Zurich, 1525, to Münster, 1536 · Story · Featured Study
The Anabaptists
Believers who baptized one another on their confession of faith, and the rulers who answered them with prison, water, fire and the sword.
Zwingli printed the Anabaptists' own articles of 1527 in order to refute them, and said hardly any Anabaptist lacked a copy.
- Where
- Zurich
- When
- January 1525 to January 1536
Jan Luyken, Dirk Willems saves his pursuer, 1685. Public domain.
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,
Summary
The Anabaptists baptized only those who confessed their faith. They would not bear the sword. Their leaders were drowned, burned and beheaded.
- Its first leaders, Grebel and Manz, talked with Zwingli and then broke with him over infant baptism.
- Their seven articles of 1527 set the ban in the place of the sword.
- Anabaptists ruled Münster from 1534 until the city fell in June 1535.
- Menno Simons, whose followers became the Mennonites, said he took no part in Münster.
The Texts the First Anabaptists Read
They read teaching before baptism in Matthew 28, and their confession of 1632 reads peace toward enemies in Matthew 5.
Menno Simons read Matthew 28, Mark 16 and Acts 2 to put faith before baptism. He taught that the disciple lays down the sword.
Teaching before baptism
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,
The first Anabaptists read the command to make disciples before the command to baptize.
Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.
Menno cites it to show that baptism followed faith.
Mark 16:16BSB
Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Menno quotes Peter's call to repent and be baptized in his chapter on baptism.
Acts 2:38BSB
The sword and the enemy
But I tell you not to resist an evil person. If someone slaps you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also;
The Mennonite confession of 1632 cites it for putting the sword into the sheath.
Matthew 5:39BSB
But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
The same article cites it beside Matthew 5:39 for prayer for enemies.
Matthew 5:44BSB
For he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not carry the sword in vain. He is God’s servant, an agent of retribution to the wrongdoer.
Sattler cited it to his judges to call them ministers of God.
Romans 13:4BSB
The weapons of our warfare are not the weapons of the world. Instead, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.
Menno quotes Paul's words on weapons when he answers the charge of Münster.
Matthew 5:39, Matthew 5:44, Romans 13:4, 2 Corinthians 10:4
Who Recorded the First Anabaptists
The record comes from their judges, their opponents and their own books.
The judges and the opponents wrote first, and the movement's own books came later.
| Witness | Written | Its side |
|---|---|---|
| The Zurich council's acts and sentences, printed by Egli in 1879 | 1525 to 1527 | The court that judged them |
| Zwingli, Refutation of the Tricks of the Catabaptists, in Preble's English of 1901 | 1527 | Their chief opponent in Zurich |
| Bullinger, history of the Reformation, in Burrage's English of 1882 | Sixteenth century | Zwingli's successor at Zurich |
| The Hutterite chronicle, the Geschicht-Buch, printed in 1923 | Compiled after the events | Hutterite brethren writing of their own forebears |
| Menno Simons, Complete Works, in Funk's English of 1871 | 1539 to 1561 | The Dutch leader, writing for his own people |
| Van Braght, the Martyrs Mirror, in Sohm's English of 1886 | 1660 | A Mennonite compiler of the martyrs |
Zurich, From the First Baptisms to the Drowning of Manz
Two years of the council's orders ran from the first baptisms to the water.
After a public disputation on baptism, the Zurich council ordered on 18 January 1525 that every unbaptized child be baptized within eight days. Families who refused faced banishment.
On 21 January the council ordered Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz to stop their disputing, closed their separate schools and banished four of their companions.
The Hutterite chronicle, a later record of a community descended from the movement, tells the first baptism. After prayer, Georg Blaurock asked Grebel to baptize him on his faith, and then Blaurock baptized the others.
Zwingli, writing against them in 1527, dates it from the hostile side: “Within three, or at most four, days it was announced that the leaders of the sect had baptized fifteen brethren.”
Neither the chronicle nor Zwingli prints the day of the first baptisms, so the record gives it only as January 1525.
