The Surviving Letters of Conrad Grebel

A selection of some of the original manuscripts translated into English for the first time and published in “The Origin of the ‘Believer’s Baptism: The Conrad Grebel and the History and Humanist Hermeneutics of the Swiss Anabaptist Movement. From the Zwickau Prophets to Modern “Simply Christian” Fundamentalism”.

With the Original Latin/ Swiss German

Summary of Letters

1517 Zwingli letter

Young Grebel's effusive humanist praise of Zwingli's erudition; note the Humanist context (Ciceronian Latin, admiration for Vadian). Subtle critique: The over-idealization of a scholar-pastor hints at the later disillusionment when Zwingli didn't meet Grebel's radical scriptural ideals, a foreshadowing of sectarian separation.

1521 Myconius letter

Here the private turmoil and emphasis on personal spiritual experience over public office prefigure the subjective turn of the Anabaptist movement, where inner spirit trumped ecclesiastical order.

1522 Vadian letter

Financial demands, fierce denunciation of abbot and Wendelin as devil-spawn, desire to publicly destroy them. Note reliance on medieval categories of blasphemy and heresy. Subtle critique: The violent rhetoric and zeal for righteous punishment, though not physically acted upon, reveals a mindset that could evolve into theocratic or militant coercion seen later in Münster.

1523 Vadian letter

Brief report on mass debate, Zwingli's compromise. Grebel's axiom that Zwingli does not act as pastor is impious. Critique: The rejection of civil authority's role in church reform, while based on biblicism, abandoned the magisterial reformation's attempt to gradually reform, leading to separatism and eventual suppression.

3 Sept 1524 Vadian letter

Grebel writing to Karlstadt and Müntzer, compiling biblical commonplaces, quoting Job and prophets. He's a prophetic figure, claiming the spirit compels him. Critique: The self-identification with Old Testament prophets and the expectation of divine vindication demonstrates a direct, unmediated claim to revelation, which in some of Müntzer's followers escalated into revolutionary violence. Grebel's nonviolence was not universally shared; the letter shows the movement's internal diversity already.

5 Sept 1524 Müntzer letter

The programmatic letter, rejection of infant baptism, sola scriptura, pacifism (they admonish Müntzer to abandon war), strict community discipline, the Lord's Supper as mere remembrance. Critique: The radical biblicism that discards all tradition, including music and liturgical forms, while advocating for pure believers' church, set a precedent for later groups to claim absolute truth and led to fragmentation. The letter's insistence on nonviolence ironically contrasts with Müntzer's later Peasants' War and the Münster rebellion, where some Anabaptists embraced the sword. Grebel's warning to Müntzer shows that even among the "radicals" there was tension; the movement's later violent trajectory was not inevitable but had roots in the same separatist and anti-institutional impulses.

Vadian's reply 28 Dec 1524

He urges moderation, cautions Grebel against excessive combativeness, asks for unity with Zwingli and Leo Jud, and asserts that reforms need time. Critique: Vadian's Humanist moderation embodies the Erasmian via media; his plea highlights the Anabaptist impatience and unwillingness to work within existing structures, which contributed to persecution.

30 May 1525 Vadian letter

Grebel's final plea, denouncing Zwingli's usury doctrine, calling Vadian to repentance or face bloodguilt. He threatens martyrdom. Critique: The intense moral absolutism and willingness to die, while admirable, also fostered a sectarian spirit that demonized opponents. The accusation of bloodguilt and the self-offering for brothers echo medieval penitential and martyrdom concepts, but also set the stage for the tragic cycles of persecution and resistance.

————————————-

A recurring feature of Grebel's correspondence is a tension between the humanist apparatus he inherited from his training under Joachim Vadian and Heinrich Glarean and the radical biblicism he would later adopt. Grebel's command of Greek was limited and largely derivative, shaped more by the pedagogical conventions of the northern humanist classroom than by sustained philological engagement with the New Testament text in its original language. His knowledge of Hebrew appears to have been negligible or nonexistent, a deficiency that would not prevent him from making sweeping claims about the plain meaning of Scripture. His readings of Paul, Matthew, and the Prophets consistently filtered the biblical text through Latin translations and the interpretive habits of late medieval scholasticism, even as he sought to repudiate the Roman Catholic intellectual tradition that had produced those very categories. This paradox runs through the entire correspondence: Grebel's rebellion against institutional Christianity was conducted with the tools of the institution he rejected.

Grebel's intellectual formation was almost entirely a product of the northern humanist classroom, where he studied under Joachim Vadian in Vienna and moved in the circles of Heinrich Glarean and Ulrich Zwingli in Zurich, and this training furnished him with the rhetorical habits and interpretive assumptions that would shape his later radicalism in ways he never fully recognized. His command of Greek was of the derivative sort acquired through classroom exercises on set texts with the aid of Latin cribs, sufficient for reading an epigram or following a familiar Gospel passage but wholly inadequate for the kind of independent philological judgment that his theological claims required; his knowledge of Hebrew appears to have been nonexistent, a deficiency that did not prevent him from pronouncing with absolute confidence on the plain meaning of both Testaments. The consequences of this gap between exegetical ambition and linguistic competence are visible throughout his correspondence, most strikingly in his letter to Thomas Muntzer of 5 September 1524, where he asserts that Paul "quite clearly forbids singing" in Ephesians 5 and Colossians 3, a claim that no competent reader of the Greek could sustain, since the verb ado in Ephesians 5:19 and the noun psalmos in Colossians 3:16 are unambiguously musical terms embedded in passages that explicitly command vocal praise.

His theology, for all its insistence on Scripture alone, remained structurally dependent on the very medieval scholastic categories he purported to reject: his sharp separation of the outward sign of baptism from its inward spiritual reality reproduces the nominalist distinction between signum and res significata as articulated by Ockham and Biel; his soteriology, particularly the insistence that unrepented usury leads to damnation, operates within the framework of penal satisfaction as it had been elaborated from Anselm through Aquinas, presupposing a concept of divine justice as actus purus demanding recompense for every transgression; and his absolute subordination of human law to divine command, the principle on which he rejected the Zurich council's authority to regulate the pace of reform, derives from the canonist hierarchy of lex divina over lex humana that had been a commonplace of medieval jurisprudence since Gratian, though Grebel applied it with a rigidity that eliminated the mediating category of prudentia on which the canonists had relied

 The regulative biblicism that emerged from this synthesis of humanist method and unacknowledged scholastic inheritance, the principle that only what is explicitly commanded or exemplified in the New Testament possesses authority, carried within it consequences that Grebel himself did not foresee and would not have endorsed: when the same hermeneutical principle was adopted by radical biblicists at Munster in 1534-1535, it was used to justify theocratic rule, polygamy, and the execution of dissenters under Jan van Leiden and Bernhard Rothmann, and when it was taken up by the Italian Anabaptists who gathered at the Synod of Venice in 1550 and by the later Socinian movement, it provided the exegetical warrant for dismantling the Trinitarian and Christological settlements of the fourth-century councils on the grounds that the Nicene formulations lacked explicit New Testament support.

Grebel's personal commitment to non-violence and his apparent orthodoxy on the doctrine of the Trinity were real, but they were held in place by temperament and inherited habit rather than by any principle internal to his method, and the history of the radical Reformation after his early death in 1526 would demonstrate with painful clarity that a hermeneutic built on the unmediated reading of Scripture by communities claiming the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit could produce outcomes ranging from quiet separatism to apocalyptic violence, with no stable criterion available to distinguish the one from the other.

Conrad and Johann Leopold Grebel to Ulrich Zwingli, 8 September 1517, Vienna

This letter was written from Vienna, where Conrad Grebel was studying under Joachim Vadian (Joachim von Watt), the humanist physician and scholar. The Grebel brothers composed it in the Ciceronian epistolary style characteristic of northern European humanism, replete with classical allusions, formulaic expressions of deference, and the standard rhetorical apparatus of the ars dictaminis as it had been adapted by Renaissance letter-writers. The letter predates the beginning of the Reformation by two months; Martin Luther would post his Ninety-Five Theses on 31 October 1517. At this stage, Grebel is an unremarkable humanist student seeking the patronage of a rising Swiss cleric whose reputation rested on his command of the literae humaniores rather than on any theological programme.

The effusive praise of Zwingli as a man "of such authority and such demonstrable learning among the Swiss" is conventional, but the idealisation of the scholar-pastor already carries within it an assumption that would prove corrosive: the belief that intellectual distinction and moral authority should be coextensive. When Zwingli later proved, in Grebel's judgment, insufficiently radical in his programme of reform, Grebel would turn this same humanist criterion of learned integrity against his former patron, accusing him of compromise and cowardice. The pattern of schism based on personal interpretation of Scripture, a pattern that would recur throughout the radical Reformation and culminate in the theocratic experiment at Munster, finds one of its earliest seeds in this seemingly innocent letter of scholarly admiration. The reference to Vadian as a man "stuck among Orcus' crabs" because of his medical studies is a humanist joke, but it also reveals Grebel's instinctive preference for the vita contemplativa of letters over the practical disciplines, a preference that would later transmute into a conviction that the spiritual life admits of no compromise with worldly structures.

We received your letter, most honoured Zwingli, as unexpectedly as we had desired it immensely ... from a man of such authority and such demonstrable learning among the Swiss, and we rejoice and indeed exult in earnest no differently than if you had sent us splendid jewels, a horn of plenty, and chicken milk. ... I would care nothing whether you charge me with rashness or folly; I shall never fail to write to you, so that your letters may often be returned to me. From them, apart from the lustre of Zwinglian and exquisite elegance and the trustworthy proof of new friendship, we shall have a spur to the gentler studies ever more eagerly and keenly.

You wish, I think, to hear the course of my fortune or some news. I have Vadian as my teacher, a man uniquely worthy of every title ... by him I am loved as a brother, while he is loved, revered, and cherished by me as the most dutiful father. ... I would rather be counted among your and my Glarean's pupils, namely the Gauls, led first by this consideration, that my first and almost chief teacher ... instructs faithfully and fulfills all the duties of a learned, good, and true teacher. These duties I miss in Vadian ... because as a candidate of medicine he is stuck, so to speak, among Orcus' crabs, entangled in various affairs ...

We have seen nothing of news here, unless it is news that Lodovico Celio Rodigino's Antiquarum lectionum books ... were printed ... We bought about thirty extremely barbarous Soliloquies of that utterly villainous hornet Wimpfeling ... lest the fame of the Swiss be damaged ... If you lack Wimpfeling's Soliloquy ... let me know. We also have the panegyrics of Baptista Egnatius ... and his book on the lives of the emperors. ... Georg Collimitius and his Vadian are giving birth to something of a commentary on the second book of Pliny's Natural History, which will seem great even to the Italians.

We waited some time for the Emperor; he did not come. Some have predicted that the plague would rage here; to this day they are false prophets ... provided the plague does not kill me so that I may leave here and come to Glarean, I will gladly await it.

For having not disdained to write to the not well-known, to the poorly learned, and finally to men of the lowest rank, we give thanks that shall never in any age be extinguished ... I have taken up the task of writing because Johann Leopold, prevented by the study of logic and about to receive the laurel of the baccalaureate, could not write. Yet he wishes that you be greeted in his name ... Farewell again and again, renowned glory of Switzerland.

From Vienna in Pannonia ... the year of salvation above the thousand-thousandth 17th, on the sixth day before the Nones of September [8 September 1517].

Your Grebels, Johann Leopold and Cunhard.

