Menno Simons: Dutch Reformer Between Luther, Erasmus, and the Holy Spirit a Study in the Problem Areas of Menno Scholarship

By Abraham Friesen

In 1962, the Reformation scholar Hans Hillerbrand said the following of Menno Simons: For the past four hundred years he (has been) a man with a bad presscriticized not only by all of his foes outside his tradition, but also by many of his friends within. Outsiders accused him of, at the very least, sympathizing if not actively supporting the revolutionaries involved in the notorious Mnster uprising of 15341535, the jihadists of the sixteenth century. Many insiders, at first fearful that this might indeed be the case, sought early to distance themselves from him, calling themselves Doopsgezinde rather than Mennists. Later, other insiders, having moved beyond Menno theologically under the influence of the Enlightenment and Rationalism, criticized him for being overly dogmatic and narrow-minded. Only a few pietists like Jung Stilling and pietistically influenced Dutch Mennonites like Johannes Deknatel, together with the occasional Baptist scholar like J. Newton Brown, spoke highly of him. Indeed, the latter said of Menno: But there stood one among them (the great reformers) whom they knew not; who was greater than theymore truly eminent in the likeness of their common Lord.

In a first section, this study begins with a chapter on the problem of reform in the sixteenth century. A second section on the 15341535 Mnster uprising that has so bedeviled Menno historiography follows. Both sections seek to recreate, at least to a degree, the larger context of Mennos life and activity and free him from the prejudices of the past. It does so by making the casenot made heretoforethat Menno was powerfully influenced, not by the revolutionaries, but by the two intellectual giants of the age: Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus. But the study also takes seriously Mennos repeated assertion that he had experienced a life-transforming conversion through the power of the Holy Spirit in early 1535. With this as background, the study then investigatesin a chronological sequencethe key problem areas of Menno scholarship that have arisen over the years. It concludes with a brief assessment of his legacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503562837

Abraham Friesen

Abraham Friesern was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, on December 20, 1933, to Dutch Mennonite parents who had migrated from Siberia, Russia, in 1926. One of eleven children, he grew up on a farm near the town of LaSalle, Manitoba, and attended a one-room country school for his first four grades, moving to a “consolidated” school of four rooms in Oak Bluff, Manitoba, for the next four grades. His high school years were spent in the city of Winnipeg at a private school. He received his university training at the University of Manitoba (BA ’58 and MA ’62), the University of Göttingen (1957–58), Stanford University (Ph.D. ’67) and the Institute for European History in Mainz, Germany (’65 to ’67). From 1960 to 1963 Friesen taught at a private high school in Winnipeg, and in the summer of 1967, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Renaissance and Reformation History at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He remained there for the entire thirty-seven years of his teaching career, retiring in 2004. Together with his wife, Gerry, he now lives in Fresno, California. Friesen is the author of the following major studies: Reformation and Utopia: the Marxist Interpretation of the Reformation and its Antecedents (1974); Thomas Müntzer, A Destroyer of the Godless (1990); History and Renewal in the Anabaptist / Mennonite Tradition (1994); Erasmus, the Anabaptists, and the Great Commission (1998); In Defense of Priovilege: Russian Mennonites and the State before and during World War I (2006); and Reformers, Radicals, Revolutionaries: Anabaptism in the Context of the Reformation Conflict (2012). He has published some eighty essays, articles, chapters in various learned venues, translated some three major studies: one from the sixteenth century, one from the nineteenth, and one from the early twentieth century. Over the years, Friesen has lectured widely in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Paraguay, delivering a number of endowed lectureships.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Abbreviations

Dramatis Personae

Introduction

PART I

The Reformation, An Era of Recovery and Conflict

1 Revolutions, Spiritual and Material

PART II

The Movement

Münster as Background and Context

2 Patterns and Movements in History

3 The Inception of the Movement

a) The Microcosm

b) The Macrocosm

4 Apocalypse and Derailment

5 Denouement

6 Assessing Hoffman

7 The Münster Legacy

PART III

The Man, Menno Simons

Dutch Reformer between Luther, Erasmus, and the Holy Spirit

8 Introduction

9 Historiography

10 The Netherlands, Luther, and Erasmus

11 Early Life

12 Conversion

13 Baptism and Early Theological Development

14 The Incarnation

15 The Sword

16 The Defection of Obbe Philips

17 Church Founder or Church Reorganizer?

18 Menno’s Church and Church History

19 Persecution

20 Faithfulness to the Biblical Text

21 A Missional Theology

22 The Christian Prince

23 The Ban

24 Menno: Reading and Writing

25 Legacy

Biography

To Gerry

A scholarly analysis of how Menno Simons differed from other champions of ‘radical’ change; a man who, despite fierce opposition by most political and religious leaders, and having a price on his head, refused to let threats of persecution, imprisonment, or death force him to abandon his understanding of Christ’s teachings. A tour de force.

Peter Klassen, Professor of History Emeritus,

The California State University at Fresno.

Here is a stirring and convincingly argued account of the Reformation’s corruption by political authority and the Anabaptist struggle, often failing, to preach and live under the rule of Christ with no weapons except patience and the Word of God. More specifically it places the theological and political posture of Menno in the context of the Reformation conversations about power and authority: the evangelical reform conversation about how a faithful church can be guided by civil authority and the apocalyptic revolution conversation about how a righteous church can replace civil authority. Friesen’s scholarship tests the assumption that Anabaptism was a coherent social movement, not merely a chaotic landscape of diverse religious arguments. As a result, this work begins to reweave the polygenetic strands of the Anabaptist cloth back together into a colorful and artful tapestry. What polygenesis scholarship pulled apart, often for good reason, Friesen’s work stiches back together, even while attending unblinkingly to the unruly threads. And at the center stands Menno’s study of the New Testament, as presented in Erasmus’s scholarship, which led him to abandon a confortable pastoral position of high status in establishment Christianity for the sake of involvement with and leadership of a discredited and fragmented wing of the Anabaptist community.

