Some Baptists (most famously J.M. Carroll, in his 1931 work “The Trail of Blood”) claim that Baptists aren’t REALLY Protestants. Instead, the theory goes, there have been Baptists* for 2000 years, and the only reasons nobody had heard of them until after the Protestant Reformation is that (a) they used to go by different names, and (b) the Catholic Church killed 50,000,000(!) of them. So… is any of that true?
*While I’m focusing on Baptists, other groups (like the Seventh-day Adventists) have their own versions of this kind of history, and most of what I’m a…