Conrad Grebel to Oswald Myconius 4 November 1521, Zurich

Written to Oswald Myconius (1488-1552), the Basel reformer and schoolmaster who would later succeed Oecolampadius as Antistes of the Basel church. The letter is a private, playful confession of romantic distraction, decorated with the classical mythological apparatus that was standard equipment in humanist correspondence. Grebel invokes Cupid, Hercules, and the Muses in an extended conceit about the conflict between amorous attachment and scholarly devotion.

Beneath the humour lies an anthropology shaped by the humanist synthesis of Ovidian categories and Pauline moral psychology. The affections are treated as a force that overmasters human reason and eloquence, a framing that owes as much to the Metamorphoses as to Romans 7. Grebel's exaggerated self-deprecation, calling himself "more ignorant than a monk," is a conventional humanist joke, but the retreat into a small circle of Zurich friends that the letter describes, the coterie of Zwingli, Leo Jud, and Johann Ammann who are "Platonising" together, marks an inward turn that would characterise the later separatist impulse. The notion of a "pure" community defined by shared spiritual experience rather than by sacramental or institutional order is already latent in this apparently trivial letter. The transition from a reading circle to a gathered church of the regenerate required only a change of vocabulary, not of social form.

The note that Grebel "in a free moment" expounds Greek epigrams and turns them into verse is telling. His Greek was of the kind acquired in the humanist classroom: sufficient for reading set texts with the aid of a Latin crib, but not of the quality that would permit independent philological judgment on the text of the New Testament. This limitation would not prevent him from asserting, within three years, that the plain sense of Scripture contradicted the practice of infant baptism, a claim that required precisely the kind of exegetical competence he did not possess.

Greetings, my Oswald. If you are well, it is good ... For so long a time I have been more silent than a fish. The god of lovers, that thrice-great one, snatched away my tongue ... not a boy, but Hercules in his prime ... assailed and set me on fire with his torches. Not that winged Cupido, who would linger with me for so vast a span of time!

This I have invented to fill the page. For what young man so devoted to the Muses would yield to Love? To love on both sides and to study diligently at the same time is false. I return to silence, but with these words ... wink at my present error ... And do you converse with me through mutual letters. For you will be able to do this more conveniently than ever before, because (unless my father banishes me from the country) I shall go nowhere, having been so often warned by the harsh misfortunes of ill-succeding travels ...

Concerning Zwingli and those you love, things go well. Zwingli, Jud, Ammann, and I are Platonising. Privately, if I have a free moment in a whole month, I expound some Greek epigram and turn it into verse ... Thus, my Oswald, I know so little that I am a Boeotian pig or, if you prefer, more ignorant than a monk. ... But such is the humane gentleness of your kindly character ... you do not begrudgingly receive the barbarism of a friend. ...

Greet Clivanus in my name and beg him not to take it amiss that I have replied nothing; tell him ... my father informed me of his departure ... Farewell most happily with your people, my brother, if you will allow me. Zurich, 4 November 1521.

Your Conrad Grebel from the heart.

Conrad Grebel to Joachim Vadian, 21 November 1522, Zurich

Original language: Latin, with some German expressions.

This letter is addressed to Grebel's former teacher and future brother-in-law, Joachim Vadian, by this date a prominent civic figure in St. Gallen. The letter contains two distinct subjects: a dispute over the cost of transporting books, and a tirade against an unnamed abbot and the priest Wendelin, whom Grebel condemns as "the very progeny of an evil demon."

The financial complaint is revealing in its own right. Grebel's recurrent poverty, his dependence on family connections and scholarly networks for even modest sums, and his sense of social grievance ("outlawed by the tyranny of poverty") would become recurring features of the Anabaptist leadership more broadly. The radical Reformation drew disproportionately from men of some education but limited economic prospects, a social stratum that had been produced by the expansion of humanist schooling but could not be absorbed by the existing ecclesiastical or civic structures.

The theological polemic is more consequential. Grebel's denunciation of the abbot and Wendelin draws on the medieval juridical categories of heresy and blasphemy, invoking the "unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 12:31-32) in what amounts to a forensic judgment. The concept of an unforgivable sin, as it had been elaborated in scholastic theology from Peter Lombard through Thomas Aquinas, presupposed a substantive inherited orthodoxy against which the sin could be measured. Grebel deploys this scholastic apparatus without apparent awareness that his own emerging rejection of magisterial authority would, by the same logic, be equally vulnerable to the charge. The desire to "treat them as they deserve" before the whole world reveals a zeal that, in later radical contexts, would translate into the theocratic coercion practised at Munster. Grebel does not yet advocate physical violence, but the rhetorical infrastructure for it is already in place. The anti-clerical fury that animates this passage is of the same species that would, twelve years later, fuel the expulsion of Catholics and Lutherans from Munster under Jan van Leiden and Bernhard Knipperdolling.

Greetings again and again, my Vadian. ... I ask you seriously: have you received the English Lutherans that I was going to give you ...? For the transport of Hasloeri's books I spent fourteen batzen; I want the same amount either paid back to me ... or the barrel sent back. ... For it is all over with me unless I scrape together this little bit of money ... weighed down by debt, I am fleeing, outlawed by the tyranny of poverty. ...

Ah! the abbot with Wendelin, lips and lettuce ... the very progeny of an evil demon ... Just as I gladly recognize them from you, so I would also like to treat them as they deserve, to show the world ... the punishments they would feel for their heresies and monstrous crimes, for their never-to-be-forgiven blasphemies against the Holy Spirit ... O my Vadian! If you knew how I burn with zeal to attack wolves of this kind ... would that by God's grace all would pray for me, and I might seriously take on this ministry and triumph. I add nothing, because not even wagon-loads of words could portray this soul of mine ...

With us there is nothing new. If you want the new Instrumentum [New Testament] gifted by Melanchthon ... do but snap your finger ... so that you may have it ... Farewell again, my Vadian, most evangelical.

From Zurich, 21 November 1522.

Your Conrad Grebel.

Conrad Grebel to Joachim Vadian, 18 December 1523, Zurich

Original language: Latin. A terse and bitter report on the aftermath of the Second Zurich Disputation (26-28 October 1523), at which the Zurich city council had appointed a joint civil and ecclesiastical commission to manage the pace of liturgical reform. Grebel accuses this commission of setting aside the "divine sentence" that the mass must cease, acting instead with "devilish prudence" by prescribing a "middle way."

This letter marks a decisive turning point. The charge that the council's commission has "perverted, pushed back, and bound" the Word of God amounts to a rejection of the magisterial Reformation's attempt to carry out change through lawful authority, through the deliberation of magistrates and the counsel of learned pastors. The "axiom" appended to the letter, that "whoever thinks, believes, or says that Zwingli acts from the office of a pastor, thinks, believes, and says impiously," is a formal repudiation of pastoral office as it was understood within the Reformed tradition. Grebel's position at this stage is a supra-legal biblicism: if Scripture commands the abolition of the mass, then no civil authority has the competence to delay or qualify that command.

The ecclesiological consequences of this position were far-reaching. If civil magistrates lacked the authority to regulate the pace of reform, and if ordained pastors who cooperated with magistrates thereby forfeited their spiritual authority, then the only legitimate community of faith was one gathered by voluntary consent around the unmediated word of Scripture. This is the logic that would produce believers' baptism within fourteen months. It is also the logic that, stripped of Grebel's commitment to non-violence and pushed to its apocalyptic extreme, would produce the Munster commune. The structural continuity between the two, a point that Grebel's admirers have often been reluctant to concede, lies in the shared assumption that the gathered community of the regenerate possesses an authority that overrides all inherited political and ecclesiastical order.

The scholastic background of Grebel's reasoning is worth noting. The distinction between divine law (lex divina) and human law (lex humana), and the absolute priority of the former over the latter, was a commonplace of medieval jurisprudence from Gratian onward. Grebel inherited this distinction, but he applied it with a rigidity that would have surprised the canonists who formulated it. In scholastic thought, the hierarchy of laws was mediated by prudentia, the practical wisdom of those charged with governance. Grebel's rejection of prudentia as "devilish" eliminated the mediating category and left only the stark alternative of obedience or apostasy.

Greetings, Vadian. ... I have written of nothing else rashly than that the evangelical cause is in a very bad state here (if you trust a suspicious man more than a liar), a state that began when you, through senatorial forethought, were acting as president, when the council was being held; then (God sees) the Word was being perverted, pushed back, and bound by its most learned heralds.

Now I shall tell you how, in dealing with the mass, both senatorial orders handed this knot to be untied to eight senators, Zwingli, the Commander, the Abbot of Kappel, the Provost of Embrach, and I know not what other shaven monsters. They, disregarding the divine sentence that there should be no mass, prescribed a middle way, by devilish prudence, I know. ... And thus the mass will have to be celebrated. Let the pastors see to it, etc. Farewell. Judge, but not as you have done so far.

Axiom.

Whoever thinks, believes, or says that Zwingli acts from the office of a pastor, thinks, believes, and says impiously. If you demand a defence of this axiom, I shall send it in writing.

Friday before the feast of Thomas, 1523.

Conrad Grebel to Joachim Vadian, 3 September 1524, Zurich

Grebel declines Vadian's invitation to visit St. Gallen, citing his recent marriage and his determination to "cling to my rock" in Zurich. The letter's chief significance lies in its report that Grebel is writing to Andreas Karlstadt and Thomas Muntzer, and that he is compiling "commonplaces" (loci communes) for public circulation.

The self-portrait as a second Job, filled with the Spirit and compelled to speak against false teachers, breathes the air of prophetic immediacy. The extended quotation from Job 32 ("I am full of words, and the spirit of my belly constrains me") positions Grebel as one who speaks under divine compulsion, not from personal ambition. This is a dangerous claim, and Grebel was not unaware of its dangers; the qualification "not prophesying" appended to his description of his teaching activity is a hedge against the charge of enthusiasm. But the hedge is unconvincing, because the logic of unmediated revelation, once admitted, provides no stable criterion for distinguishing the genuine prophet from the false one. Muntzer claimed the same Spirit, and the Munster prophets Jan Matthijs and Jan van Leiden would claim it after him.

The mention of Karlstadt and Muntzer is particularly telling. Grebel was writing to both men in the same week (the letter to Muntzer is dated 5 September 1524, two days after this letter to Vadian). He had obtained and read Muntzer's treatise on "feigned faith," and while he would rebuke Muntzer's advocacy of armed resistance, the fact that he regarded Muntzer as a potential ally reveals the extent to which Grebel's biblicism and Muntzer's apocalypticism shared common ground. Both men rejected the mediation of magisterial authority between Scripture and the believer. Both claimed the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit. Both regarded the established churches as apostate. The difference between them, Grebel's commitment to non-resistance and Muntzer's willingness to take up the sword, was real but secondary; it concerned the application of principles, not the principles themselves. The later anti-Trinitarian movements that emerged from Anabaptist circles, from the Italian Socinians to the Polish Brethren, would inherit this same confidence in the individual believer's capacity to read Scripture without the mediation of creedal or conciliar authority, and they would use it to dismantle the Nicene settlement that Grebel himself never questioned.

The reference to Daniel's prophecy of the "abomination of desolation" standing in the temple is an apocalyptic allusion that links Grebel's local dispute with Zwingli to a cosmic drama of apostasy and restoration. This kind of typological reading, in which the contemporary church is identified with the apostate Israel of the prophets, was standard fare in both medieval and Reformation polemic, but Grebel applies it with a directness that collapses the distance between the biblical text and the present moment. The postscript, requesting 9.5 batzen to pay off a debt related to Vadian's wife's testament, is a characteristically jarring return to the mundane.