Gerald Mast, Professor of History and Religion,

Bluffton University, Bluffton, Ohio.

"As a lifetime reader of Anabaptistica, I enjoyed marginal confidence that I could marshal a more than average grasp of the subject. Reading Abraham Friesen’s monumental study of the life and theology of Menno Simons demonstrated the fallacy of that conclusion by introducing me to new vistas on just about every page. And how does he do it? This profoundly academic book is sufficiently scintillating to substitute for a griping novel. The chapters concerning Menno’s conversion and life in the Spirit put me on my knees. Friesen extricated Menno from the cabal in which he was associated with the Münsterites. Simply put, Menno Simons: Dutch Reformer between Luther, Erasmus and the Holy Spirit carves a fresh path that will benefit us all in Reformation studies. Time for only one book this year on the Reformation? This is the volume you cannot afford to miss."

Paige Patterson, President Southwestern Baptist

Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas.

In this bold intellectual biography of Menno Simons – the first to appear in the English language in nearly 50 years – historian Abraham Friesen vigorously reclaims Menno as an orthodox Christian and the legitimate founder of the Mennonite tradition. Menno’s theological development is more deeply indebted to Erasmus and Luther than to Melchior Hoffman, and his distinctive theological positions – on topics like the sword, the incarnation, discipline and ecclesiology – emerge out of his thoroughgoing Biblicism rather than events in Münster in 1535. This wide-ranging argument is anchored in a remarkable grasp of the primary sources and a profound engagement with the historiographical tradition. The book will undoubtedly spark renewed and vigorous debate on Menno’s life and thought, a debate that is long overdue.

John Roth, Professor of History at Goshen College

and Editor of the Mennonite Quarterly Review.

"Menno Simons has long awaited a masterful study. Finally in Friesen’s work we have the story that unravels the origins of Menno’s thought and dispels all of the commentators who have linked him either to the apocalyptic fanaticism of the Münsterites or some counter group in the Catholic church like the Waldenses. Friesen’s Menno portrays a man who completed what the Magisterial Reformers began but either could not or would not finish. To do so he drew heavily from the early writings of Luther, Erasmus’ paraphrases of the books of the New Testament, and the biblical text itself. Thus Friesen reclaims Menno from the bad press that began with his contemporaries who were wed to the religio-political structures that the Enlightenment discarded. Menno is the authentic keeper of reformed aspirations. Menno Simons will quickly become the definitive intellectual biography of this important sixteenth-century reformer who has historically been misinterpreted by friend and foe alike. This is a work of impressive erudition that clears away centuries of historiographical debris."

Paul Toews, Professor of History and Director of the Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies Emeritus, Fresno Pacific University.

Menno Simons has been misrepresented for too long by too many, so much so that only a dedicated genius could untangle the convoluted historiography and properly redraw the lineaments of Menno’s life and thought. In Abraham Friesen we finally have our master. Herein a lifetime of recognized scholarship has been judiciously focused on carefully discerning and properly representing the context, life, and legacy of his subject. Friesen’s magnum opus will benefit the general reader and the academic specialist alike, and it should remain unsurpassed for centuries. Delightfully, enlightening historical discoveries are relayed with well-turned phrases on nearly every page, and importantly, delinquent scholars will never again be able to foist their shambolic treatments on the premier leader of the later Anabaptist movement in the sixteenth century.

Malcolm Yarnell, Professor of Systematic Theology and Director

of the Oxford Study Program, Southwestern Baptist

Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas.

Acknowledgments

Irvin Horst should have written the intellectual biography of Menno. But he never got to it despite having spent much of his academic life studying the man while at the University of Amsterdam. Nonetheless, every Menno scholar is indebted to his work. I came to the study of Menno by default, having been asked to deliver a paper on Menno and Münster in 1990 at a symposium in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in Horst’s honor, Some twenty years later I was asked by a group of German Mennonites to write a fifty-page introduction for a new German translation of the reformer’s works. Having completed the assigned task, it seemed only natural that, having again immersed myself in the reformer’s writings, I should attempt a larger study.

Menno had never been the central focus of my study though I had read through his collected works on at least three separate occasions. Then, some twenty years or so ago I acquired a 1681 Dutch edition of his works. While teaching at Goshen College during the winter semester of 2006 I worked through much of the Menno and related materials contained in the college’s excellent Historical Library, the same library that, back in the 1980s, had permitted me to take Leo Jud’s 1535 translation of Erasmus’ paraphrases to Santa Barbara with me for an entire year! On our nearly annual spring-break trips to the Masanutten Resort just outside of Harrisonburg, Virginia, we also paid many-a-visit to the Menno Simons Library located on the campus of Eastern Mennonite University, actually spending an entire week in it in October 2012. These two libraries made it possible for me to build up a considerable Menno bibliography that allowed me to tackle the problem of Menno Simons. The one thing, however, that all these fine institutions lacked, indeed that every institution in the world lacks, is a critical edition of Menno’s works. Until we have that all studies of Menno must be deficient.

Old friends like Peter Klassen and Paul Toews – and new friends like Marvin Kroeker – read the manuscript in progress. And the Council of Senior Professionals at Fresno Pacific University allowed me to explore my interpretation of Menno in two separate lectures that went on far too long. Others, like Paige Patterson, Gerald Mast and John Roth and Malcolm Yarnell only read the manuscript on completion. To all, I extend my most sincere thanks for their comments and suggestions. The italics are mine and have been employed simply for the sake of emphasis.

But the person who deserves the most credit for this study is my loving wife of over fifty-two years. Gerry – now battling pancreatic cancer – has been my constant encouragement and inspiration in spite of her illness. I cannot adequately express the admiration and love I have fort her. She deserves much more than the loving dedication of this book. Our bond shall never be severed.

