Ab-Iberg, their freedom was especially short-lived. Ab-Iberg was so ill by the night of the escape that he lost consciousness once he made it down the last wall with the rope. Realizing his weakness, he knew he could not flee far into the woods like the others. Fortified by a bit of food and drink that Hans Ockenfuss gave him, he went into town and was seized there. In his testimony to the Council, he explained that he could neither read nor write. But “Grebel, Mantz, and Blaurock had read and strengthened him and the others in the Tower,” giving a small picture of the spiritual life that the men carried on during their two weeks in the prison together. Through their reading, Ab-Iberg said, “he had believed in the Scripture.” That the Zurich government permitted them to have books with them in their prison cell is also an indication of its commitment to foster the study of the Word among the common people. Unfortunately, the Zurich authorities likely rued this decision when learning that the Anabaptist men ultimately found the books useful in an unexpected way to make their escape. The Town Council decided not to recommit Exell and Ab-Iberg—both from Catholic cantons to the south of Zurich—to the Tower. Instead, it expelled them from the territory of Zurich with the warning that “if they come in again they shall that very hour be drowned without mercy.” Despite the stern language of these warnings, this punishment was another example of the Zurich government tempering its attempt to stop the spread of Anabaptism among its citizens with a measure of mercy; at this point, councilors kept holding out hope that the Anabaptist fervor might subside before they felt the need to resort to the spectacle of executions. 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.

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Zurich Sentences Early Anabaptist Leaders to Life in Prison and Announces the Death Penalty for Future Rebaptizers

Hans Leaman — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 22:05:09 +0000

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 […]

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Evangelical Preachers Arrive in the Tyrol, Where Anabaptism Rapidly Spreads

Hans Leaman — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 21:26:44 +0000

January – February 1526 In the fall of 1525 and winter of 1526, agitation for church and political reform arrived in the Tyrol, the high Alpine region under Austrian Habsburg control. Several individuals who would later become preachers of Anabaptist concepts of the sacraments and advocates of free-church ecclesiology began itinerant preaching in the mountain villages of the region at this time. Their preaching laid the groundwork for an especially strong interest in Anabaptism over the next few years. Two itinerant preachers who surface in records multiple times were Mathias Messerschmied and a goatherd named Wolfgang or “Wölfl.” Messerschmied had been a canon of a church in the Puster Valley before he was imprisoned for heretical beliefs in 1524 and then headed to Augsburg. Returning to the Tyrol, he distributed literature that he brought from Augsburg critiquing the church’s presentation of the sacraments. Now married, he and his wife hosted meetings where they would read these pamphlets and the Scriptures aloud, since many in the region had not yet learned to read. Wöfl was one of those agrarians who would typically rely on others reading aloud to learn the Scriptures, but he traveled to the city of Innsbruck in 1525-26 and learned how to read from a schoolmaster. Returning to the Puster Valley, he joined the Messerschmieds’ meetings and began preaching. A year later, when he was arrested, he testified that he believed the Mass had become a form of idolatry, and the priests treated it like “a piece of merchandise which the merchant locks up so that he may make some money of it.” These sentiments were likely part of his preaching from early 1526 onward, as they resonate with Messerschmied’s emphases, as well. When Lent 1526 began, Messerschmied and Wöfl were part of a group who gained notoriety in the area for flouting the church’s traditions by intentionally eating sausages—much like Christoph Froschauer and Zwingli’s associates had done in Zurich during Lent 1522.1 In both cases, the act appeared to be intended to assert freedom from priestly traditions and to draw a contrast to the more basic practices of worship found in the New Testament. Others who were pressing for church and political reform in the Tyrolean Alps displayed agreement with Zurich’s style of reformation. For instance, a former Dominican monk from Ulm named Hans Vischer also came to authorities’ attention in the Lenten season of 1526. Speaking in taverns and shops, he reportedly taught that there was “nothing to mass,” indicating a Zwinglian view that the Lord’s Supper should be treated simply as a memorial of Christ’s sacrifice. He complained that the nobles led men into unjust and unnecessary wars and suggested that the people would be better off managing the land without them.2 And most notably, there was Michael Gaismair, who rose to leadership of a band of peasants who had already taken up arms against the lords of the Tyrol in August of 1525. The rebellion failed, and Gaismair was taken to the court city of Innsbruck under arrest. But in October 1525, he managed to break out of the jail where he had been held and fled to the Swiss cantons of Graubünden and Zurich. The cantonal governments gave him refuge, viewing him as a useful ally to them if he were to weaken the Habsburgs’ oversight of the territories to their east. It also appeared to Zwingli and his associates that Gaismair could become a comrade of theirs on religious grounds. With the freedom and support Zurich officials gave him—at the same time that Hubmaier sat in prison—Gaismair used his refuge to recruit more volunteers to stage another rebellion against the Catholic overlords in the Tyrol. To assist in that endeavor, Gaismair wrote up a proposal for a “Territorial Constitution” (Landesordnung) for Tyrol, which he and his army members pledged to implement if they were to gain power. In February or March, Gaismair published it as a flyer that could be easily distributed. Zwingli likely advised him on the text, which sets out a vision of republican governance much like Zurich’s. Before going into details about the operation of courts and the management of farmlands and mines, the signatories swore to establish “laws which are wholly Christian” and “expel all godless people, who persecute the eternal word of God, burden the poor commoner, and impede the common good.” Monastic cloisters would be turned into public hospitals and all “chalices and jewelry should be taken from all churches and ecclesiastical building, melted down, and used for the common needs of the territory.”3 The pitch would be effective enough to rally a group of miners and farmers intent on overthrowing the prince-archbishopric of Salzburg later in the spring.4 Messerschmied, Wölfl, and Vischer all seem to have envisioned their desired church reforms being advanced by political and military means, like Gaismair’s peasant rebellions. When Wölfl was challenged by a conservative priest, Messerschmied and his Bible study associates even joined with a group of miners pledging to “protect and defend” him, by implication with arms, and they likely nailed a threatening letter against the priest to his church door.5 But after Gaismair’s Salzburg rebellion failed, people who had come under their influence would be open to envisioning a different approach to church reform—one that they would encounter when George Blaurock came to their region a year later, emphasizing personal moral commitments rather than top-down civic imposition of “godly law.” Messerschmied himself would become an Anabaptist, and one of the men who heard Wölfl teach in 1526 would, after a few years of spiritual struggles, eventually emerge as the most consequential evangelist for Anabaptism in the region: Jakob Hutter.6 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.

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The Poisoning of the Soul

Micah Barnard — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 21:31:11 +0000

Micah Barnard explores consumerism, identity, and spiritual erosion in 19th-century Russia through Gogol’s The Overcoat, and what it reveals about the modern soul.

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