05 – Jan. 05 – THIS DAY IN BAPTIST HISTORY PAST

Anabaptist Memorial in Zurich

[the] Anabaptists… realized their principles had long endured.
 On this date, Jan. 05, 1527 two outstanding Anabaptists paid the price for their faith.  Felix Manz, known as the Apollo of the Anabaptists, was drowned in Lake Zurich for his testimony for Christ.  George Blaurock, considered the Hercules of the movement, was stripped to the waist and severely beaten.  Many church historians speak of the Anabaptists as mere heretics.  Franklin Hamlin Littell, in The Origins of Protestantism (New York: The Macmillan Co. 1964), wrote, “Information on the…[Anabaptists] has been notoriously scarce and has rested in the main upon hostile polemics.”  It is apparent that the Anabaptists in the days of the Reformers realized their principles had long endured.  They maintained, according to Littell, the “…principle that the True Church could not have been destroyed since the founding. …”  Dr. Roland H. Bainton connects Anabaptists with the ancient Donatists he when acknowledges that “The parallels between the Anabaptists and Donatists were however, more than superficial.”  One of the things he wrote of was their similar enemies and persecutions and enemies.  He also said, “To call these people Anabaptists, that is rebaptizers, was to malign them, because they denied that baptism was repeated, inasmuch as infant baptism is no baptism at all.  The called themselves simply Baptists.  The offensive name was given to them to bring them under the Justinian Code which had been written against the Donatists.  Leonard Verdin, historian of the Christian Reformed Denomination wrote, “We know that at the time of the birth of the Hybrid [The Anabaptists of the days of the Reformation] there were already people who were called Anabaptists.”  Interestingly C. A. Cornelius (1819-1903) a Roman Catholic scholar was among the first historians to call for modern research of the Anabaptist movement.
Dr. Greg J. Dixon from: This Day in Baptist History Vol. IIII: Cummins /, pp. 9-10.
The picture above is a memorial in Zurich listing the names of 43 Anabaptists who were martyred by the Roman Catholic Hierarchy (Church/State) in the 16th Century. (Wickepedia)