Abraham Friesen, Professor of History Emeritus, UC Santa Barbara

Fresno, California

April 14, 2015

Preface

Revolutionary/terrorist splinter groups like the current Muslim jihadists—by whatever name they may be called today—are often portrayed as implicating the larger, more moderate, and perhaps even peaceful ethnic or religious bodies from which they have emerged. Though the reasons for doing so are mostly unspoken, the following argument is usually either implied or openly articulated: Did they not all sprout from the same seed, and do they not all pray to the same God and venerate the same prophet? And share the same Koran as their holy book? Are they not therefore essentially alike? The only thing that differentiates the peaceful from the revolutionary is that the latter have had the opportunity to realize their revolutionary potential while the great majority have not. For, as the Ancients argued, human nature does not change or develop; only circumstances change. And it is these changed circumstances—if we grasp them—that allow us to realize our human potential. Therefore, given the right circumstances, all Muslims will become jihadists. All the currently peaceful Muslims lack is opportunity.

This argument has its source in what one historian has called a tradition of ancient biography and psychology that people’s inborn character remains with them unchanged, and that, if there does seem to be a change, it is only a revelation of preexisting but hitherto latent features.¹ But if it is a tradition of ancient biography, how did it come to be applied to social, ethnic, or religious groups? To the best of my knowledge, it was Luther’s partner, Philip Melanchthon, who, in the sixteenth century, first expanded this biographical theory to include larger groups. In 1525, he used the theory to explain how Luther’s erstwhile follower, Thomas M 63434.png ntzer, had become a leader of the revolutionary peasants. Ten years later, when the revolutionary followers of Melchior Hoffman took over the Westphalian city of Münster, Melanchthon expanded the theory to include all members of the Anabaptist movement, even though no one else had ever been involved in any insurrections. And the symbol of this adherence to violence was considered to be an adult’s or a believer’s baptism. Thus, when Menno Simons, the Dutch reformer and subject of our study, was rebaptized in early 1536, he was immediately regarded as a revolutionary. As such, Emperor Charles V issued an edict against him in 1542, demanding his capture and execution. And even though most scholars today no longer consider Menno an adherent of the revolutionary wing of the splinter group, virtually all regard him as an adherent of the more peaceful branch of that group: the Melchiorites, followers of Melchior Hoffman. Even the Swiss Brethren, former followers of the Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli, came to be included in the condemnation, Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor saying of them: Our gracious God has undoubtedly desired, through the actions of the Munsterites, to reveal to the world, but especially to His elect, the great and deceptive evil that lies secretly hidden behind Anabaptism. As with the jihadists today, the revolutionary splinter group in Westphalia was believed to have indicted the entire movement.

But Menno was not guilty as charged. Indeed, his intellectual development as a reformer began well before Melchior Hoffman appeared on the Dutch scene in 1529 and was independent of either him or his followers; it began in 1525 with doubts about the efficacy of the Catholic mass. This led him to a study of the Bible and Luther’s writings on the mass, especially the latter’s On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, written in 1520, with its powerful articulation of the doctrine of sola scriptura. Having made Luther’s doctrine his own, he read Erasmus’ paraphrases on the books of the New Testament, especially his paraphrases on the Gospel of Matthew and the Acts of the Apostles, where he discovered Erasmus’ unique interpretation of Christ’s Great Commission. As had the Swiss Anabaptists before him, he made this doctrine his own. With the Bible as lodestar, Menno navigated the religious waters of the early years of the Reformation, taking what seemed to him in accord with the teachings of Scripture and rejecting what did not. It was in this frame of mind that he encountered the revolutionaries in 1534, at a time, that is, when his theology was already nearly fully formed. Now, if Menno had been able to navigate his way through all the writings of the early reformers, and in the process remain true to the Scriptures, why would he—in 1534–35—fall prey to the blandishments of the revolutionaries? The fact is that he did not; and those who attempted to associate him with the revolutionaries did so only to demonize him and the rest of the peaceful Anabaptists.

Of all the Radical Reformers so demonized by Melanchthon’s misuse of the Ancient theory of biography, Menno was the only one to recognize the nature of the argument. As we shall see, he repudiated Melanchthon’s attempt to implicate all Anabaptists in the revolutionary activities of the small splinter group by pointing out that their argument, pared down to its essential elements, went somewhat as follows: Judas (Jan of Leiden) was a traitor and a thief; therefore all the other apostles (Menno et al) were traitors and thieves. Again, Simon the sorcerer (Jan Mattys) was a scoundrel; therefore all members of the apostolic churches (Anabaptist churches) were scoundrels, etc. He (Gellius Faber) knows very well that we do not, and may not, allow sect makers, peacebreakers, and unscriptural agitators in the fellowship of the peaceful and pious, as has been said. Put into the contemporary context, just because Osama bin Laden was a jihadist does not mean that every member of the Muslim religion is a jihadist. But the jokers in the argument are two little words: potential and opportunity. To become a revolutionary one must have both potential and the opportunity to become one. Living a God-fearing and peaceful life, therefore, only means that you have either not yet realized your true potential, or that you have not had an opportunity to realize it. Under these circumstances the authorities are obligated, as Philip Melanchthon himself stated, to judge with the sword those belonging to the larger movement who have as yet committed no crime. Thus was persecution of the peaceful followers of Menno and the rest of the Anabaptists justified.

Time, however, said Menno, would prove their accusers wrong. And it has. For as the great Dutch cultural historian, Johan Huizinga, once said of Menno’s followers: they turned out to be the most peaceful citizens of all. History itself has proven all the Magisterial Reformers’ predictions that Menno’s followers were "like-minded with those of Munster, that (they) wished to capture cities and lands, if only (they) could, and that (they) instigate tumults, resort to the sword, steal and pick pockets, practice polygamy," and so on, wrong. Nearly five hundred years after the fact Mennonites are today called one of the three historic peace churches. Thus has history vindicated Menno’s contention that his accusers and persecutors would, in the end, be proven wrong.

Abraham Friesen

Professor of History Emeritus

UC Santa Barbara

Abbreviations

Augustine, Works: Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. Edited by

Philip Schaff, 38 vols. Reprint Wm. B.

