Mennonite Weekly Review

ELIZABETHTOWN, Pa. — Martyrs Mirror is newer than the Bible and longer than some copies of it.

Jeffrey Bach, director of the Young Center at Elizabethtown College, checks out a copy of the Martyrs Mirror with Diane Windham Shaw of Lafayette College. In the background is Marilyn McKinley Parrish of Millersville University. — Photo by Dale D. Gehman

Like the Bible, though, the book has a powerful message for today, said James Lowry, a Mennonite historian from Hagerstown, Md.

“Persecution, dungeons, shackles, chains are not something in our experience,” Lowry told an audience at a June 8-10 conference, “Martyrs Mirror: Reflections Across Time,” at Elizabethtown College.

Yet we live in a materialistic age, as Dutch Mennonites did in 1660 when Thieleman van Braght revised and added to previous books and records about Christian martyrs, aiming to spark spiritual renewal, Lowry said.

“The Martyrs Mirror is the correct medicine for 21st-century Christians, and especially for Mennonites,” Lowry said.

More than 60 people from across the spectrum of Anabaptist-connected groups as well as scholars from other traditions gathered at the event, which marked the 350th anniversary of the 1660 edition, called The Bloody Theater of the Baptism-Minded and Defenseless Christians. In the book, van Braght tells of martyrs from the early church and persecuted groups in Europe through the Anabaptists of the 16th and 17th centuries.

The 1685 edition — The Bloody Theater or Martyrs Mirror of the Baptism-Minded, or Defenseless Christians — added Jan Luyken’s etchings depicting events described in the text, including execution scenes, family farewells and moments of decision.

One story tells of Anneken Jans, drowned in 1539 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, after she was arrested for singing a hymn in public. Another remembers Dirk Willems, from Asperen, the Netherlands, who escaped from prison but stopped running to rescue his pursuer, who had fallen into an icy pond, only to be recaptured and executed in 1569.

“These are heroic, mythic tales designed to inspire allegiance to Mennonite identity and conformity to its ethic of nonviolence at any cost,” said Julia Spicher Kasdorf, professor of writing at Penn State University in University Park.

In the early 1740s German-speaking Mennonite immigrants to Pennsylvania ended efforts to gain exemption from military service after colonial authorities directed them to take their request to the king’s officials in England.