January 30 – February 8, 1525

The 25 Anabaptists who were arrested in Zollikon on January 30 remained imprisoned in Zurich until February 8. At some point during those nine days, Ulrich Zwingli again showed a personal interest in debating with the dissidents over theology, even though most of his interlocutors were now lay villagers rather than fellow priests and students of the Biblical languages. Instead of rehashing the propriety of infant baptism, where he was defending the practice, the conversations now turned on the propriety of re-baptism, where Zwingli felt he was on the offense:  since the Anabaptists had earlier insisted that he provide precedents for infant baptism in the New Testament, he now “demanded of them the Scripture” showing that any early Christians were “baptized twice.”¹

This was the news that Hans Hottinger, a Zollikon resident sympathetic to Anabaptist positions, passed on to other Zollikon residents who had gathered one evening, including the wives and relatives of several of the prisoners. In this time of trial, they were supporting each other by sharing supper together. Hottinger had gone to Zurich to check in on the prisoners because, as he later testified, “he had some friends among them” and wanted to “see how they were and how they were planning to defend themselves.” After talking, the prisoners “asked him to go to Zollikon to their wives and children to see how they were getting along and to tell them that they were in good condition and to bring them greetings.”² According to the supporters of the prisoners who had gathered in Zollikon, Hottinger passed on the word, encouraging them to “remain cheerful and steadfast.”³

But Hottinger also brought back the prisoners’ account of their interview with Zwingli, and he exulted to share the news that these villagers’ knowledge of the Scriptures set Zwingli back on his heels.  After “Master Huldrych Zwingli had said that no one was baptized twice,” the Anabaptists “showed him the Scripture” providing precedent for rebaptism:  Acts 19 gave the account of about twelve men encountered by Paul in Ephesus who had received baptism from John the Baptist. Paul distinguished between John’s “baptism of repentance” and baptism based on belief “in the one coming after him, that is, in Jesus.”⁴ These men of Ephesus believed and were then “baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.”  According to Rudy and Claus Murer’s testimony about Hottinger’s report, when Zwingli heard the prisoner’s recollection of the Ephesians’ baptism, he responded with surprise, saying, “Ha, that happened once.”⁵  When Zwingli apparently attempted to argue that John the Baptist’s baptism did not count as a Christian baptism, so that the Ephesians were only truly baptized once through Paul,⁶ the prisoners responded that, with such criteria, then “they also had been baptized only once.”⁷ If John the Baptist’s baptism had not been undertaken with consciousness of Jesus as the Lord and Savior, then the same could be said for their baptisms as infants. They were undergoing new baptisms as adults in order to experience baptism, for the first time, as believers in the lordship of Jesus. The prison conversation gave some Anabaptists hope that Zwingli would soon change his position.⁸

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. Heine Murer Testimony on Hans Hottinger (Feb. 18-25, 1525), in The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism: The Grebel Letters and Related Documents, ed. Leland Harder (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1985), 347. ↩︎
2. Hans Hottinger Testimony, (Feb. 25, 1525), in ibid., 349. ↩︎
3. Heine Schänik Testimony on Hans Hottinger (Feb. 18-25, 1525), in ibid., 347. ↩︎
4. Acts 19:1-7. ↩︎
5. Rudy Murer Testimony on Hans Hottinger (Feb. 18-25), reiterated by Claus Murer, in Harder, 347. ↩︎
6. Hans Hottinger Testimony, (Feb. 25, 1525), in ibid., 349. ↩︎
7. Heine Schänik Testimony on Hans Hottinger (Feb. 18-25, 1525), in ibid., 347. ↩︎
8. Heine Horner Testimony on Hans Hottinger (Feb. 18-25), in ibid., 348. ↩︎