Eerdman: Grand Rapids, 1979.

BRN: Bibliotheca Reformatoria Neerlandica.

Edited by S. Cramer and F. Pijper. The

Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1903—.

CH: Church History. Berne, Indiana, 1888—.

Complete Writings: The Complete Writings of Menno Simons.

Translated by Leonard Verduin; edited by J. J. C. Wenger, Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1956.

CR: Corpus Reformatorum. 99 vols. Halle, Berlin and Leipzig, 1834–1982.

Erasmus, Collected Works. The Collected Works of Erasmus. 72 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974—.

Includes The Correspondence of Erasmus, vols. 1–13.

JMS: Journal of Mennonite Studies. Winnipeg, Manitoba, 1983—.

Luther, Heilige Schrift: Die gantze Heilige Schrift Deutsch. Translated by Martin Luther. Edited Hans Volz. Munich: Rogner and Bernhard, 1972.

Luthers Schriften: Martin Luther. Sämmtliche Schriften. Edited by Joh. Georg Walch, 24 vols. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1880.

MQR: The Mennonite Quarterly Review. Goshen, Indiana, 1927—.

Menno, Opera Omnia Opera Omnia of alle de Godgeleerde Wercken van Menno Symons. Johannes vaan Veen, 1681. Reprint Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1989.

MBl: Mennonotische Blätter. Hamburg, Germany, 1854–1925.

QGTS : Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer in der Schweiz. Multiple editors. Vols. 1–4. Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1952—.

QGTÖ: Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer in Österreich.

Edited by Grete Mecenseffy, 2 vols. Gutersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1964 and 1960.

QGTElsass: Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer in Elsass.

Edited by Manfred Krebs and Hans Georg Rott, 2 vols. Gutersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1959 and 1860.

WA: D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische

Gesamtausgabe, 61 vols. Weimar, 1883—.

ZfK: Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte. Stuttgart, 1876—.

Dramatis Personae

(Cast of the Most Important Characters)

Augustine (3455–438): regarded widely as the greatest of the Latin or Western Church Fathers because of his impact on the Western Church. He founded a religious order (Luther’s Augustinian order) and served as Bishop of Hippo in North Africa. He is remembered especially for his The City of God, his writings against the Donatists, and many other influential pieces. But his influence was not all positive. He was the originator of the doctrine of original sin, has been called the father of the Medieval Inquisition, and advocated the accommodation of Scripture to the changing historical times. For our purposes his importance lies especially in his willful misinterpretation of the Parable of the Tares, an interpretation that became problematic in the apocalyptic atmosphere of the early years of the Reformation.

Martin Bucer (1491–1551): was the principal reformer of the city of Strassburg (1523–1548); there he encountered Anabaptists of various persuasions, most seeking sanctuary from persecution elsewhere. Earlier, as chaplain to Frederick Count Palatine of the Rhine, he attended the first Diet of Nuremberg (1522–1523), acquiring firsthand knowledge of its proceedings. He was the principal author of the Confessio Tetrapolitana (four South-German cities) presented to Charles V at the 1530 Diet of Augsburg.

Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575): succeeded Ulrich Zwingli as pastor and leader of the Reformed Church in Zurich in 1531. A virulent opponent of the Anabaptists, he wrote many books against them in which he promoted the idea propounded by Philip Melanchthon that, given the opportunity, all Anabaptists would become revolutionary Münsterites.

John Calvin (1509–1564): born in Noyon, France, he received a humanistic education but converted to Protestantism in 1532. He began his reform career with Bucer in Strassburg where, in 1536, he published the first edition of his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion. More important than Melanchthon’s 1521 Loci Communes, this was essentially the first systematic theology written by a reformer. His subsequent fame brought him to Geneva, where, under William Farel, he quickly became the leading reformer. Though married to a former Anabaptist—or perhaps because of it—he became one of their most bitter enemies.

Wolfgang Capito (1478–1541): was, with Martin Bucer, the co-reformer of the city of Strassburg. During the early years of the Reformation he hosted many radicals in his home. He opposed the persecution of the Anabaptists and, along with Bucer, was the principal interrogator of Melchior Hoffman during the latter’s imprisonment in the city after 1533.

Charles V (1500–1558): was the son of Philip of Habsburg and Joan of Spain, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. He became emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 1519 when already King of Spain, the new world, as well as being the Archduke of Austria and the Low Countries. He opposed Luther from the outset but was forced to deal with the reformer through the Imperial Diet that frustrated his nearly every move. Because of his many other obligations, Charles was forced to be absent from the empire for long periods of time. This gave the defenders of Luther and the Reformation many an opportunity to strengthen their positions. Aside from the famous 1521 Edict of Worms passed against Luther under questionable circumstances by the diet early in his reign, a notorious edict against the Anabaptists was passed in 1529, and in 1542 another edict was passed specifically targeting Menno Simons.

Donatists: North African Christians who opposed the reinstatement of priests (traditors) who had renounced their faith during the many early persecutions of Christians in the Roman Empire. They argued that the sacraments performed by immoral and apostate clerics were ineffective. They rejected Augustine’s mixed church of wheat and tares, contending, that if the church possessed the Holy Spirit, it had to be pure. They therefore opposed Augustine’s misinterpretation of the Parable of the Tares as well as his appeal to the emperor to persecute dissenters. As Augustine’s reputation waned, theirs rose. Reformation Anabaptists were often called Donatists or new monks because of their desire to live pure lives.

Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536): was born in Gouda, Netherlands, as the illegitimate son of a priest. He received his early education in the schools of the Brethren of the Common Life, but then devoted himself to Classical studies. His meeting with John Colet in Oxford, England, in 1499, whose lectures on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans he attended, persuaded him to change the focus of his studies from Classical Antiquity to Christian Antiquity. In 1516 he published the first edition of his Greek and Latin New Testament; a second edition followed in 1519, and a third in 1522. In 1517 he published his Paraphrase on Romans; he followed this with paraphrases on all the other books of the New Testament except Revelation. His paraphrases on the Gospel of Matthew (1522) and the Acts of the Apostles (1524) were of particular importance to the Swiss Anabaptists and to Menno.