Greetings, dearest Vadian. ... I sensed it would please both of you, I answered at once that I had set my mind on making the journey ... But again, when I thought one thing after another ... I began to sway with my whole body towards another opinion, that was, to cling to my rock. ... While I turn many things over, here is the companion Michael, but my father is absent. Thus I have remained, and there is something for me to do here.

You ask what I am doing. I am writing back to Andreas Karlstadt; I am writing first to Thomas Muntzer (whose twin little book on feigned faith I recently obtained and read); perhaps I shall also address Luther ... Next, I read the Greek Gospel of Matthew to some hearers, interpreting as best I can, not prophesying. Finally, of all things, I compile and collect passages ... namely two commonplaces, which I intend to cast before the public, unless someone else anticipates me. Do you want to hear the ground of my whole boldness?

I waited and they spoke not; they stood and answered no more. I also will answer my part and show the knowledge of God. For I am full of words, and the spirit of my belly constrains me. Behold, my belly is like wine without a vent, ready to burst new wineskins. I will speak and breathe a little ... I will not accept the person of a man, nor will I make God equal to man. (Job 32)

Hear, you bishops!

And what Daniel prophesies: And in the temple shall be the abomination of desolation ... Because also according to Ezekiel, certain men, when they drink the purest water, foul the rest with their feet, and the sheep feed on what has been trampled ...

Besides, my wife holds me almost as much as all the other reasons ... So if I can do anything by mutual letters, I prefer to offer that at this time rather than move myself to you ... Farewell in Christ. Zurich, 3 September 1524.

Your Conrad Grebel.

P.S. ... send me 9 and a half batzen by Michael to pay off your wife's testament.

Conrad Grebel and the Swiss Brethren to Thomas Muntzer 5 September 1524, Zurich

This is the most programmatic of Grebel's surviving letters and the single most important document of pre-Anabaptist theology. It was co-signed by Andreas Castelberg, Felix Mantz, Hans Oggenfuss, Bartlime Pur, Heinrich Aberli, and other members of the Zurich circle who would, within five months, perform the first believers' baptisms on 21 January 1525. The letter was never delivered to Muntzer, who by September 1524 was already moving toward the armed confrontation with the Saxon princes that would culminate in his capture and execution after the Battle of Frankenhausen on 15 May 1525.

The theology articulated here is a thoroughgoing biblicism of the regulative type: worship must be restricted to what is explicitly commanded or exemplified in the New Testament. On this principle, Grebel and his co-signatories reject infant baptism (no New Testament command or example), congregational singing (Paul "quite clearly forbids singing in Ephesians 5 and Colossians 3," a reading that requires a selective and tendentious handling of the Greek text), Muntzer's liturgical "tablets" (no New Testament precedent), and any understanding of the Lord's Supper that goes beyond a memorial meal. The Supper is to be "common bread, without idols and additions," administered with "a common drinking vessel," and conducted under the rule of congregational discipline outlined in Matthew 18.

The exegetical claims made in this letter repay close attention, because they reveal both the strengths and the limitations of Grebel's biblical scholarship. His assertion that Paul "forbids singing" in Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16 is, by any standard of Greek philology, untenable. The verb ado in Ephesians 5:19 and the noun psalmos in Colossians 3:16 are unambiguously musical terms, and the passage in Ephesians explicitly commands the believers to address one another "in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart." Grebel appears to have read these passages through a Latin intermediary and to have interpreted the Pauline emphasis on the heart (en te kardia humon) as an exclusion of vocal expression, a reading that no competent Hellenist would endorse. The same pattern of confident exegetical assertion unsupported by adequate philological command recurs in the discussion of baptism, where Grebel appeals to the "plain sense" of Scripture without engaging the lexical and syntactic questions that had occupied patristic commentators from Origen onward. His dismissal of Augustine, Tertullian, Theophylact, and Cyprian on baptismal theology is sweeping but unargued: he does not explain why these ancient readers of the Greek and Latin texts were wrong, only that they were wrong.

The social ethic of the letter demands non-resistance and explicitly refuses the sword. "True believing Christians are sheep among wolves, sheep for slaughter. They must be baptized in anxiety, distress, tribulation, persecution ... They use neither worldly sword nor war, for killing is entirely abolished among them." This passage is the locus classicus of Anabaptist pacifism, and it constitutes a direct rebuke of Muntzer's rumoured calls to arms. Grebel's commitment to non-violence was sincere, and it would be sustained by the mainstream Swiss Brethren and their Mennonite descendants. But the letter's rejection of all inherited order, its willingness to "break with idols," and its expectation that the Word alone produces a pure community contain structural tensions that Grebel's pacifism could not resolve. The question that the letter does not answer is what happens when the gathered community disagrees about what Scripture commands. Grebel's answer, the discipline of Matthew 18 (admonition, then exclusion), assumes a prior consensus on the meaning of the text that his own exegetical practice could not guarantee. When that consensus fractured, as it did repeatedly in the first generation of Anabaptism, the results ranged from the peaceful schisms of the Swiss and South German Brethren to the catastrophic theocracy at Munster, where radical biblicists claimed the same scriptural warrant for polygamy, communism of goods, and the execution of dissenters that Grebel had claimed for non-resistance and believers' baptism. The structural continuity lies in the method: the gathered community reads Scripture, determines its plain sense, and enforces that determination without appeal to any authority beyond itself.

The soteriology implicit in the letter is also worth noting. The statement that "water does not strengthen and increase faith" and "does not save" is directed against the Lutheran and Catholic positions alike, but it rests on an understanding of grace that owes more to late medieval voluntarism than to any careful reading of Paul in the Greek. The sharp separation between the outward sign and the inward reality, between the water of baptism and the faith it signifies, echoes the nominalist distinction between the sign (signum) and the thing signified (res significata) as it had been articulated by William of Ockham and Gabriel Biel. Grebel would have been horrified by the comparison, but his theology is structurally dependent on the very scholastic categories he purported to reject.

The letter also contains the seeds of the anti-Trinitarian developments that would emerge within Anabaptist circles in the following decades. While Grebel himself shows no sign of questioning the Nicene Creed, his hermeneutical principle, that only what is explicitly commanded or exemplified in the New Testament has authority, provided a ready-made tool for those who would later argue that the Trinitarian formulations of the fourth-century councils lacked explicit scriptural warrant. The Italian Anabaptists who gathered at the Synod of Venice in 1550, and who included proto-Unitarian figures, operated on precisely this regulative principle. The line from Grebel's letter to the anti-Trinitarianism of Fausto Sozzini is not a line of direct influence, but it is a line of logical entailment.

Peace, grace, and mercy from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord be with us all. Amen. Dear brother Thomas, for God's sake do not be surprised that we address you without title, and that, as brothers, we presume from now on to deal with you by writing ... The Son of God, Jesus Christ, who offers himself as the sole teacher and head of all those who are to be saved, and who calls us brothers, has driven and compelled us through the one common word given to all brothers and believers to make friendship and brotherhood and to set forth the following articles.

... our forefathers had fallen away from the true God, from the knowledge of Jesus Christ ... they lived without God's commandment ... in human, useless, unchristian practices and ceremonies ... So now we too see everyone being saved in a merely apparent faith, without the fruit of faith, without baptism of testing and proving ... while they remain in ... Antichristian practices, baptism and the Lord's Supper of Christ, in contempt of the divine word and in esteem for the papal word ...

... We are wonderfully glad that we had found someone of common Christian understanding with us ... who dares to show the evangelical preachers their lack: how in all chief articles they falsely spare and deal, and set their own good opinion, even that of the Antichrist, above God ...

... we admonish you ... that you earnestly devote yourself to preaching only God's word without fear; to setting up and defending only divine practices; to judging only as good and right what can be found in bright, clear Scripture; and to rejecting, hating, and cursing all schemes, words, practices, and opinions of all men, including your own.

We understand ... you have Germanized the Mass and set up new German songs. This cannot be good, for we find in the New Testament no teaching about singing, no example. Paul rebukes the Corinthians ... because they mutter in the congregation, as though they were singing ... Paul in fact quite clearly forbids singing in Ephesians 5 and Colossians 3 ... Fifth, Christ commands his messengers only to preach the word ... the word of Christ, not song, should dwell among us. ... Seventh, if you wish to abolish the Mass, it must not be done with German singing. ... The Mass must be rooted out by the word and institution of Christ. ... it was not planted by God.

... The Supper of union ... the words in Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 22, and 1 Corinthians 11 alone should be used, neither less nor more ... it should be common bread, without idols and additions ... there should be a common drinking vessel ... the bread is nothing other than bread, in faith the body of Christ, and an incorporation with Christ and the brothers; for one must eat and drink in spirit and love, as John teaches ... the bread should not be locked away for a single person ...

... If someone found that he could not live as a brother, he eats to condemnation ... it should also not be used in temples ... it should be used often and much ... not without the rule of Christ in Matthew 18. ... Do not look to the falling away or to the anti-Christian sparing ...

It is far better that few be rightly instructed through the word of God ... than that many falsely and treacherously believe from mixed doctrine. ... if your benefices are founded on interest and tithes, both of which are real usury as among us, and if no whole congregation will support you, then you must withdraw from the benefices. ...

We heard with sorrow how you have set up tablets. We find no Scripture or example for this in the New Testament. ... Be willing to cast down the tablets again. ... Draw with the word, and make a Christian congregation with the help of Christ and his rule ... Apply earnestness, common prayer, and breaking of bread according to faith and love, without command and without compulsion. Then God will help you ... and singing and tablets will fall away.

... Whoever will not reform himself ... after Christ and his word and rule have been preached to him, and after he has been admonished by the three steps and by the congregation, him, we say, as instructed by God's word, one should not kill, but regard and leave as a heathen and tax collector. One should also not defend the Gospel and those who accept it with the sword, nor should they defend themselves ... True believing Christians are sheep among wolves, sheep for slaughter. They must be baptized in anxiety, distress, tribulation, persecution ... They use neither worldly sword nor war, for killing is entirely abolished among them. ...

... Scripture describes baptism as meaning that through faith and the blood of Christ ... sins have been washed away; that it means one has died and should die to sin, and should walk in newness of life ... Thus water does not strengthen and increase faith, as the learned men at Wittenberg say ... it does not save, as Augustine, Tertullian, Theophylact, and Cyprian taught ... all children who have not yet come to the discernment of the knowledge of good and evil ... are certainly saved through the suffering of Christ ... we conclude ... that infant baptism is a senseless, blasphemous horror, contrary to all Scripture and also contrary to the papacy.

... If you or Carlstadt do not write adequately against infant baptism ... I would venture my salvation, Conrad Grebel, and what I should have begun to write against all who until now ... have written misleadingly and knowingly about baptism ... I, together with us all, will be more certain of persecution ...

We ask you not to use or even name the old practices of the Antichrist, such as sacrament, Mass, signs ... Hold and act only according to the word ... Regard us as your brothers ... What we have not understood rightly, instruct and teach us.

Given at Zurich on the fifth day of the autumn month in the year 1524.

Conrad Grebel, Andreas Castelberg, Felix Mantz, Hans Oggenfuss, Bartlime Pur, Heinrich Aberli, and your other brothers ...