The mandate of 7 March 15262 paragraphs
On 7 March 1526 the council sent Manz, Blaurock, Grebel and others to the new tower on bread and water. By mandate it set drowning without mercy as the penalty for anyone who baptized another again.
The council's scribe wrote the year of the mandate as 1525 by mistake, as the editor of the records, Emil Egli, notes.
On 5 January 1527 the council sentenced Manz to be bound and thrown into the water. The sentence names three charges, his rebaptizing, his separate sect and his teaching that no Christian may rule or judge with the sword.
Bullinger, Zwingli's successor and a hostile witness, writes that on the way “his mother and brother came to him, and exhorted him to be steadfast.”
He says Manz sang “In manus tuas, Domine” before he was drowned.
The Martyrs Mirror, compiled in 1660, heads its entry on Manz with the year 1526, against the council's own sentence of 1527. It keeps his last admonition, which says, “The true love of Christ shall not destroy the enemy.”
The Seven Articles of February 1527 and Sattler's Death
Michael Sattler led the meeting, and he was burned three months after it.
Böhmer and McGlothlin both date the articles to 24 February 1527, from one manuscript at Pressburg. The sources differ on the place.
Böhmer, in 1910, places the meeting at the Baden village of Schlatt, and McGlothlin, in 1911, at Schlatten am Randen near Schaffhausen. Burrage places it at Schleitheim in 1882, and so does Wenger's English of 1945.
In Preble's English of Zwingli's Latin, the first article says, “Baptism should be administered to all who have been taught penitence and change of life.”
The sixth calls the sword “an ordinance of God outside of the perfection of Christ” and says that in that perfection “we use only excommunication.”
The seventh says that Christ “forbids all oaths.”
In the same English the second article treats excommunication, the third the breaking of bread, the fourth separation from evil, and the fifth the pastors of the church.
The Martyrs Mirror prints the trial of Michael Sattler, whom Böhmer names as the meeting's leader. Sattler called his judges “ministers of God,” appointed “to punish the evil, and to defend and protect the pious.”
The sentence, dated 21 May 1527, ordered his tongue cut out, his body torn with red-hot tongs and burned. The Mirror says his brethren were executed with the sword and the sisters drowned.
Münster, 1534 to 1535, the Kingdom That Failed
Anabaptists won the city's government in 1534, and its fall became the charge laid against them all.
Bax writes that the Anabaptists won supreme power in Münster by the election of 23 February 1534 and set up a kingdom there. By his account the besieged city passed back to its bishop on 25 June 1535.
On 22 January 1536, as Bax gives it from the Catholic chronicler Kerssenbrock, Jan of Leiden, Knipperdolling and Krechting were executed on the Prinzipalmarkt. Their bodies were hung in cages from the tower of St Lambert's, where Bax wrote in 1903 that “the original cages may still be seen.”
Bax is an interested writer, since he calls the condemned “martyrs to the doctrine of Anabaptism.”
Kerssenbrock was a chronicler for the side that took the city.
Münster is the strongest evidence for the charge that the new baptism led to rebellion. Kerssenbrock told the kingdom as its fruit, and Menno says he heard the charge on every side.
Menno Simons and the Martyrs Mirror
Menno answered the charge of Münster, and van Braght gathered the movement's martyrs.
Menno Simons, a priest in Friesland from 1524, tells in his own account that the beheading of Sicke Snyder at Leeuwarden for being rebaptized first set him searching the Scriptures on baptism.
His renunciation, first printed in Dutch in 1554, is his own defence of his party. It opens, “We are falsely accused, by our opponents, of following the teachings of Munster.”
He says he had opposed those teachings “for more than seventeen years.”
To the rulers who named Münster against him, he wrote that the rightly baptized “know of no weapons other than patience, hope, quiet, and God's word.”
Thieleman van Braght gathered the martyrs' accounts in the Martyrs Mirror of 1660. He reports, as told by “trustworthy persons,” that Dirk Willems turned back on the ice to save the man pursuing him.