Frederick the Wise (d. 1525): was the elector of Saxony and Luther’s protector. He was called the Wise because of his reputation for political astuteness. In order to protect his heretical university professor from the church’s reprisals and the emperor’s actions, he devised a policy whereby he defended the preaching of Luther’s gospel but refused to allow any changes to be made in the church services. This contradictory policy came to be embedded in the March 6, 1523, Nuremberg Imperial Edict. The consequences of this policy are discussed in Part I of this study.

Melchior Hoffman (1495–1543): was born in Schwãbish-Hall, South Germany. Little is known about his early life, except that he became a furrier by trade without a higher education. In the early 1520s he came under the influence of Luther and the Reformation, becoming a lay preacher in the Baltic cities where he plied his trade. Captivated by Luther’s apocalyptic message, he published a book on Daniel 12 as early as 1526 (now lost). Due to a quarrel with the Lutherans over the doctrine of the Real Presence in 1529, he parted ways with them and departed for Strassburg, the home of Luther’s Eucharistic enemies. Once there, however, he quickly alienated the city’s main reformers, Bucer and Capito. As a consequence, he associated with the mystical Anabaptist prophets, Lienhart and Ursula Jost together with Barbara Rebstock. From here in 1530 he traveled to Friesland, where he introduced an apocalyptic version of Anabaptism. He argued that Christ would return in 1533, but only after a great cleansing of the godless. His more peaceful followers in the Netherlands and Strassburg came to be called Melchiorites, the more revolutionary ones, Münsterites.

Hans Hut (?–1527): was a follower of Thomas Müntzer born in Haina, Thuringia, who was rebaptized by the mystical Anabaptist Hans Denck on May 26, 1526. He became one of the most effective propagandists for the faith, but whose faith? Recent scholarship has tied his ideas to those of Thomas Müntzer, placing in serious doubt his commitment to a believer’s church. He was one of the first, if not the first, to associate the sign of TAU with adult baptism, pointing to his overwhelming concern with the Day of God’s Wrath. His missionary activity was located principally in Austria.

Jan van Leiden (?–1536): born in Leiden, he began his adult life as a tailor but soon became an innkeeper. He joined the local Chamber of Rhetoric, becoming an actor who delighted playing the role of King David in local plays long before he proclaimed himself the King David of the New Jerusalem in the city of Münster. In November 1533, he was rebaptized by Jan Matthijs and in early February 1534 was sent as one of the latter’s apostles to the city of Münster in order to prepare the way for Matthijs and the impending end of the age.

Martin Luther (1483–1546): was an Augustinian monk educated at the universities of Erfurt and Wittenberg, receiving his Dr. Biblicus from the latter institution in 1512. Living in the constant fear of God’s impending wrath and judgment from his youth, Luther, both in the Erfurt monastery and the university, sought to pacify what he considered to be an angry and righteous God by means of his good works. As he was grappling with the medieval concept of the active righteousness of God, a righteousness that demanded righteous deeds from men to gain eternal life, and with the Vulgate Bible’s mistranslation of repentance with do penance (which only reinforced his fear of God’s righteousness), he came across Erasmus’ correction of this word in the Annotations to his 1516 edition of the New Testament. This transformed his understanding of the righteousness of God from an active to a passive one: to a righteousness acquired through faith in Christ and the repentance of one’s sins. It was through faith, therefore, that God’s righteousness came to be imputed to the believer; hence, sola fide. With this understanding as foundation, Luther attacked the sale of indulgences in October 1517. A few years later, he declared the pope to be the Antichrist and opposed his teachings with those of the Bible; hence, sola scriptura. Thus did the Gospel and apocalypse become intertwined in Luther’s early teachings. Together, they formed a volatile combination in the early years of the Reformation.

Jan Matthijs (?–1534): was a baker from Haarlem who was rebaptized by Melchior Hoffman. After Hoffman’s imprisonment in 1533, Matthijs came to Amsterdam, where he intimidated the brothers who, in fear, then elected him as their leader and new Enoch. Having gained the leadership, he surrounded himself with twelve apostles, several of whom—Jan van Leiden being one—were sent to the city of Münster in Westphalia to proclaim the Day of Wrath and establish the city as the New Jerusalem. From here they would conquer the world. He predicted Christ’s return for Easter Sunday 1534; but when he did not appear, Matthijs thought to reestablish his authority by attacking, with a select group of men, the besieging troops. He was slaughtered shortly thereafter in a skirmish outside the city walls, and his body was hacked into little pieces by his enemies.

Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560): was a brilliant young Greek scholar who, in 1518, became Luther’s colleague and partner in the work of reform at the University of Wittenberg. His 1518 inaugural address became famous for its dictum that, as he put it, history is the key to all of the sciences, not least of all theology, suggesting that theology had to be understood historically. Because of his impact on German education he became known as the praeceptor Germaniae, the teacher of all Germany. As his Loci Communes of 1521 demonstrates, he was at first open to more radical theological positions, even doubting the validity of infant baptism for a time. Subsequently, however, he turned on the radicals, becoming much more harsh in his condemnation of them than was Luther. Especially after 1535 he argued that all Anabaptists were potential Münsterites—that is revolutionaries—and should therefore be judged with the sword, even if they had never committed any crime.

Thomas Müntzer (c. 1489–1525): was a former follower of Luther who began to separate himself from the reformer already in March 1522. Probably attracted to the fourteenth-century German mystic, John Tauler, through Luther’s early editions of A German Theology, he read him constantly and became a theological mystic himself. But he also absorbed the apocalyptic thinking of his day—probably as mediated through Luther—and came to regard the Day of Wrath as imminent. At the same time, he proclaimed the establishment of a new apostolic church as early as late 1521 from which the tares—the godless—would be removed. Since, as the result of Augustine’s misinterpretation of the Parable of the Tares, the latter could only be removed in the time of harvest, the end of the age, he believed that the time of such removal had come. The only question that remained for him was: who would remove them? On this question, Müntzer came to disagree with Luther, whom he accused of changing his mind on the matter. It was because of these beliefs that Müntzer became involved in the 1524–1525 Peasants’ War.