[Postscript in Grebel's hand:]

Dearest brother Thomas ... I have written to Luther ... and admonished him to cease from the false sparing of the weak ... Meanwhile Hans Huiuff of Hall ... brought a shameful little book of Luther ... I see that Luther wants to hand you over to the prince ... If you preached that princes should be attacked with fists, or if you wished to defend war, or the tablets, singing, or anything else not found in the clear word ... I admonish you by the common salvation of us all: be willing to abandon them and all human opinion ... you will become wholly pure ... If you fall into the hands of Luther and the princes, let the mentioned articles fall, and stand by the others like a hero and fighter of God. ... For our shepherds are grim and raging against us, calling us knaves ... we will shortly see persecution come over us. Therefore pray for us.

... we are alike in word, trial, and opponents ... May God ... be with you and us all. ... If God wills, greet your Christians from us, and write back ... a long letter. You will awaken in us great joy and increased love toward you.

Joachim Vadian to Conrad Grebel, 28 December 1524, St. Gallen

This letter is Vadian's reply to Grebel's increasingly strident correspondence, and it is the only surviving letter in this collection not written by Grebel himself. Vadian writes on the Feast of the Holy Innocents, a liturgical date whose ironic appropriateness, given the subject matter of mutual accusation and the protection of the vulnerable, he does not remark upon. The letter is a model of Erasmian moderation, and it stands in sharp contrast to the apocalyptic urgency of Grebel's recent correspondence.

Vadian's position is that reform must proceed gradually, with "discretion" (Bescheidenheit) and "gentleness" (Sanftmutigkeit), terms that belong to the vocabulary of Erasmian irenicism rather than to Grebel's prophetic biblicism. The humanist's appeal to these virtues rests on a fundamentally different ecclesiology. For Vadian, the church is an institution embedded in civic life, subject to the same requirements of prudence and patience that govern all human governance. For Grebel, the church is a gathered community of the regenerate, and any compromise with unregenerate civic structures constitutes apostasy. These two ecclesiologies are incommensurable, and Vadian's gentle plea for patience was doomed to fail.

The letter's theological modesty is also revealing. Vadian's admission that he has "a poor understanding of these things" and is "ready to be taught" is not false humility; it is the posture of the lay humanist who regards theological questions as matters for specialist judgment, not for prophetic assertion. Grebel, by contrast, had already moved beyond this deference to learned authority and was claiming the competence to pronounce on matters of baptism, the Supper, and ecclesiology on the basis of his own reading of Scripture, a reading conducted, as noted above, without the philological tools that would have made it reliable.

The later tragedy, Grebel's imprisonment by the Zurich council, Felix Mantz's execution by drowning on 5 January 1527, and the escalation of radical movements into the militant apocalypticism of Munster, illustrates the consequences of disregarding counsels of patience such as Vadian's. This is not to suggest that Vadian's moderation would have prevented all violence; the dynamics of the Reformation were too complex for any single intervention to have altered their course. But the letter records a moment at which a different path was offered and refused.

My greetings with the offer of all I can. Dear brother-in-law Conrad,

I have taken note of your recent letter. It surprises me that you think I have much desire to mock you; that is not at all my nature. My desire has always been, and still is, that you maintain a proper, reasonable attitude toward Zwingli and Low [Leo Jud], and not be so senseless or combative, considering that they are the ones who labour to promote the word of truth and yet cannot suddenly cast out and abolish everything that has grown into abuse over so many years. The struggle is now mostly over baptism; it will in time, without doubt, be put in order by the word of truth as well as other things have been. For that reason I have always wished that there might be peace and a mutual understanding among you.

But if you think you must proceed radically, I cannot prevent you or others. Yet I want always to have admonished you, as a kinsman, that you proceed with discretion and gentleness, as befits the gospel, and not think that I am mocking you if I do not simply concede everything. And there is much for me to overlook, for in truth I have a poor understanding of these things and am ready to be taught. Take everything in the best part. And be commended to God.

Given at St. Gallen on the Feast of the Holy Innocents, in the [15]24 year.

Joachim von Watt, etc.

Let me know if anything new comes out from Zwingli or Low; I will pay for it. Likewise, what you intend to do with the little book I sent you.

To the pious and well-learned Conrad Grebel, citizen of Zurich, my dear brother-in-law.

Conrad Grebel to Joachim Vadian, May 1525, Zurich

Original language: Latin. This is Grebel's last surviving letter, written after the first believers' baptisms of 21 January 1525 and before the Zurich council's coercive measures against the Anabaptists, which would include Grebel's own imprisonment in October 1525. Grebel would die of plague in the summer of 1526, probably in August, at approximately twenty-eight years of age.

The letter pleads with Vadian to abandon what Grebel calls Zwingli's "bloody party" and the sin of usury (census, interest), invoking Psalm 15, Ezekiel 18, and Pope Gregory IX's decretal on usury (the decretal Naviganti, incorporated into the Liber Extra of 1234). The appeal to a papal decretal is a striking anomaly in a letter written by a man who elsewhere denounces the papacy as Antichrist, and it reveals the extent to which Grebel's thought remained embedded in the medieval legal and theological tradition even as he sought to repudiate it. The scholastic doctrine on usury, as it had been elaborated from Gratian through Aquinas and into the canon law of the high Middle Ages, treated the exaction of interest as a sin against commutative justice, a category that presupposed the Thomistic account of justice as a stable disposition (habitus) ordered toward rendering to each what is due. Grebel's invocation of this tradition, combined with his citation of the biblical proof-texts that the scholastic doctors had themselves cited, places him squarely within the medieval penitential framework, even as he imagines himself to be operating on the basis of Scripture alone.

The soteriology presupposed in the letter, that unrepented usury leads to damnation, draws on the scholastic concept of mortal sin as an act that destroys the habitual grace of the soul and renders the sinner liable to eternal punishment unless he repents and makes satisfaction. This is the framework of penal substitutionary atonement as it had been articulated in the Western church from Anselm of Canterbury's Cur Deus Homo (1098) through the scholastic synthesis of the thirteenth century. The idea that Christ's suffering atones for sin, and that the benefits of that atonement are available only to those who repent and conform their lives to the divine commandments, is the unspoken premise of Grebel's demand that Vadian "give up the usury of interest" or face damnation. The concept of divine justice at work here, the notion of God as actus purus whose justice demands satisfaction for every transgression, is Thomistic in origin, and it is remarkable that Grebel deploys it without any apparent awareness of its intellectual provenance.

The language of bloodguilt and covenant fidelity that runs through the letter ("Beware, beware of innocent blood"; "I call heaven and earth to witness"; "I will bear witness to the truth even unto death") draws on the medieval penitential tradition and on the prophetic rhetoric of the Old Testament as it was read through the lens of typological exegesis. Grebel offers himself as a martyr, and his willingness to "lay down my life" for the brothers, or for Vadian if he repents, is framed in terms that echo both the Johannine writings (1 John 3:16) and the medieval theology of martyrdom as a second baptism. The letter simultaneously repudiates the sword and yet infuses the conflict with an ultimacy that could, in other hands, justify holy violence. The habit of confronting civil authority with absolute divine commands, and of treating any refusal to comply as evidence of damnation, is already fully formed in this letter. The Munster rebellion of 1534-1535 lies nine years in the future, and Grebel would have recoiled from the violence of Jan van Leiden and Bernhard Rothmann; but the theological grammar that made Munster possible, the assertion that the gathered community of the regenerate possesses the authority to override all human law in the name of divine commandment, is the grammar of this letter.

Salvation and peace to you in the Lord, not in the world, so that it may be in the Lord.

I am most grateful for the kindness you have shown me ... But when your struggle against those good Christian brothers of mine comes to mind, I say freely, frankly, and in a Christian manner: ... all or at least the greatest fault is yours, if anything is decreed against those people, prison, fine, banishment, or death. Beware, beware of innocent blood; they are innocent, even if you both know and do not know; whether you will or not, they are innocent. Their patience, the outcome of their lives, and the great day of the Lord will prove it. ... I call heaven and earth to witness; allow me ... to speak what through Christ our Lord and Saviour is true in truth. I, by the Lord's permission, will bear witness to the truth even unto death ...

I know what urges you: it is the interest [census] that urges you, I think, or your fleshly wisdom, or the unjust side of Zwingli, the enemy of truth in this matter. Do not, I beg you, destroy yourself. ... Rather give up the usury of interest; trust in God; humble yourself; be content with little; withdraw from Zwingli's bloody party; flee from your own wisdom to the divine ... Why do you not believe Zwingli, even for your own salvation, who, according to the clear Scripture (Psalm 15 [14], Ezekiel 18), publicly proclaimed that interest promotes damnation? And Pope Gregory IX excluded from the Lord's Supper anyone who exacts anything beyond the principal from a debtor.

If you are not willing to stand with the brothers, at least do not resist ... I tell you, truly and unfailingly, by my faith in Christ ... I have warned you in this manner solely out of love ... If you yield, I will lay down my life for you; if you do not yield, I will lay it down for these brothers ... I will bear witness to the truth through the plundering of my goods, namely my house ... through prisons, banishments, death, and by a written booklet, unless God forbid it.

You approve the doctrine; Zwingli disapproves it. What, then, do you wait for ...? ... If the doctrine is sound, as it is sound, as you confess ... and if you deny them the choice, why do you not choose yourself, or someone else, or be chosen, or why does the council not baptise? ... In this way you indicate that you desire baptism to be abolished, to the mockery and contempt of the doctrine you have approved ... Again I say: if you deceive the council, which does not notice this, you will not deceive the Lord.

Pray for me to the Lord ... and I in turn will pray constantly, as a brother. Bear this with a Christian and patient spirit, and take heed. Farewell in the Lord Jesus Christ. Greet my sister and the household for me, with thanks.

Zurich, Tuesday before Pentecost, 1525.

[To] Joachim Vadian, my brother-in-law and brother in the Lord.

8 Sept. 1517 — Conrad et Johann Leopold Grebel to Ulrich Zwingli

Literas tuas, observandissime Zvingli, ut minus expectavimus, a viro scilicet et tantae authoritatis et tam monstrabilis doctrinae inter Helvetios, sic desyderio immenso (pro me meoque amico loquor) accepimus atque non secus gaudemus, immo et serio triumphamus, ac si nobis praeclaras gemmas, ac si copiaecornu lacque gallinarium misisses. Accipiant alii ab amicis divitum dona regum, dummodo chartarias illas tuas opes (quas ut omnia faventibus Musis tractas) tuo Conrado, Zvinglius, mittere non desinas. Ego susque deque laturus, si me vel temeritatis sive stulticiae incuses; nunquam non ad te scribam, sic ut tuae literae mihi saepe reddantur. Ex quibus, praeter Zvinglianae exquisitaeque nitorem elegantiae fidumque novae amicitiae testimonium, ad mansuetiorum literarum studia alacrius acriusque calcar habebimus.

Vis, puto, fortunae meae tenorem aut novarum aliquid rerum audire. Vadianum habeo praeceptorem, virum omnibus titulis unice dignum, cui, en et hoc fateor, fratris loco diligor, ipse autem pientissimi patris vice mihi amatur, colitur observaturque. In artibus liberalibus, quas septem vocant, nullam lauream, sed hoc meo suadente genio, aut tuli aut unquam feram. Ad mansuetas literas si hodie non desideo, totus olim desidebo. Stipendio Maximiliani Caesaris maxime hac tempestate duobus enim annis adiutus, ad praedicta literarum studia Viennae incubui, perinde quoque incubiturus. Et quamvis nonnullis commoditatibus hic magis quam alibi afficerer, mallem tamen inter Glareani mei atque tui discipulos Gallos scilicet nactus numerari, hac primum ratione pellectus, quod primus quasi praeceptor meus non sine summa honoris praefatione, non sine longa titulorum coronide nominandus fuerit, instruit fideliter atque omnes docti, boni verique praeceptoris numeros explet. Hos ego, ne aliquid obiicias, in Vadiano, non sua negligentia, non maligni natura ingenii praepedito, sed medicinae candidato scilicet tanquam inter Orci cancros haerente, desydero. Ille ut variis intricetur negociis, Pomponium Melam fructiferis suisque commentariis sub praelo Viennae et in literariis follibus positum interpretatur.

