July 27, 1525

One of the hundreds of men and women who joined the Anabaptist movement at Eastertime in St. Gall was Johannes (Hans) Krüsi. He had been a teacher in the Latin school of the village of Wil when he went to St. Gall, about half a day’s walk, to hear Conrad Grebel preach. When overseers in Wil learned that he had been relating closely with known Anabaptists after Easter, such as Wolfgang Uliman, he lost his teaching post and had to make ends meet by picking up the craft of weaving.¹ But his literacy skills remained very useful for church life. Krüsi soon started serving as a Bible “reader” for other Anabaptists, and he contributed to a project that Conrad Grebel had begun: the creation of a concordance of Scriptures in Swiss German, arranged by topic, covering issues of faith and baptism that Anabaptists were especially concerned about.² The collection of scriptures likely circulated among Anabaptists mainly through handwritten copies, but it was also printed later in 1525 under the name Hans Nagel von Klingau, a name that is also attached to Krüsi through his father’s family. The concordance surely advanced Anabaptists’ abilities to memorize relevant Scripture passages when asked for a defense of their faith—whether by neighbors interested in theological discussions or by interrogators in prison.³

For Krüsi, the latter situation would unfortunately become necessary by summertime. In early June, a week after Uliman carried out an impromptu debate with Vadian and clergy in church, the town councilors of St. Gall decided to ban Anabaptists from meeting in the town.⁴ By that time, Krüsi had been appointed by Anabaptists in the region to preach and baptize. He journeyed frequently between the city and in his home area, finding an especially receptive audience in the village of Tablat. So many residents of the village were excited about his preaching that a crowd effectively resisted the efforts of the constable of the district and several soldiers to arrest him in late May. While a few threw rocks at the law enforcement officers, Krüsi urged them to pray from the constable “that he also might accept their true faith.” Government records indicate the constable’s belief that people from almost every village in the district had volunteered to defend Krüsi “with body and goods” if authorities attempted his arrest again. But on the day of the St. Gall ban on Anabaptist meetings, Krüsi was in the city to preach and lead the Lord’s Supper. He went forward with the meeting and apparently preached against the veneration of relics and images; afterward, at least, several St. Gallers demolished a church’s altar and seized the bones of saints housed in a church and threw them out. A few days later, St. Gall arrested Krüsi, but released him again on June 16 on condition that he cease preaching and rebaptizing. Word soon spread, however, that he returned to leadership among the Anabaptists outside the city. When he was sleeping one night, the constable of St. Gall seized him from his bed and transferred him to the city of Lucerne, where he would be far removed from his supporters. Seven days after his trial there, Krüsi was burned at the stake, making him the third person to be executed on account of his Anabaptist activities.⁵

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. Leland Harder, ed., The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism: The Grebel Letters and Related Documents, (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1985), 554-55. ↩︎
2. See Conrad Grebel to Andreas Castelberger (Zurich, Apr. 25, 1525), in Harder, 357-58. ↩︎
3. Heinold Fast, “Hans Krüsis Büchlein über Glauben und Taufe: Ein Täuferdruck von 1525,” in The Heritage of Menno Simons: A Legacy of Faith, ed. C. J. Dyck (Newton, KS: Mennonite Publication Office, 1962), 213-31; Werner Packull, Hutterite Beginnings: Communitarian Experiments during the Reformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 30-31; Harder, 425-28, 554. For the full text of the concordance, see Quellen zur Geschichte der Täifer in der Schweiz, vol. 2: Ostschweiz, ed. Heinold Fast (Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1973), 265-73. ↩︎
4. Harder., 384-85. ↩︎
5. Harder, 554-556. ↩︎