Dirk Philips (1504–1568): was the son of a Dutch priest and younger brother of Obbe Philips, who became a Franciscan monk. He was rebaptized toward the end of 1533 in Leeuwarden by Peter Houtzagher, one of Matthijs’ apostles and later ordained by his brother, Obbe. Together with the latter, he came to oppose the violent tendencies within the movement. After the collapse of the New Jerusalem in Münster toward the end of June 1535, he was among those disillusioned followers of Hoffman who called on Menno to come to their rescue. He later became Menno’s partner in the work of building a believer’s church in the Netherlands.

Obbe Philips (c. 1500–1568): was the older brother of Dirk Philips who studied medicine, practicing his profession as a barber as was often customary in his day. In 1530 he married and took up his work in Leeuwarden. In late 1533 he was rebaptized by an apostle of Jan Matthijs and was nearly immediately ordained as a preacher. Gradually, however, he came to oppose the radical tendencies under Matthijs. In late 1534 he came to Delft, where he ordained David Joris, as he later did Menno in 1537. He along with others then called Menno into a leadership position, but abandoned them in 1540. Around 1560 he wrote a Confession (not published until 1584) in which he recounted his experiences during those turbulent years.

Bernard Rothmann (c. 1495–1535?): born in the vicinity of Münster in Westphalia, he spent time in Wittenberg, where he became acquainted with Luther and Melanchthon. But his restless spirit led him to visit the reformers in Strassburg in order to gain or confirm new theological insights. He must also have read widely in Erasmus’ biblical scholarship, for such a reading is reflected in his 1533 Confession Concerning the Two Sacraments (baptism and communion). This tract, the result of his participation in the summer 1533 Münster Colloquy, already demonstrates his attraction to Anabaptism. When van Leiden, and then Matthijs, arrived in the city where Rothmann had become reformer in 1533, he and his followers received rebaptisms from them. Van Leiden and Matthijs then also convinced them that—as Rothmann later put it—this was the time of harvest, the Day of God’s wrath and the end of the age. This last piece of information changed everything. Thus did Rothmann become the spokesperson for the Münster revolution, writing numerous tracts to defend and justify it.

Introduction

A few words, perhaps written without much reflection but in all innocence, can sometimes determine how a person’s life is interpreted. So it was with Menno Simons when, in the 1539 first edition of his Foundation of Christian Doctrine—his well-known Fundamentboek—he spoke of the Münsterites as beloved brothers … who only erred a little when they took up the sword to inaugurate the kingdom of God. Had he written these words of the leaders of the revolutionary movement one might consider them incriminating; but he did not. He wrote them—as his earlier, 1535, Against the Blasphemy of Jan of Leiden made clear—of the often naive and misguided followers of men like Jan of Leiden, whom he called an Antichrist. But there was a problem: Menno’s Blasphemy was not published in his lifetime; indeed, it was discovered and published only after his daughter’s death in 1627. As a consequence, those who read those fateful words prior to 1627 did not have the benefit of Menno’s context. At the time Menno penned those words, therefore, the thought that they might, some day, come back to haunt him or his followers in the form of an accusation that he must have been, at the very least, a Münster sympathizer if not an outright fellow traveler does not appear to have crossed his mind. For, had not Menno, as he tells us in any number of places, opposed the Münsterites both privately and publicly from the time he first encountered them? Yet some enemy must have, in those early years, noted those incriminating words and enlisted them as evidence to prove his complicity in the revolutionary movement of 1534–35. When Menno quietly deleted them from his second, 1554, edition, he appeared to confirm the accusation. Nor did he ever explain himself, at least not in print.

It is difficult to determine with any certitude who first drew the world’s attention to those words. But it must have been someone familiar with Menno’s writings or with a person who was. None of the earliest histories of the Münster uprising—Meister Heinrich Gresbeck’s 1535 Bericht von der Wiedertaufe in Münster,² Henricus Dorpius’ 1536 Wahrhaftige Historie,³ or even Hermann von Kerssenbroick’s 1573 Anabaptistici furoris Monasterium inclitam Westphaliae metropolim evertentis historica narratio (not published until 1730)⁴—so much as mention the name of Menno. Nor did Lambert Hortensius mention it in his 1548 Tumultuum Anabaptistarum Liber unus, even though he was born in the vicinity of Utrecht, was ordained there, as was Menno, and spent most of his adult life teaching at the Hironymus school in the city. Although he described the developments in the city of Münster in plastic prose, the study has proven to be of little historical value.⁵

All of this changed with Guy de Bres’ 1565 La Racine, source et fondement des anabaptistes ou rebapizes de nostre temps, written four years after Menno’s death. In 1570 the book was translated into the Dutch as Dee Wortel / Den Oorspronck / ende het Fundament der Wederdooperen / oft Herdooperen van onsen tijde.⁶ As had become customary by then, de Bres—who was born a Catholic in Bergen in 1522 but later came under the influence of Calvin—saw the origin of Anabaptism in Saxony down there on the Saale River, where a number of revolutionary visionaries led by Nicolaus Storch entered into a sectarian revolutionary conspiracy.⁷ At the conclusion of the first chapter, de Bres then wrote: This, then, is the first and true beginning of the Anabaptists, of whom the aforementioned seditious Müntzer was the originator and foremost member.⁸ Having made his point, de Bres moved on to his second chapter Concerning the Anabaptists of Münster. The connection between the man Müntzer and the Münster movement was no longer, if it had ever been, in doubt.