Novarum rerum hic nihil vidimus; tamen si novum est Lodovici Celii Rhodigini etiamnum viventis Antiquarum lectionum libros anno 17o ab Aldi socero Venetiis excusos. Vimphelingii illius scelestissimi crabronis Soliloquia barbarissima numerum prope trigenarium excedentia a bibliopolis nostris emimus, quo Helvetiorum fama laederetur minus, atque omnia emimus. Unum habet dominus Ioachimus Vadianus, alia alii. Mihi tamen aliquot supersunt. Si ergo Vimphelingii, hoc est Helvetiomastigis, soliloquio cares, fac sciam. Baptistae quoque Egnatii de victis a Gallorum rege Helvetiis panegyricos et eiusdem de imperatorum vitis librum habemus. Plinii historias nescio an hic an Basileae cum pulcherrimo doctissimi viri Camertis indice excudant. Molitur ille idem de pulchre dictis poetarum et proverbiorum nominatam seriem edere. Georgius Collimitius cum Vadiano suo aliquid commentarii in secundum Plinii de naturali historia parturiunt, quod Italis etiam magnum videbitur.

Caesarem aliquamdiu expectavimus; non venit. Pestem hic debacchaturam aliqui praecinuerunt; in hanc usque diem vani vates. Modo excipiam aliis morbis homines hic et frequenter laborare et interire! Pestem, modo me non enecet, ut hinc abeam, ut ad Glareanum veniam, libenter operior. Sed ista missa facio.

Quod non bene notis, quod indoctulis, quod denique imi subsellii homuntionibus scribere non dedignatus fueris, gratias agimus nullo unquam aevo extinguibiles, proque virili nostra referemus. Amicitiam postremo, quam humili eloquio te inchoasse dicis, hoc est meo iudicio plusquam erudito, tibi adiuratissimi obsecutores futuri arctissime tenebimus. Nec hoc praetereundum, scribendi partes me ideo desumpsisse, quum Ioannes Leopoldus logices studio prohibitus et baccalaureatus lauream propediem suscepturus scribere non potuit. Vult tamen, ut nomine suo saluteris, idem volente Hulderico tuo institore et Conrado Moser, qui tuas huc attulit. Cum saepe scribes, quamvis alias amatus, tamen tunc maxime amabere et ego respondendo non impiger ero.

Vale et ama te tuo merito observantes. Etiam atque iterum vale, inclitum Helvetiae decus.

Viennae Pannoniae ex lyceo nostro anno salutifero supra sequimillessimum 17o sexto nonas Septembris.

Grebelii tui Ioannes Leopoldus et Cuonhardus.

Viro ingenuarum artium magistro animarumque in Helvetiorum Eremo tueatori vigilacissimo Hulderico Zuinglio, domino sibi summopere colendo.

4 Nov. 1521 — Conrad Grebel to Oswald Myconius

Salve mi Osalde. Si vales bene est et quod ego tibi ex animo precor. Iam tanto tempore (nihil nego) pisce taciturnus magis fui. Linguam eripuerat deus amorum, ille ter magnus, atque adeo apud me non paucis mensibus non puer, tanto enim robore qui adoritur, oppugnat, expugnat, sed Hercules creditus, aut si quis hoc quoque grandior robustiorque vixit. Non captus oculis qui videatur, quando me cuncta inspiciente Apolline certius fixerit, telis furorum sauciaverit, facibus impetiverit, incenderit. Non alatus ille Cupido qui tam immenso temporis spacio apud me moretur!

Haec ut explerem chartam commentus sum. Qui enim adulescens tam deditus Musis amori cederet? Utrimque ut amem ut studeam sedulo, falsum est. Redeo ad silentium, at hisce verbis connive quaeso ad nunc errorem, non committam posthac ut incusandus sim. Et confabulare tu per litteras mutuas mecum. Poteris enim istud quam prius unquam commodius praestare quod (nisi parens proscripturus sit e patria) nusquam abibo, peregrinationum infoeliciter succedentium iniquis casibus iam toties commonefactus ut ad abitionis nomen auditum exhorrescam.

De Zinlio et quos tu amas, bene agitur. Platonisamus Zinlius, Scudus, Ammanus et ego. Privatim autem si quando per integrum mensem quippiam vacat meditari, Graecum epigramma aliquod expono, in carmen (pene exciderat crimen) verto. Excipe hanc raram et brevem operam, nihil ago. Inde fit, mi Osalde, ut tam nihil norim, ut sim Boeotica sue vel, si mavis, monacho indoctior.

Denique ex hoc quoque ut tam incompte, inepte barbasculeque tecum garriam, sed quae tua est benignorum morum humana facilitas rursusque facilis humanitas non gravatim amici barbariem suscipit. Suscipisque quod ex animo dicta ineleganter licet malis quam ex ore suaviter ornateque. Utcunque est, scribam, rescribam, scriptitabo, scriptitando enecabo; cave itaque si vivere voles.

Clivanum nomine meo supplica, ne in malam partem interpretetur quod nihil responderim, quod ideo factum esse illi dices (modo Lucernae agat) quod sit quiddam quod longiorem moram poscat, quam ut iam potuerim extrudere. Huius diei nanque vespere abitionis suae me admonuit pater crastino summo mane discessurus. Ecce causam esse non aliam non missarum litterarum quam huius incognitam properationem.

Vale cum tuis foelicissime, mi frater, si pateris. Dominum Xilotectum, Ioannem Tibianum et qui me amant salvebis. Tiguri. IIII Novembris, anno MDXXI.

Conradus Grebelius tuus ex animo.

Osaldo Myconio viro omnibus modis docto et charo amico. Lucernae.

21 Nov. 1522 — Conrad Grebel to Joachim Vadian

Salve etiam atque etiam, mi Vadiane. Zinlium acceperas de missa libellum parturire. Mihi non constat, qui manu ab isto e regione domus meae contingi possem. Ideo expectes quantumlibet diu; per me non habebis, nec per Zinlium etiam opinor, ut qui non concipiat unquam hoc argumenti genus tractare. Plus satis nugarum.

Serio hoc ex te interrogo, num Anglos Lutherigenas exceperis, quos ego tibi dono daturus eram, si isti satisfecisses prius bibliopolae; neque enim mihi gratis impertit neque tu me pariter cum familia mea alis. Plus satis serii fuerit et hoc, quare ego finio.

Atque en de neutro? Pro vectura librorum Hasloeriorum impendi quattuordecim bazios; totidem aut satisdari mihi volo, adeoque ne summae quadrans minimus decedat, aut dolium remitti. Nunc habes me; tu fac, quod facis, hoc est, fac amice, ne negligar. Actum enim de me est, nisi hanc pecuniolam ex Zellanis corradimus; aere alieno gravatus profugio, paupertatis tyrannide proscribendus exulo. Neque me tum iuvabunt quippiam ista tua opulenta verba, deluse augur, quibus me tantum non Midam futurum vaticinabare.

Hui abbatem cum Wendelino labra et lactucas, ut aiunt, utrunque bis, hoc est vita, ordine praeterea, cacodaemonis progeniem ipsissimamque progeniem, quos ego, ut lubens ex te agnosco, ita pro merito etiam tractare cuperem, mundo orbique universo ostensurus poenas, quas isti ob haereses suas et immania scelera, ob nunquam ignoscibiles blasphemias in spiritum sanctum persensuri essent, si quantum vellem, tantum etiam possem in θεοπνεύστοις τοῖς γράμμασι. Fiat interim voluntas Domini, dum ego non possum nec tu vis sive per καιρὸν non audes, dum Zinlius vellet auderetque, nec sinant occupationum sive afflictionum procellae. Sed quid non Sertorius in istum scribit Elymam magum, veritatis omnis inimicum, paedicatorem! O mi Vadiane! Si me scias, quam ardeam insectandi huiusmodi luporum ardore, quam vero non chara futura esset vita mea mihi, modo istos anathema superis atque inferis, ne mortalibus solum putes, sat digne dixissem. Atque utinam gratia Dei omnes pro me orent et ministerium hoc triumphaturus serio accipiam. Nihil addo, quia nulla plaustra etiam verborum cognoscendum animum hunc meum facto olim periculo depingere possent.

Apud nos novi nihil est. Si instrumentum novum a Melanchthone Germaniae civitate (exque ipsa Graecia) donatum, scholiis insuper insertis explanatum desideras; verum ubi diebus his prius ad nos advectum fuerit, crepa tantum digitulo, ut habeas, ne tamen non indices semper exemplariorum numerum.

Quod reliquum est: salvebis plurimum episcopum cum universa Ecclesia, quae Christi capitis per Evangelium graciae est, et sorores item, ut sint cum tuo isto Vadiano nomine salvae, iubeo, utque tandem, quae minus tua est, minor natu, redeat quam primum parentibus, istius absentiam qui gravatim atque aegre tolerant. Vale, sed heus! Quis istas cimicei, hoc est Wentelini, pseudochristi blasphemias scripsit ad me? Iterum vale, mi Vadiane, perquam evangelicissime.

Ex Tiguro, 21. Novembris, anno 1522.

Conradus Grebelius tuus.

Domino loachimo Vadiano, viro in omnigena literatura eximie docto, affini suo perquam charissimo.

18 Dec. 1523 — Conrad Grebel to Joachim Vadian

Salve, Vadiane. Quia et expetis et pro officio meo etiam expostulare posses, ut scribam ad te, immo rescribam, utcunque sinant multa, quae multis etiam nominibus impedire videbantur, scripsi. Nec aliud temere, quam pessime rem Evangelicam hic habere (si tamen suspecto magis quam mendaci credas) et tunc coepisse, cum tu providentia senatoria praesidentem ageres, cum celebraretur concilium; tunc (Deus videt et in auribus eius est) cum verbum a doctissimis eius praeconibus inverteretur, retruderetur et alligaretur.

Nunc dicam, quomodo super missa tractantes uterque ordo senatorius nodum hunc enodandum tradiderunt octo senatoribus, Zinlio, commendatori, abbati Capellano, praeposito Imbriacensi et nescio quibus monstris rasis. Illi neglecta sententia divina de non missando medium praescrisperunt prudentia (scio) diabolica. Illud cras referetur ad utrunque senatum, et sic missandum erit. Viderint pastores etc. Vale. Iudica, sed non ut hactenus.

Ἀξίωμα.

Qui Zinlium ex officio pastoris agere putat, credit vel dicit, impie putat, credit et dicit. Ubi defensionem huius ἀξίωματος postularis, rescriptam mittam.

Die Veneris ante festum Thomae 1523.

Domino Ioachimo Vadiano, praesidenti concilii Tigurini clarissimo, affini charissimo. Apud Sanctum Gallum.