The Mirror prints the Asperen sentence of 16 May 1569, which confirms Willems's death by fire and the charge of rebaptism. The rescue rests on van Braght's report, written about ninety years after it.
The churches that came from these congregations, the Mennonites, the Amish, the Hutterites and the Brethren, stand on their own page with their counts today.
Whom the Church Should Baptize
Zwingli argued from the covenant, and the articles from teaching before baptism.
Zwingli answered in his Refutation that Hebrew infants were sealed with circumcision, “the sign of the covenant,” and so were under the covenant. He wrote that infants “are not excluded because they cannot hear or understand.”
The articles of 1527 and Menno gave baptism to those taught first who confess faith. MannaFest stands in the Wesleyan-Pentecostal line, which baptizes believers.
Books to Read Next
The Complete Works of Menno Simon
Menno Simons, translated by John F. Funk · 1871
Menno writes on baptism, the sword and Münster in his own words.
Free scan of the 1871 EnglishThe Selected Works of Huldreich Zwingli
Huldreich Zwingli, edited by Samuel Macauley Jackson · 1901
It holds the Refutation of 1527, with the articles inside it.
Free scan of the 1901 editionA History of the Anabaptists in Switzerland
Henry S. Burrage · 1882
Burrage tells the Swiss story and gives Bullinger's account of Manz in English.
Free at the Internet ArchiveRise and Fall of the Anabaptists
E. Belfort Bax · 1903
Bax tells the kingdom of Münster from the chronicles of the siege.
Free scan of the 1903 printingWhat the First Anabaptists Left
The first Anabaptists held that a church is gathered from those who believe and are then baptized, and that Christ's people bear no sword. Their judges and their opponents recorded them first, and Münster tested the claim.
Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- The Holy Bible, Berean Standard Bible (read 2026)
- Emil Egli, Actensammlung zur Geschichte der Zürcher Reformation (Zürich, 1879), numbers 621, 622, 624, 934, 936, 937 and 1109, pages 275 to 277, 444 to 445 and 529 to 530.
- Huldreich Zwingli, Refutation of the Tricks of the Catabaptists (1527), translated by Henry Preble, in Samuel Macauley Jackson, ed., Selected Works of Huldreich Zwingli (Philadelphia, 1901), pages 134 to 135, 177 to 178, 196 to 197, 206 and 222 to 223.
- Henry S. Burrage, A History of the Anabaptists in Switzerland (Philadelphia, 1882), pages 99 to 100, 168 to 172 (Bullinger, Reformationsgeschichte I, 382) and 219.
- Geschicht-Buch der Hutterischen Brüder, edited by the Hutterian Brethren in America (Standoff Colony, 1923), pages 34 to 35.
- Thieleman J. van Braght, Martyrs Mirror (1660), translated by Joseph F. Sohm (1886), pages 415 to 418 (Manz and Sattler) and 741 to 742 (Willems), in the Herald Press printing of 2012.
- Heinrich Böhmer, ed., Urkunden zur Geschichte des Bauernkrieges und der Wiedertäufer (Bonn, 1910), Kleine Texte 50/51, IV, introduction, pages 25 to 26.
- W. J. McGlothlin, Baptist Confessions of Faith (Philadelphia, 1911), part I, Earliest Anabaptist Articles, pages 2 to 3.
- J. C. Wenger, translator, The Schleitheim Confession of Faith, Mennonite Quarterly Review XIX, 4 (October 1945), pages 247 to 253, the cover letter.
- E. Belfort Bax, Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists (London, 1903), pages 317 to 320, quoting Kerssenbrock II, 212.
- The Complete Works of Menno Simon, translated by John F. Funk (Elkhart, 1871), To the Reader and pages 3 to 5 (the Renunciation of 1554), pages 24 to 25 (Concerning Baptism) and 81 to 82 (the exhortation to all in authority)
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