Only some five pages into the second chapter de Bres made his case for Menno’s entanglement with the Münsterites, and he made it in extended fashion, an indication that he was probably the first to do so.⁹ He began by saying: "Your great teacher Menno Simons does not deny, as (so) many of you do, nor is he ashamed to call them his brothers and sisters (I say those of Münster and Amsterdam) in a booklet written by him entitled Een schooner ende profijtelycke vermaninghe ende onderrichtinge aen der Overheydt ende aen allen Staten.¹⁰ De Bres continued: There, among other things, he (Menno) went on to say: I hope and believe that our beloved brothers—who formerly deviated somewhat from (the teachings of) the Lord in that they both advocated and attempted to defend their faith with the sword and other weapons—will find a merciful God."¹¹

Having made the accustation, de Bres proceeded to lecture the Dutch Anabaptists of his day, saying that they should learn from Menno and with him confess that, having been taught in Münsterite schools, they were brothers and fellow travelers of the revolutionaries. He knew, of course, he continued, that they would not do so. But if they did not, they should realize that no matter how holy they might consider themselves, no person with real understanding (of the situation) would any longer trust them. On the outside chance, however, that some people might still be persuaded that you no longer have anything to do with those raving lunatics, such persons should compare the present-day Mennonites with the Münsterites. For, said de Bres,

if you had the opportunity you would do precisely what they did. For were not your brothers, the Anabaptists of Münster, initially merciful, kindhearted, peaceable, soft-spoken, claiming to have died to the world as you claim? You know well that the content of their teaching was no different from yours. Therefore, if you wish to be considered innocent of the charges against the Münsterites, you have no choice but to leave the sect which has, from the beginning, produced nothing but revolutionaries, perjerers and unrighteous hypocrites. For, (we know that) in the end you will be just like they were; for like you they were angels in the beginning, serving the Lord, but in the end they had all become devils. So even though you assert you are of God, in the end you, too, will become devils. There can no longer be any doubt of this.¹²

Even before de Bres’ book had been translated into the Dutch, his argument appeared in the 1569 translation of Bullinger’s 1560 Anabaptist Origins, Progress, etc., by one Gerard Nicolai.¹³ An obvious insertion by the translator into the Bullinger text, the passage reads as follows:

These and the like (the Münster Anabaptists) Menno names and confesses in his 1539 Fundamentboek to be his beloved brothers and sisters who only erred a little. In his own words: "I do not doubt that our brothers, who formerly displeased God a little (note this word) since they sought to defend their faith with the sword, have found a merciful God. For (I hope) that they have not been infected with the aforementioned heresies (he refers here to the teachings of David Joris and the like, such as: polygamy, the use of the physical sword, etc., the opposite of which they proved at Münster). For, they sought nothing less than Jesus Christ and eternal life. To achieve (that goal) they sacrificed house and home, land and health, father and mother, wife and child. (They did this when the foremost Anabaptists were secretly sent out with letters inviting people to come to Münster where they would be repaid tenfold, as we stated earlier.) … I call the pious and upright my sisters and brothers, even though they have unwittingly sinned. However the double minded who did not seek God from pure motives even though they were called brothers and sisters, the leaders of the movement (that is, those persons who brought them the writings) as those inside Münster and Amsterdam, I leave in the Lord’s hands … ¹⁴

Here, unlike in de Bres’ account, one does get at least a glimpse of the context within which Menno made the statement. That is, that Menno was willing to cut the Münsterite followers some slack, saying that he hoped those who sincerely sought the Lord in all of this would have a merciful God; the leaders, however, he left to God’s judgment. But Nicolai did not go as far as Menno had in his 1535 Blasphemy where he judged Jan of Leiden to be an Antichrist.

A third early citation—and it should be noted that all these early citations come from Dutch sources—is contained in Simon Walrave’s¹⁵ Successio Anabaptistica, dat is Babel der Wederdopers, eensdeels in Duytsland, maer principal in Nederland, in welke de opgeworpen oorsprong, de rasende voortganck, ende bittere verstrouinge in t’cort verhaelt wort.¹⁶ Walrave’s knowledge of Obbe Philip’s Confession of c. 1560¹⁷, in which the former leader of the peaceful followers of Melchior Hoffman declared that my commission (was) unlawful and that I was therein deceived and that he, Obbe, wanted to free my soul in a confession before God, acknowledging my guilt and deception, only made Menno’s beloved brothers statement more incriminating.¹⁸ Thus he could say on pages 94 and 95,

In this currently fundamental statement of the Anabaptists, Menno confesses the godless revolutionaries of Münster to be his brothers … Thus he says in his Fundamentboek printed in 1539, I do not doubt (he says) that our beloved brothers who formerly sinned a little because they wanted to defend their faith with the sword have a gracious God, for they sought nothing but Jesus Christ and eternal life for which they sacrificed house, home, lands, health, father, mother, wife, children and even life itself.

If both Menno and Obbe could confess their prior adherence to the revolutionaries, why, the writer implied, could not all Dutch Anabaptists do so?

Whereas Menno had to defend himself against more general accusations of being a Münsterite at least since 1552¹⁹ there are no references in his writings to the infamous passage in the 1539 edition of his Fundamentboek. This may well be because de Bres was indeed the first to raise the issue in 1565. But it did become an issue shortly thereafter. And somehow or other Menno’s followers had to deal with it.