3 Sept. 1524 — Conrad Grebel to Joachim Vadian

Salve, charissime Vadiane. Litteris, quas ad parentem dedisti, desiderare te adventum meum significasti; pater legendas dedit et cum legissem, quid animi haberem, interrogavit. Ego quandoquidem utrique gratum fore olfacerem, animum me adposuisse ad iter conficiendum statim respondi, maxime autem si comitem habiturus essem, quod sim ad aberrandum in itineribus a via recta doctissimus. Rursus autem cum aliud ex alio cogitarem et perpenderem, in aliam sententiam toto corpore nutare coepi; ea erat, ut petrae meae adhaererem. Causas habeo magni ponderis apud me, sed non audies eas accurate explicatas, priusquam volens nolens vel ego ad te vel tu ad nos veniamus. Dum multa mecum volvo, adest comes Michael, sed abest pater. Sicque ego mansi, et est, quod hic agam.

Quid sit, quod ago, quaeris. Rescribo Andreae Carolostadio; Thomae Münzero (cuius libellum geminum de ficta fide nuper nactus legi) scribo primum; forsitan et Lutherum compellabo, fiducia verbi divini percitus. Deinde lego aliquot auditoribus Evangelium Matthaei Graecum, pro mea virili interpretans, non prophetans. Postremo omnium est, quod conscribam et colligam locos — iudica haec verba absque risu et iudicio locos istos praeoccupante – nempe duos communes, nisi alius quispiam praeveniat, in publicum deturbaturus. Vis causam audentiae meae universae:

Expectavi et non sunt locuti; steterunt nec ultra responderunt. Respondebo et ego partem meam et ostendam scientiam Dei. Plenus sum enim sermonibus, et coartat me spiritus uteri mei. En venter meus quasi mustum absque spiraculo, quod lagunculas novas dirumpit. Loquar et respirabo paululum; aperiam labia mea et respondebo. Non accipiam personam viri et Deum homini non aequabo. Nescio enim, quamdiu subsistam, et si post modicum tollat me factor meus.

ἀκούετε ἐπίσκοποι

et quod Daniel prophetat :

et erit in templo abominatio desolationis, et usque ad consummationem et finem perseverabit desolatio,

quia etiam iuxta Ezechielem quidam,

cum purissimam aquam bibant, reliquam pedibus turbant, et oves pascuntur his, quae conculcata a pedibus illorum, et bibunt quae illi pedibus turbant.

Telas exordiuntur non per spiritum Dei; faciunt consilium et non ex Deo, ut addatur peccatum super peccatum, ut descendatur in Aegyptum inconsulto ore Domini, ut spes ponatur in auxilium et fortitudinem Pharaonis et fiducia habeatur in umbram Aegypti, ut fortitudo Pharaonis fiat in confusionem et fiducia umbrae Aegypti in ignominiam. Etc.

Tenet insuper coniux (quod rectius conticuissem) pene quantum aliae causae omnes, periculum item itineris valetudinisque meae specimen, brevi itinere exploratum. Si quid ergo litteris mutuis possum, malim hoc tempore praestare, quam ad te demigrare et abstrahi quasi a carne et costa mea, curis, studiis, vigiliis coeptisque meis. Boni consule, quando quid agerem apud te, nondum intelligam. Si quid est, quod possim quacunque opera, ut huc venias habitaturus etiam, nihil detrectabo. Si urgebit pater, non potero forte negare. Si nihil est aliud, quam ut convivamus, ut humaniter excipiar a te et fovear confabulamentisque recreer, obmitte me invitare. Si quid est aliud dignius, iubeto etc. Salvere iube nomine meo sororem cum tuis omnibus. Vale in Christo. Tiguri, 3. Septembris die 1524.

Conradus Grebelius tuus.

Gratum feceris, si per Michaelem 9 ½ bazios miseris pro persolutione testamenti uxoris tuae. Persolvissem ego, si non usque adeo tenuis essem. Non igitur impudentiae meae, sed tenuitati imputa, quod debiti admonuerim.

Viro christiano atque claro Ioachimo Vadiano, affini suo charissimo. Apud S. Gallum.

5 Sept. 1524 — Conrad Grebel and others to Thomas Müntzer

Frid gnad barmhertzigkeit von Gott unsserem vatter und Iesu Christo unserem herren sy mit unss allen Amen. Lieber bruder Toman lass dich umm gotz willen nit wunderen, dass wir dich ansprechend on titel, und wie ein bruder ursachend hinfür mit unss zehandlen durch geschrift, und dass wir ungefordert und dir unbekant, habend gedörfen ein gmein künftig gesprech uffrichten. Gottes sun Iesus Christus der sich aller deren die do selig werden söllend, einigen meister und houpt dar büt, und unss brüdere heisst sin, durch dass einig gmein wort allen brüderen und gläubigen, hand unss getriben und betzwungen früntschaft und brüderschaft zemachen und nachgende artikel antzetzeigen. Zů dem hat unss ouch din schriben zweier büchlinen von dem erdichten glauben gursacht, darumb so wellist ess im besten verstan umm Christi unsers heilands willen, sol unss ob got will zů gütem dienen und würcken werden Amen.

Wie nach dem unnserre allfordren von dem waren got, und erkantnuss Iesu Christi und dess rechtschaffnen gloubens in in, und von dem waren einigen gmeinen götlichen wort, von den götlichen brüchen Christenlicher liebe und wäsen abgefallen sind, on gott gsatz und Evangelio in menschlichen unnützen unchristlichen brüchen und Ceremonien gelebt und darinn selikeit zeerlangen vermeint habend, und aber wit gefelt worden ist, wie dass die Evangelischen prediger antzeigt habend und noch antzeigend zum teil, also ouch ietzund wir iederman in glichsendem glouben selig werdend, on frücht dess gloubens, on touff der versüchung und probierung, on liebe, und hoffnung, on rechte Christenliche brüch, und beliben in allem altem wäsen eigner lasteren, und gmeinen Ceremonischen Endkristlichen brüchen touff und nachtmal Christi, in verachtung dess götlichen worts in achtung dess bepstlichen, und dess wortess der widerbepstlichen prediger so ouch dem götlichen nit glich und gmess ist, in ansechung der personen, und allerley verfürung wird schwarlicher und schädlicher geirret dann von anfang der welt ie geschehen sy.

In semlicher irrung sind ouch wir gewäsen die wil wir allein zuhörer und läser wärend der Evangelischen predigeren, welche an disem allem schuldig sind, uss verdienst unserer sunden. Nach dem wir aber die gschrift ouch zehand genommen habend, und von allerley artiklen besechen, sind wir etwas bericht worden und habend den grossen und schädlichen mangel der hirten, ouch unseren erfunden dass wir got nit täglich ernstlich mit stettem sufftzen bittend, dass wir uss der zerstörung alles götlichen wäsens und uss menschlichen greuwen geführt werdind, in rechten glauben und brüch gottes kummin. In semlichem allem bringt dass faltsch schonen, die verschwiggung und vermischung dess götlichen wortes mit dem menschlichen. Ia sprechend wir ess bringt allen schaden, und macht alle götliche ding hinderstellig, bedarf nit unterscheidens und erzellens.

In dem so wir semlichs merkend und beklagend, wir zů unss gebracht din schriben wider den falschen glouben und Touff, sind wir nach bass bericht worden und befestet, und unss wunderbarlich erfrewt dass wir einen funden habend, der eins gmeinen christenlichen verstands mit unss sy, und den Evangelischen predigeren, iren mangel anzeigen dörfe wie sy in allen houpt artiklen falsch schonind und handlind, und eigens güt dunken ia ouch dess Endkristen über gott und wider gott setzind nit wie gesanten von gott zehandlen und predigen zů stat.

Darumbs so bittend und ermanend wir dich als ein brüder, by dem namen kraft wort geist und heil so allen christen durch Iesum Christum unsseren meyster und seligmacher begegnet, wellist dich ernstlich flissen allein götlichs wort unerschrocken predigen, allein götliche brüch uffrichten und schirmen, allein güt und recht schetzen dass in heiterer clarer gschrift erfunden mag werden, alle anschläg, wort, brüch und gütdunken aller menschen ouch din selbs, verwerfen, hassen und verfluchen.

Wir verstand und hand gesechen dass du die mess vertütschet hast, und nüwe tütsche gsang uffgericht, mag nit güt sin, wann wir findet in dem nüwen Testament kein ler von singen, kein bispil. Paulus schilt die Corinthischen glereten me dann er sy rüme darumm dass sy in der gmein murmlelend, glich alss ob sy sungind, wie die Iuden und Itali ire ding pronuncierrend in gsangs wiss. Zum andren die wil dass gsang in latinischer sprach on götliche ler und apostolisches bispil und bruch erwachsen ist, und nit gütz gebracht nach gebuwen hat, wirt ess nach fil minder buwen in tütsch, und ein usserlichen schinenden glauben machen. Zum dritten so doch paulus garnach heiter dass gsang verbütt im 5 zůn Epheseren und im 3 zůn Colosseren die wil er sagt und lert man soll sich bereden und ein andren underrichten mit psalmen und geistlichen liederen, und so man singen well, sol man im hertzen singen und danksagen. Zum 4. was wir nit gelert werdend mit claren sprüchen und bispilen sol unss alss wol verbotten sin alss stünd ess gschriben dass du nit sing nit. Zum 5. Christus heisst sine botten allein dass wort uss predigen in altem garnach und nüwem Testament, paulus ouch also dass die red Christi nit gsang under unss wone. Der übel sing hat ein verdruss, der ess wol kan ein hoffart. Zum 6. sol man nit tün wäss unss güt dunkt, zů dem wort und darvon nit setzen. Zum 7. wilt du die mess abtün muss nit mit tütschem gsang geschehen, dass din ratschlag filicht oder von dem Luther her ist. |8| sy muss mit dem wort und uffsatz Christi uss gerüttet werdend. 9. dann sy ist nit von got gepflantzet. 10. dass nachtmal der vereimbarung hat Christus uffgesetzt und pflantzet. 11. die wort so Mathei 26. Marci 14. Luca 22. und 1. Cor. 11. sollend allein gebrucht werden weder minder noch me. |12| der diener uss der gmein solte sy vorsprechen, uss einem der Evangelisten oder uss paulo. 13. sind wort dess uffgesetzten mals der vereinbarung, nit der consecrierung. 14. ess sol ein gmein brot sin, on götzen und zů satz. 15. wann ess bringt ein glichsenden andacht, und anbetting dess brotes, und ein abzug von dem innerlichen. Ess sol ouch ein gmein trinkgschirr sin. 16. dieses wurd die anbetung abtün und recht erkannüss und verstand dess nachtmalss bringen, die wil dass brot nüt anders ist dann brot, im glauben der lib Christi, und ein inlibung mit Christo und den brüderen, wann im geist und liebe müss man essen und trinken wie Io. im 6 ca. und in den andren antzeigt paulus so im 10. und 11. zum Corinthieren, actum 2. clar erlernet wirt. 17. ob ess wol nun brott so ist gloub und brüderliche liebe vorgat sol ess mit freud genommen werden, wann so mans bruchte in der gmein solt ess unss anzeigen dass wir warlich ein brott und lib, und ware brüder mit einanderen werind und sin weltind etc. 18. So einer aber sich funde nit brüderlichen mögen läben isst er zů der verdamnuss wann er isst on underscheid wie einandermal, und schendt die liebe dass inner band, und dass brot das usser. 19. wann ess ermanet in ouch nit an den lib und blüt Christi dess Testamentes an dem Crütz, dass er umm umm [sic] Christi und der brüderen dess houptes und glideren willen, läben und liden well. 20. ess solt ouch nit von dir ministriert werden, darmit gieng die mess ab, dass einig essen, wann dass nachtmal ist ein antzeigung der vereinbarung, nit ein mess und Sacrament darumm sol ess nieman allein bruchen, weder im todtbett nach sunst dass brott soll ouch nit verschlossen werden etc uff ein einige person, wann niemantz soll im selbss dass brott der vereimbarten nemmen allein, er sye dann mit sim selbss uneiss, dass ist keiner etc. 21. ess sol ouch nit gebrucht werden in templen nach aller gschrift und gschicht wann ess bringt ein falschen andacht. 22. ess solt offt und fil gebrucht werden. 23. solt nit on die regel Christi Mathei im xviii gebrucht werden, wolaber ess ist ie nit dess Herren nachtmal, wann on die selb so louft iederman nach dem usseren dass inner die liebe lasst man farren, gand brüder und falschbrüder hinzů, oder essend. 24. so du ess ie zůdienen wilt woltend wir ess geschech on pfäffische kleidung und messgwand, on gsang on zusatz. 25. der zitt halb wissend wir dass Christus den apostlen im nachtmal geben und die Corinthier ouch also gebrucht hand, bestimmend by unss kein gwisse tziit, etc. Damit nach dem du dess nachtmalss dess herren fil bass bericht bist, und wir allein unseren verstand antzeigend, sind wir nit recht dran, ler unss dass besser, und wellist gsang und mess lassen fallen und alles allein nach dem wort handlen und brüch der apostlen herfür tragen mit dem wort und uffrichten. Mag ess nit sin so were ess besser man liesse alle ding latin beliben und ungedreht und gemitlet. Mag dass recht nit uffgericht werden, so ministrier ouch nit nach dinem oder dess Entchristen pfäffischen bruch, und ler zemintsten wie ess sin solt alss Christus Ioannis im vj tüt, und lert wie man sin fleisch und blüt essen und trinken müss und sicht nit an den abfal, oder dass widerkristlich schonen so die aller glertisten erste Euangelische prediger ein waren abgott uffgericht und in alle welt gepflantzet hand. Ess ist fil weger dass wenig recht bericht werdind durch dass wort gottess recht gloubind, und wandlind in tugenden und brüchen, denn dass fil uss vermischter ler falsch hinderlistig gloubind. Wie wol wir dich manind und bettend, hoffend wir doch du tüest ess selbss, und manend ouch darumm aller liebst dass du unsserm brüder also früntlich geloset, und bekent hast dich ouch etwas zů fil nachgelassen haben, und dass du mitsampt Carolostadio by unss für die reinisten usskinder und prediger dess reinisten götlichen wortes geacht sind, und üch beden so ir sy straffend und billich, die menschen wort und brüch mit götlichen vermischend, sollend ir üch billig von den pfaffheit pründen und allerley nüwen und alten brüchen, eignen und alten gütdunken von rissen und gar rein werden. Sind üwer pfründ gestifft uff zins und zehenden bede warem wücher wie by unss, und so nit ein gantze gmein üch ertzicht wellind ir üch der pfründen entzücken, ir wüssend wol wie ein hirt ernert werden sol.

