January 21, 1525

On January 21, 1525, the Zurich Council followed up its mandate from three days earlier with its first orders of banishment for objectors to infant baptism: Wilhelm Reublin and Hans Brötli, the first pastors to preach against infant baptism in the Zurich countryside, the bookseller Andreas Castelberger, who had been a close associate of Conrad Grebel in Biblical studies over the prior year, and Ludwig Hätzer, the Hebrew scholar who had joined Grebel at one of the December discussions on baptism with Zwingli, were all ordered to vacate the canton within eight days. 

Grebel and Felix Mantz were also named in the decree, but treated with more forbearance—likely due to their families’ stronger political connections in the canton. The Council members merely made clear that they had tired of hearing the young men’s complaints on church policy and expected them, if they were to conform to their families’ histories of good citizenship, to fall in line with the Council’s discernment: “Conrad Grebel and Mantz shall be told thenceforth to desist from their arguing and questioning and be satisfied with Milords’ judgment, for no more disputations will be permitted hereafter.”¹  

With the specter of exile hanging over them, about fifteen colleagues of these men gathered that evening in a home to pray.  George Blaurock, an ordained priest described in records as a man of godly zeal, felt moved to ask for rebaptism as a believing adult. Grebel, though a layman, baptized him, and then others in the group asked for rebaptism too. One letter-writer, recalling the evening about five years later, leaves it unclear whether Grebel or Blaurock acted as the baptizer for the others that evening, while the Hutterite chronicler, Kaspar Braitmichel, indicated several decades later that Blaurock baptized the others after his own baptism.² “Together they surrendered themselves to the Lord,” Braitmichel wrote. “They confirmed one another for the service of the Gospel and began to teach the faith and to keep it. This was the beginning of separation from the world and its evil ways.”³  

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.  Council Decree, (Zurich, Jan. 21, 1525), in The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism: The Grebel Letters and Related Documents, ed. Leland Harder (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1985), 338. ↩︎
2. Klettgau/Cologne Letter (1530), in ibid., 342; The Chronicle of the Hutterian Brethren, Vol. 1 (Rifton, NY: Plough, 1986), 41-47. ↩︎
3. Chronicle, 46. ↩︎