One year after Menno’s death the first edition of Het Offer des Heeren, the Dutch Mennonite martyrology appeared. In it the concern of Menno’s followers to separate themselves from the revolutionaries is quite evident, Hans van Ouerdamme being quoted as complaining on page 116: What is more, daily there are lies told about us by those who say that we will defend out faith with the sword as those of Münster did. May Almighty God keep us from such atrocities.²⁰ Rather than threaten to execute the wrath of God on their enemies as the Münsterites had done, however, Het Offer emphasized the suffering of the defenseless Christians, who, although like the martyrs under the altar in Revelation 6:9–11, waited patiently for their number to be fulfilled.²¹ Nothing could more dramatically demonstrate the shift that had taken place from Münster to Menno than this transition from Bernard Rothmann’s 1534 The Wrath of God to the 1562 Mennonite Het Offer des Heeren,²² for the language of the former was filled with threats of death and destruction whereas Het Offer is filled with the witnesses of the defenseless Christians, as the subsequent Martyrs Mirror called them who had given their lives for their non-resistant faith.²³

But a martyrology that only listed the defenseless Christians martyred since the beginning of the Reformation could not of itself negate the accusations that were now— after 1565—being leveled in a much more pointed manner,²⁴ though Het Offer may have had some success in this regard since it went through eleven editions between 1562 amd 1599. And each edition added new names to the list, making it appear that Dutch Anabaptists had not been granted another opportunity to demonstrate who they really were.

With the 1615 Historie der Martelaren the authors began to take a broader approach to their subject matter; now, for the first time, the names of those who had been martyred for having rejected infant baptism and been baptized upon their confession of faith prior to the Reformation were included.²⁵ The majority of the latter had been Waldenses, the peaceful followers of the twelfth-century Peter Waldo of Lyons. Could there be a line of continuity between the latter and Menno Simons to prove that Mennonites, unlike the Münsterites, had always been a peaceful people? Jacob Mehrning, in his 1646 S. Baptismi Historia, was the first to assert such a connection,²⁶ but it was Thieleman J. van Bragt who, in his 1660 Het Bloedigh Toonel der Doops Gesinde, stated categorically that Menno had, in fact, belonged to these peaceful Waldenses. By doing so, van Braght killed two birds with one stone. On the one hand, he freed—or at least thought he had freed—Menno from any contamination by the revolutionary Münsterites. On the other, he could argue that Menno and his followers, as Waldenses, had never been rebaptizers—the great sin laid to the Anabaptists’ account by both Catholics and Magisterial Protestants—they had never been Anabaptists at all but always only Baptist-minded—hence Doopsgezinde.²⁷

For a time this Waldensian argument carried weight, especially with insiders. Thus even the great Mosheim could write in his 1741 Ecclesiastical History: "The modern Mennonites not only consider themselves as the descendants of the Waldenses, who were so grievously oppressed and persecuted by the despotic heads of the Roman church, but pretend, moreover, to be the purest offspring of these respectable sufferers, being equally averse to all principles of rebellion, on the one hand, and all suggestions of fanaticism on the other."²⁸ Though Mosheim did not sound entirely convinced of the theory’s veracity, he did not directly attack it.

To this point no one had written a life of Menno.²⁹ His collected works had been published in part in the 1646 Sommarie and in whole in the 1681 Opera Omnia. But the defensive posture of the Dutch Mennonites and their descendants did not change. In 1753 the pastor of the Hamburg Mennonite church, Gerhard Roosen, built on van Braght’s argument in his A Counterattack and Declaration of Innocence of the Evangelical Anabaptist Christians, called Mennonites, against the undeserved Accusation that they derive from the Revolutionary Münsterites and adhere to their Principles and Teachings.³⁰ In the same year the Amsterdam Mennonite pastor and friend of Moravian leaders like A. G. Spangenberg and Count Nikolaus von Zinsendorf, Johannes Deknatel himself published what can only be considered a pietistically influenced collection of Menno’s works called Menno Simons in’t Kleine.³¹ In it he asserted: "There were Anabaptists even before Menno’s time, and it is clear that many improvements had already been made before the great Reformation, among the Waldenses, under Wycliffe, under Hus and their followers by means of which God prepared the work (of the Reformation). In the same way, there were, as Menno observes, groups of Waldenses who had been gathered into congregations under the cross, etc. But because of the severe persecutions they were scattered sheep; it was probably these, according to Menno’s own testimony in his Departure from the Papacy, who asked Menno to be their chief overseer."³²

The first attempt at a Dutch life of Menno, A. M. Cramer’s 1836 Het Leven en de Verrigtingen van Menno Simons, still referred to Menno as the Waldensian Menno,³³ as did the first German biography, Bernd Karl Roosen’s 1874 Menno Symons den Mennoniten Gemeinden geschildert.³⁴ Roosen did, however, admit that although the Anabaptists most often arose in those regions where the Waldenses and Hussites had dwelt … one could not say with complete assurance that the one had grown out of the other.³⁵ The reason why B. C. Roosen was less certain than some of his predecessors probaly lay in the fact that J. H. Halbertsma’s 1843 attempt, in his De Doopsgezinden en hunne Herkomst, to prove the connection by a comparison of their respective teachings³⁶ had met with considerable skepticism by both A. M. Cramer—who only some eight years earlier had affirmed the connection in his Menno biography—and Blaupot ten Cate, both of whom reviewed the book.³⁷ Cramer now suggested there were two problems with the theory in general and Halbertsma’s study in particular: first, the similarity in the theology of the Waldenses and Anabaptists could simply have derived from a similar reading of the Bible. More importantly, however, neither Menno nor any of the early Dutch Anabaptists had ever mentioned the Waldenses. Blaupot ten Cate, while arguing that the Anabaptists were indeed an older, continuation of the apostolic faith, nevertheless conceded that there was no direct link between the Waldenses and either the Swiss Amabaptist leaders or those of the Netherlands. He, too, argued that the similarities could be explained by a similar reading of the biblical text. The theory was beginning to founder on the lack of corroborating factual evidence.

Just about the time Dutch Mennonite scholars began to reject Van Bright’s theory, the Münster archivist and historian, Ludwig Keller, came from out of nowhere to retrieve, indeed to expand it. In his 1885 Die Reformation und die älteren Reformparteien,³⁸ this impartial outsider argued with considerable ingenuity and show of reason, as the American Prebyterian scholar Henry Elias Dosker later wrote: for the historical genesis of the sect from the well-known medieval movements of the Petrobrusians, the Apostolic Brothers, the Arnoldists, the Moravian Brethren, and the German Mystics.³⁹ While Dosker and German scholars like the