Few Christians today would think twice before choosing to be baptized by personal conviction. For Felix Manz that choice cost him his life: he was drowned in the Limmat River in Zurich by magistrates who also called themselves reformed.
Manz was born around 1498 in Zurich, the illegitimate son of a canon of the Grossmünster, the city’s main church. He received an unusual education for his time, mastering Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, which allowed him to study the Scriptures in their original languages.
He became a disciple of Huldrych Zwingli, the reformer who had led the Reformation in Zurich since 1519. When Conrad Grebel joined the group around 1521, the two became friends and together began to question the Mass and the baptism of newborn infants.
After the Second Zurich Disputation in 1523, Manz and Grebel concluded that Zwingli had given in too much to pressure from the city council. In their view, only personal, conscious faith, not a custom inherited at birth, should open the door to baptism. The group also called for an end to the payment of tithes and interest, a stance the magistrates of Zurich treated not only as religious disagreement but as a threat to the city’s social and economic order, and Zwingli went so far as to publicly call Manz a rebellious, stubborn peasant.
On January 21, 1525, at the house of Manz’s mother, George Blaurock asked to be baptized by Grebel and then baptized others present. That simple act gave rise to the Swiss Brethren, the first organized Anabaptist group of the Reformation.
Manz kept baptizing adults and preaching in villages around Zurich even after the council banned the practice, which the authorities took as deliberate defiance of public order. He was arrested repeatedly between 1525 and 1527 for this persistence.
On March 7, 1526, the Zurich council decreed that rebaptizing adults would be punished by death by drowning, a sentence of macabre irony against a man who preached baptism. Manz was the first to suffer it, on January 5, 1527, while his mother urged him from the riverbank to stand firm.
Manz’s death did not end the movement he had helped begin. It exposed, already in the 16th century, that reformers could persecute other Christians with the same harshness they condemned in Rome, and it left as its legacy the conviction that faith is born of personal decision, not decree of the state.