Wir versehend unss fil gütz zů Iacobo Struss und anderen etlichen die wenig geacht werdend by den hinlässigen schriftglereten und doctoren zů witemberg. wir sind ouch also verworfen gegen und von unsern gelerten hirten, ess hangt inenn alle mentschen an schafft dass sy ein sündigen süssen Chr’um [Christum] predigend, und inen gütz underscheids gebrist wie du in dinen büchlinen antzeigst, die unss armgeistigen fast über die mass gelert und gsterkt hand, und sind also aller dingen glich on dass wir mit leid vernommen hand wie du taflen uffgericht habist, so wir kein gschrift noch bispil in den nüwen Testament findet. In dem alten soll ess wol usserlich geschriben werden ietz aber in dem nüwen sol ess in die fleischin taflen dess hertzen geschriben werden, wie die verglichung beder Testamenten usswist, wie wir durch paulum 2 Cor. 3. hieremiam im 31. capitel, im 8 zun hebreieren, Ezechiels im 36. bericht werden, so wir nit irrend, alss wir nit meinend und gloubend, wellist die Taflen wider zegrund richten. Ess ist uss eignem gütdunken erwachsen, ein verglicher kost der do zůnemmen wurd, und gantz abgötist werden und sich in alle welt inpfantzen wie mit den götzen geschehen ist. Ess machte ouch ein argwon alss ob ie etwas usserlichs an der statt der götzen darab der unglert leren künde, stan und uffgricht werden müste, so allein dass usserlich wort gebrucht soll werden, nach aller gschrift bispil und gebott wie fürnemlich 1 Cor. xiiii. und Col. 3. unss antgezeigt wird. Semliche erlernung uss dem einigen wort, möcht mit der zitt etwas hinderstellig werden, und ob ess ie kein schaden bringen wurd so welte ich ie nüt nüwes erfinden und uffrichten, und den hinlessigen, falsch schonenden verfürenden glereten nit nachfolgen oder glich sin, uss eignem gütdunken nit ein einzig stuk erfinden leren und uffrichten. Züch mit dem wort und mach ein Christenliche gmein mit hilff Christi und siner Regel wie wir sy eingesetzt findend mathei im xviii und gebrucht in den Epistlen. Leg ernst ann und gmeins gebett und abbruch nach dem glouben und der liebe one gebott und ungetzwungen, so wirdt gott dir und dinen schäfflinen zů aller lüterkeit helfen wird dass gsang und taflen fallen. Ess ist wisheit und rates me dann gnůg in der gschrift wie man all stend alle menschen leren regieren wisen und fromm machen soll. Welcher sich nit bessren nit glouben wil, und dem wort und hendlen gottes widersetzt, und also verhart, den sol man nach dem im Christus und sin wort sin regel geprediget, und er ermanet wirt mit den drien zügen und der gmein, den sprechen wir uss gottess wort bericht sol man nit tötten, sundert ein heiden und zoller achen und sin lassen. Man soll ouch dass Evangelium und sine annemer nit schirmen mit dem schwert oder sy sich selbss, alss wir durch unseren brüchter [sic] vernommen hand dich also meinen und halten. Rechte gleubige Christen sind schaff mitten under den wölfen, schaff der schlachtung, müssend in angst und nott trübsal verfolgung liden und sterben getoufft werden, in dem für probiert werden, und dass vatterland der ewigen rüw mit nit erwürgung liplicher finden, sunder der geistlichen erlangen. Sy gebruchend ouch weder weltlichs schwert nach krieg, wann by inen ist das töten gar abgetan. Wol aber wir wärend noch dess alten gsatzes in welchem ouch (so fer wir unss bedenkend) der krieg nach dem sy dass gelobt land eroberet hattend, nun ein plag gewesen ist, von dem nit me.

Dess Touffs halb gfalt unss din schriben wol, begerend ouch witer bericht werden von dir. Wir werdend bericht dass man on die regel christi dess bindens und entbindens, ouch ein erwachsner nit gtoufft solte werden. Den touff beschribt unss die gschrift, dass er bedüte durch den glouben und das blüt Christi (dem getoufften dass gmüt erenderndem und dem gloubenden vor und nach) die sind abgewaschen sin, dass er bedüte dass man abgstorben sie und sölle der sünd, und wandlen in nüwe dess läbens und geist, und dass man gwüss selig werd so man durch den inneren touff den glouben, nach der bedütnuss läbe, also dass dass wasser den glauben nit befeste und mere wie die glereten zů Wittemberg sagend und wie er ser fast tröste, und die letst zůflucht in dem todtbett sye. Ite dass ess ouch nit selig mache wie augustino Tertullianus Theophylactus und Ciprianus zů schmach dem glauben und liden Christi an den alten erwachsnen, zů schmach dem liden Christi an den ungetoufften kindlinen, gelert habend.

Wir haltend unss nach gemelten gschriften Gene. 8. Deute. 1. 30. 31. und 1. Cor 14. Sapientia 12. Ite 1 petri 2. Ro. 1.2.7.10. mathei 18. 19. marci 9. 10. Luca 18 etc dass die alle kind die noch nit zů underscheid dess wüssens güts und böss kumen sind, und von dem boum dess wüssens nach nit geessen habend, dass sy gwüss selig werdind durch dass liden Christi dess nüwen adams welcher inen dass verschnitpf läbens widergebracht hab, die wil sy allein dem tod und verdamnuss underworfen sin werind wo Christus nit gelitten hett, nach nit erwachsen zů dem prästen der zerbrochnen natur, man künne unss denn bewisen dass Christus nit für die kind gelitten hab. Dass man aber fürwirt der gloub werd von allen erforderet so da selig werden söllind, schlüssend wir die kind uss und haltend sy on glauben selig werden und nit glauben uss obgemelten sprechen. Und beschlüssend uss beschribung dess Touffs, und uss den gschichten (nach welchen kein kind getoufft worden ist) ouch uss den obgemelten sprüchen so allein von allem handel der kinden luttend, und andere alle gschrift die kind nit betrifft, dass der kindertouff ein unsinniger gotzlesteriger grewel sy wider alle gschrift ouch wider dass bapstum. Wan wir findend dass fil iar nach der apostlen zitt durch Ciprianum und augustinum sechss hundert Iar lang gloubende and ungloubende mitteinanderen getoufft sind worden etc. Die wil du semlichs alss zehen malen bass bekenst und wider den kindertouff dine protestationen heruss gelassen hast, verhoffend wir du handlist nit wider dass ewig wort wisheit und gebott gottes nach welchen man allein gloubende touffen sol und touffist keine kind. Ob du oder Carolostadius nit gnügsam wider den kindertouff schriben werdend, mit aller zůgehört, wie und warumb man Touffen sölle etc, so würde ich min heil versuchen (Cünrat Grebel) und dass ich angehebt han sollen uss schriben wider all so biss har (on dich) von dem touff verfürlich und wüssentlich schribend, und die unsinnig gotzlesterig form dess kindertouffs tütsch hand, alss Luter, Löw, osiander, und die Strassburger, und ouch etliche noch schantlicher gehandlet hand. Ob ess von gott nit gewendt wirt so bin und wird ich mitsampt unss allen der verfolgung gwüsser sin von den glereten etc dann anderen lüten.

Wir bittend dich wellist allte brüch der endchristy nit bruchen ouch nit nemmen, alss Sacrament, Mess, Zeichen, etc. Allein an dem wort halten und schalten wie allein gesanten, und dir und Carolostadio foruss wol anstat (und ir mer tünd weder alle predicanten aller nationen). Halte unss für dine brüder und verstand dises unser schriben von grosser freuden und hoffnung zů üch durch gott wegen beschehen, und ermann tröst und stercke unss wie du wol kanst. Bitt gott den herren für unss dass er unserem glouben zehilf kumme wann wir gern glouben weltind, und so unss gott ouch zebetten verlicht wellend wir ouch für dich und alle bitten dass wir alle nach unserem brüf und stand wandlind, dass verlich unss gott durch Iesum Christum unserem Heiland amen. Grütz unns alle brüder die hirten und schäfli so dass wort dess gloubens und heils mit begird und hunger annemmend etc. Noch einss wir begerend din widerschriben und so du etwas ussgan lassist, unss durch disen botten, und ander zůschikist. So du und Carolostadius einess gemütess sind begerend wir ouch bericht werden, wir hoffends und gloubendss. Diser bott so ouch dem lieben unserem brüder Carolostadio brief gebracht hat von unss sye dir befolet, und magst du zů Carolostadio kummen, dass ir mitt einandren antwortind, wurd unss ein hertzliche freud sin. Der bott soll wider zů unss kummen, wass wir imm nit gnügsam belonet habend, wirt in siner widerfart ersetzt werden. Gott sye mit unss. Wass wir nit recht verstanden habend berichte und lere unss.

