Willing to Die: Martyrdom in the Mennonite Imagination

As the Reformation spread through Europe, thousands of individuals faced imprisonment, exile, and even execution for the crime of permitting themselves to be re-baptized. In the eyes of the established Church authorities--whether Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed--these dissenters were justly condemned as dangerous heretics. But to their fellow Anabaptists, they were martyrs, reliving the persecution suffered by the early Church. Willing to Die explores the relationship between the figures of the martyr and the heretic in relations to the early Anabaptist movement, illuminating how the promoters of believers' baptism could be understood by their fellow Christians as earnest advocates of the restoration of the church of the apostles, or as a seditious threat to the common peace. As recent scholarship on early Christian martyrdom has shown, the fact of death alone has never sufficed to make someone a martyr. Rather, martyrs are created by being commemorated as such by a community. From the earliest days of Christianity, one community's martyr could be another's heretic. By compiling martyrologies that included some executed Anabaptists and excluded others, surviving Anabaptists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries joined a centuries-long intra-Christian debate in which the commemoration of the special dead define the boundaries of legitimate beliefs and practices of the True Church.