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Sixteenth-century Anabaptists were ardently disliked and despised. This fact is nowhere more aptly illustrated than in the nasty nicknames given them. Indeed the name Anabaptist itself, which means “rebaptizer,” was probably designed to these people under the penalties of Roman civil law—which, in a series of imperial edicts from approximately 390 to 420 A.D., decreed death to those who rebaptized or were rebaptized. The Reformers had destroyed or disregarded canon law and judicial procedures, which had been developed over many centuries by the Roman Church. In order to draw up laws more suitable to their view of Scripture and the church, Reformers chose edicts and patterns of jurisprudence ready at hand in the Justinian Code, compiled under Roman Emperor Justinian’s orders in the 530s. On the basis of those edicts, therefore, the Reformers and princes decreed the death penalty for rebaptizers, thereby giving the name Anabaptist itself an unfavorable reputation. Indeed, second generation German Marxist Karl Kautsky has concluded that “Anabaptist” in the sixteenth century bore the emotional stigma of the term “Bolshevist” in the early twentieth-century West.

There were other naughty nicknames: (1) Fanatics (Schwarmer) or people with bees in their bonnets, who followed no rational order of social behavior but upset every social convention by stubbornly insisting on a radical separatist religious existence, as if they alone understood divine matters or even God himself; (2) Corner-preachers (Winkelprediger), who conducted their illegal religious enterprises in secret hideaways and spurned the light of open, forthrightly-public pronouncements of their views. The fact of early edicts banning their private religious gatherings did not spare them this nickname; (3) Mob-spirited factionalists (Rottengeister), who played upon the emotional immaturity and latent grievances of the lower classes of society with their own brand of passionate rhetoric; (4) Donatists, who like their fifth-century forebears considered themselves a spiritual elite, not fit for company with common Christians; (5) Revolutionaries (Aufrüherer), who promoted civil disobedience and revolt under the guise of preaching and practicing religious piety. English translations of these terms cannot quite convey the degree of contempt or hatred of their sixteenth-century German originals; even present-day German dictionaries have succeeded in domesticating and taming some of these unruly names.

Why did people use these names? And why did they despise and then persecute the Anabaptists? Our own secularist, post-Christian West has difficulty understanding persecution for religious reasons. It will be the task of this essayist to describe and to explain attitudes toward these Anabaptists by different groups of people in the sixteenth century. This will not be an apology for the Anabaptists, because most Westerners now consider their religious divergences to be relatively harmless.

Early on both peasants and townfolk displayed an openness to the Anabaptists, without much inquiry as to their reputed heretical views. All Europe was awash in fresh religious fervor. Many people were, of course, disturbed by suggestions of too much change in religious practices. Such changes could impair and even harm the faith of simple, transparent and steadfast Christians, as Luther understood so well. But there were many other people for whom the freshly-opened Bible led to novel ways of understanding and living out its message. (Of course Roman Christians before and during the Reformation read the Bible; many of them knew its contents extremely well. Still the Reformation built and developed its own momentum on this freshly interpreted Scripture, even to the point of elevating Scripture to an authority above that of the Church, which had much earlier decided exactly which books could be accepted as part of the Bible.)

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