Datum zů Zürich uff den fünfften tag Herbstmonets Im Mvc und xxiiii Iar.

Cünrat Grebel, anderess kastelberg, felix Mantz, Hanss Oggenfüss, Bartlime pur, Heinrich aberli, und andere din brüder ob gott wil in Christo die semlichs zů dir verschriben habend, wünschend dir und unss allen, und dinen schäflinen allen, biss uff andere botschaft dass war wort gottes waren glauben liebe und hoffnung mit allem frid und gnad von gott durch Christum Iesum Amen.

Dem luter hab ich C. Grebel in unser aller namen schriben wellen und manen abtzeston von dem schonen, so er on gschrift brucht und in die welt, und ander nach im gepflantzet hand, so hat ess min trübsal und zit nit mögen zůgäben. Ir tünd ess nach üwer pflicht etc.

[Adresse:]

Dem wahrhafftigen und getrüwen verkündiger dess Evangelij Tomas Müntzer zů altstett am hartz, unserem getrüwen und lieben mitbrüder in Christo etc.

[Postscriptum:]

Herzliebster bruder Toman. Wie ich in unser aller namen geschriben hat in die il und gmeint diser bott wurd nit harren dass wir dem Luther ouch schribind, also hat er regenss halb müssen beitten und harren. Do han ich für mich und die anderen mine und dine brüder ouch dem Luter geschriben, und in gemanet abtzestan von dem falschen schonen der schwachen welche sy selbs sind. Der Andress Castelberg hat Carolostadio gschriben. In dem so kumpt Hansen Huiuffen von Hall hie unserem mitburger und mittbrüder, der by dir gwäsen ist im kurtzem, ein Brief und schäntlich büchlin dess Lutherss dass keinem zeschriben zůstat der primitiæ wil sin wie die apostel. Paulus lert anders: porro servum domini etc. Ich sich dass er dich an die achss gäben wil, und dem fürsten überantwurten, an welchen er sin Evangelium gebunden hat alss aaron den Moysen für ein gott haben müsst. Diner büchlin und protestationen halb so find ich dich on schuld, du verwerfst dann den touff gar, kann ich nit daruss verstän, sunder dass du den kindertouff und den unverstand dess Toufs verdamnest. Was dass wasser bedüte Ioannis 3. wellend wir in diner und biblischer gschrift bass besechen. Dess Hüuffenbrüder schribt du habest wider die fürsten geprediget dass man sy mit der fūnst angrifen solte. Ist ess war, oder so du krieg schirmen woltest, die taflen, dass gsang, oder anderss so nit in clarem wort fundist, alss du disse gmelten stuk nit findest, so ermann ich dich by gmeinem heil unser allen wellist davon abstan und allem gütdunken ietz und hernach, so wirst du gar rein werden, der unss sunst in andren artiklen bass gefalst den keiner in disem tütschen ouch anderen länderen. So du dem Luther und hertzogen in die hend kumpst, lass die gmelten artikel fallen, und by den andren stand wie ein helde und kempfer gottes. Biss stark, du hast die Bibel (daruss Luther Bibel bubel babel macht) zů schirm wider das abgötisch Luterisch schonen dass er und die glerten hirten by unss in alle welt gepflantzet hand, wider den hinderlistigen hinlessigen glouben, wider ire predigting darinn sy den Christum nit lerend wie sy soltend, und aller welt ebend dass Evangelium uffgetan habend dass sy ess selbss läsind oder läsen soltind, aber nit filen wann iederman hangt an inen. By unss sind nit zwentzige die dem wort gottess gloubend, nun den personen Zwingli, Löwen, und andren so anderschwo sind glert geachtet. Und ob du darumb liden müsstest, weist wol dass ess nit anders mag sin. Christus müss noch mer liden in sinen glideren, er aber wirt sy stercken und fest erhalten biss zů dem End. Gott geb dir und unss gnad. Wann unsere hirten sind ouch also grimm und wüttend wider unss, scheltend unss büben an offentlicher Cantzel und Satanas in angelos lucis conversos. Wir werdend ouch mit der zitt sächen die verfolgung über unss gan, darumm so bitt für unss by got.

Noch ein mal manend wir dich, und dass darumm, dass wir dich umm der clarheit willen diness wortes also hertzlich liebend und achtend, und vertruwt zů dir getörend schriben, wellist nütss nach menschlichem gütdunken eignem oder frembdem handlen leren oder uffrichten, was uffgericht ist widerumm niderwerffen, und wellist allein götlichs claress wort und brüch, mitsampt der Regel Christi, unvermischtem Touff und unvermischtem nachtmal, wie wir in dem ersten brief angerürt habend, und du bass bericht bist dann unser hundert, uffrichten und leren etc. Wann so du und Carolostadius, Iacobuss struss, und Michel Stifel nit gar rein zeflissen sin woltind (alss ich aber und mine brüder hoffend ir werdinds tün) were ess wol ein ellend Evangelium in die welt kummen. Ir aber sind wir reiner weder unsere hie und die zů Wittemberg, die uss einer gschriftverkerung in die ander, und uss der blindheit in andre grössere täglich fallend. Ich gloub und halt dass sy ware bäpstler und Bäpst werden wellind. Ietz nit me. Gott der hertzūgen mit sinem sun Iesu Christo unserem heiland, und sinem geist und wort sye mit dir und unss allen.

Cünrat Grebel, andress Castelberg, felix mantz, Heinrich aberli, Ioannes Panicellus, hanss oggenfüss, Hanss Huiuff, din lantzman von Hall, dine brüder, und siben nüw lung müntzer dem Luther.

So dir fry nachgelassen wirt, witer zepredigen und nichtss begegnet, wellend wir dir unsers schribens zů dem Luther Copy schicken und sin antwort so er unss widerschribt. Wir habend in gemanet und unsere hie ouch, darmit so ess gott nit hinderen wurde, wellend wir iren mangel anzeigen und nit fürchten wass unss darumm begegnen werde. Wir hand ouch sunst kein Copy behalten denn allein dess briefs so wir zů Martino deinem widersächer geschriben habend. Darumm vernim unser unglert unbehowen schriben zů guttem uff, und biss gwüss dass wirs uss warer liebe getan häbind, wann wir sind mit wort und anfechtung und widersächeren glich, wie wol du bass gelert und stercker im geist. Umm diser glichförmige willen habend wir gnüg mit dir gerett oder geschriben. Wellist unss so ess got haben wil dine Christen grüssen und allen gmeinklich in eim langen brief widerschriben, wirst du unss grosse freud und gemerete liebe zů dir erwecken.

30 May 1525 — Conrad Grebel to Joachim Vadian

Salus tibi sit et pax in Domino, non in mundo, ut possit esse in Domino.

Quod mihi benefeceris, plurimum tibi gratus sum, et cupio desideroque, ut mire tibi rependatur a Domino Deo, Deo bonorum datorum. Cum autem cogito, cum in animum venit lucta tua contra istos bene christianos fratres meos, libere et ingenue et christiane dico: nollem alii libentius repensum iri, quod mihi factum est bene, quam tibi, ut exoneratus possem tibi dicere, quod dicendum esset; quod ipse tamen etsi scias, non moveris tamen, ut doctrinae spiritus magis aurem dares vacuam quam doctrinae carnis. Esto me oneraris; esto ipse scias, non caves tamen; esto scias, inquam, dico tamen: omnis aut maxima saltem culpa tua est, si quid statuetur adversus istos carcere, multa pecuniaria, proscriptione aut morte. Cave, cave ab innocenti sanguine; innocens autem est, et si tu scias simulque nescias; velis, nolis, innocens est. Patientia et vitae eorum exitus et dies Domini magnus probabunt. In tuam perniciem eo literarum sacrarum, eo dignitatis in ea civitate natus es, nisi caves et resipiscis. Ego coelum et terram invoco testes; patere me quaeso loquentem id, quod per Christum Dominum nostrum et servatorem verum est in veritate. Ego Domino sinente usque in mortem testabor veritatem, in qua sunt isti vere et tu esse posses. Ego scio, quid te urgeat: census urget te, puto, aut sapientia tua carnis aut iniquae partes Zinlii, veritatis hostis in hac re. Noli te, quaeso, perdere. Si hic fallis homines, non lates coram Domino Deo cognitore cordium et iusto iudice. Cede potius ab usura census; fide Deo, humilia te, modico esto contentus, cede a sanguinaria parte Zinlii, a sapientia tua profuge ad divinam, ut stultus mundo, sapiens Domino fias; puer fias, alioquin non possis ingredi in regnum Dei. Quid non credis Zinlio etiam propter salutem tuam, qui iuxta claram scripturam Ps. 14 Ezech. 18 censum ad damnationem promovere publice proclamavit? Et Gregorius, nonus eius nominis papa, a cena Domini exclusit, qui supra sortem quippiam exigeret a debitore.

Si non vis stare cum fratribus, non resiste saltem, ut excusatior esse possis, et non dato exemplum persecutionis aliis civitatibus. Ego tibi per fidem meam in Christum, per coelum et terram et quicquid in eis est, infallibiliter vere dico, me ex una charitate erga te in hunc modum monuisse te. Ideo ego te per Christum adiuro, ne me contemnas ex Christo loquentem, monentem; et cura anxie, ut ad resipiscentiam, non in testimonium tibi dictum sit. Si cedis, ego animam meam pro te ponam; si non cedis, pro istis fratribus nostris ponam adversus omnes, qui huic veritati repugnaturi sunt. Testimonium enim veritati dabo direptione bonorum, domus nempe, quae mihi sola est; dabo testimonium carceribus, proscriptionibus, morte et scripto libello, nisi Deus vetet. Quodsi ego non rescripsero, non dormient alii omnes.

Tu probas doctrinam, Zinlius improbat. Quid expectas ergo, cum scias prius? nunquid expectas, ut tegmen habeas reprobandi etiam doctrinam et persequendi? Mi Vadiane! Cur non testamini more nostro, sola potestate et brachio carnis agitis, scripturas pro arbitrio contra nos usurpantes? Credisne insanos esse nos aut toto inferno, nedum demonibus plenos, qui parati simus usque in mortem testari, in eam autem, quam Zinlius et alii parant, dum veritatem in mendacio detinent? Si sana est doctrina, ut sana est, ut tu quocunque animo fateris, et electionem istis adimis, cur tu non eligis te aut alium aut eligeris aut senatus facit baptisatque? cur non eligit? cur non die pfaffen, die wider die ler sträbend und nit erwelt sind?

Vide, quomodo te capias ipse et indices verbis propriis aliud in animo habere, quam verba sonent; nam si isti non baptisant, nemo ex vobis, quibus tu adscribis hoc munus et eligendos ais, baptisaret. Sic indicas te cupere, ut baptismus tolleretur ad derisionem et contemptum probatae a te doctrinae et praecepto baptismi. Nam Domini doctrina et praecepta ideo data, ut impleantur et in opus exeant. Iterum dico, si fallis senatum, qui hoc non animadvertit, non falles Dominum.

Ora pro me ad Dominum, ut eius sola iusta voluntas in nobis velit, et ego vicissim et fraterne et indesinenter orabo. Patere christiano animo et patiente, et cave. Vale in Domino Iesu Christo. Saluta mihi sororem et familiam cum gratiarum actionibus. Tiguri, die Martis ante Pentecosten, anno 1525.

Ioachimo Vadiano, sororio meo et in Domino fratri.