Trail of Blood? Truth or Fiction?

The date's inaccurate too - Trent didn't convene until 1545, by which time the Anabaptists had been around for a couple of decades or so.

It's cod history - a few verifiable facts mixed in with a lot of speculation and quite a bit of dishonesty or fiction.

 

If it wasn't for the Trail of Blood, I probably wouldn't be an Orthodox Christian today...

In XC
-

 

If it wasn't for the literal trail of blood, I would still be an Anglican in the Church of England, the holy catholic church. Never mind the splinter catholic churches.

Cheers,

Jim

 

Didn't we just have a discussion on this a couple of weeks ago?

 

1. Yes we did have, and still do have a thread on this very subject just one page back. It wasn't very long ago.
2. This thread was started based on a false accusation from this thread:

http://www.baptistboard.com/showpost.php?p=1381492&postcount=44

which states

Note, that I never said it was an accurate resource as the OP infers.

 

I am afraid we can all quote certain aspects of history tp prove our ascendency.

Cheers,

Jim

 

Jim, as you know, most anti-Landmarkers hold that Baptists first showed up in, what, the 1600s. You, however have on more than one occasion cited the existence of Baptist in Wales at least a century or two earlier.

Since the doubters say there's no historical evidence that Baptists existed before the Reformation, would you provide more documentation for them?

I think they see the Trail of Blood as a strawman easy to knock down.

 

I've noticed that the non-Landmarkers seem to do more than just disagree with the view--they seem to hate it. And it appears to me to go beyond whether there's sufficient historical evidence; there seems to be a hatred for the idea of Baptist succession, the idea that the Universal Church is a fantasy, the pre-eminence of the local church, and for anything other than competely open communion.

I suspect some of you will say I'm painting with too broad a brush. But I'm a-feared some would hate those views, even if they were beyond dispute. Naw, I take that back, it's a cheap shot.

Sometimes, though, it seems to me that the hatred of Landmarkism exceeds the hatred of Calviniism. Maybe some of you who are neither can tell me if my impressions are right or wrong.

 

I don't 'hate' it so much as pity it; that said, I do hate fiction masquerading as truth. And I would say also that the Landmark position is full of vitriol against the Catholic and Orthodox - so I would question who's doing the 'hating' here.

 

There were, of course, no groups called Baptist way back then. Nobody disputes that. The Landmark position is that there were, in fact, groups of Christians who held to similar beliefs as modern-day Baptists. They are the groups with which Landmarkers claim kinship. Some of those groups, such as Paulicians, Henricians, Petrobrussions, Anabaptists and the like, have been tagged as weirdos, who had some strange practices.

One does not have to subscribe to every belief or practice held by a group to claim kinship. Shoot, some modern day Baptists are a bit weird, too. even in our beloved Southern Baptist Convention. Still, we manage to find common ground with Southern Baptists all the way backto 1845, and with all Baptists back into the 16th century.

If I am going to insist that 5th century New Testament churches (or even lst century groups) look exactly like mine, then I'm going to be out of luck. By the same token, if I'm going to insist that all Baptists churches today look like mine, I'm in trouble again.

I still suspect that the real problem for anti-Landmarkers is not so much the question evidence as it is a distaste for the Landmark views regarding the local church and the non-existent Universal Church.

 

Exactly. An author's poor use of a language makes it difficult to take his writing seriously.:thumbs:

 

The Catholic and Orthodox doctrines have nothing to admire. They are apostate churches that point people to Hell. From the Reformation until just recently the common consensus was that the Beast or the Antichrist of Revelation was the Pope of the RCC. Look in almost any classical Protestant commentary and almost all will agree on this singular point.
A popular commentary, for example is Albert Barnes, a Presbyterian who lived 1798-1870. This is what he wrote concerning the "mystery woman Babylon" in Revelation 17:5,6:

Most other Protestant commentaries agreed. Was this a matter of hating? Or was it a matter of looking at history objectively without revising it (as the RCC and others do), and comparing it to Scripture. They were more honest with the Word and with history back then, than many are today, who are loathe to offend the political sensibilities of many. Political Correctness had not become a fad back then.

 

You have demonstrated Tom Butler's point well. You paint all anabaptists with the same brush. The word "Ana-baptist" simply means "re-baptizer" or "baptize again." It was a name given out of disdain and ridicule. They did not choose that name because they wanted it. They got that name because their converts came out of Catholic or Anglican Churches who had already been baptized as infants. Once saved, they had to be "re-baptized," since their first "baptism" wasn't considered a baptism at all. The label came from the Catholics and Anglicans.

The statement you just made is extreme and probably refers to less than 1% of all anabaptists. Do you believe that that is a fair representation of the Anabaptist movement to paint all of them as polygamists, even all the ones in Germany as polygamists. Like the RCC, you would like to tarnish Bible-believing Christians with an evil and wicked paint brush, using an exception (which you probably can't document in the first place), and then generalize that all these Christians are the same wicked evil unsaved people. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

 

For those who wish to attach some degree of aberration to those ancient groups claimed as ancestors by many Baptists, one should consider that these people were considered enemies of the established churches of the day, whether Catholic or otherwise. Some of those aberrations were probably lies perpetuated by their enemies to discredit them.

No one denies that there were variations. But most of those groups share a number of doctrines also held by modern Baptists. They also share a history, that is, they were persecuted by the established church.

Lutheran historian Mosheim wrote that these groups existed in Wales, and were hidden in the forests of Europe before Luther and Calvin came on the scene.

Now, I want to quote a letter written in 1519 from Bohemia to the famed Catholic theologian Erasmus.

Sounds like Baptists to me. And remember, this was written by someone who was not praising, he was condemning. Erasmus was sort of a reformer who chose to work within the RCC, but when two of the people described in the quoted paragraph complimented him, he lashed out at them, calling them "Anabaptists."

 

There is all kinds of such evidences in historym IF one truly wants to find it. My agrument remains that it seems impossible that the NT church should disappear completely unto magically Smthe appears on the scene to develop baptistic churches along with the reformers, when not one of the reformers developed a baptistic church and even Smythe got the baptism incorrected...pouring water on his own head, and then he never did form a baptist church........I am puzzled!

Cheers,

Jim

 

Jim, I would think that one would be embarrassed to hold to such a notion that Jesus had no church on his earth from the First century to the Reformation. Particularly in the light of Matthew 16:18.

I can anticipate the reply, "wait a minute, we didn't say there wasn't one; we just said there's no documentation."

If anybody wrote this, I just missed it, but I have yet to read anything on this board by any anti-Landmarker that supports unbroken succession of New Testament churches from apostolic times until today. They have trashed without exception every Christian group cited by the Landmarkers as progenitors of modern Baptists. They have left the world with nothing but weirdo cults which apparently bear no resemblance to a first century New Testament church.

So we are left with the question, were there, or were there not, true NT churches in existence somewhere from Jesus' time until now?

This is a trick question, so consider the implications of your answer.

Choose from one of the following answers:

1. Yes, and we Baptists claim them as ours.
2. Yes, but they weren't Baptist because Baptists didn't begin until the Reformation.
3. No, because there's no evidence. There were times when there was no New Testament church in existence.
4. Don't know because the evidence is thin. But we accept by faith Matthew 16:18.

If none of these answers will do, give your own.