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yeah i did....from Constantine to Luther, they provided no evidence for contiguous groups of immersion Baptists... In the tightly controlled medeival Church, such was impossible...like I said, dissenters often got burned at the stake.

Why is it so hard to give credit to the Reformation for making Baptists possible?

There are lots of Bible believeing Christians who disagree on believer baptism too--that is excluding children from the church...both then and now.

Analog Reigns is correct that the Baptists began AFTER Luther, but he seems to see the Anabaptists as the ancestor to modern-day Baptists, and that's not really correct either. Mennonites and Apostolic Churches would correctly trace their lineage to Swiss Anabaptists from the 1500s, whom, as he rightly states, made up the left wing of the reformation. While Englishman John Smyth, circa 1607, may indeed have gleaned the idea of believer's baptism from the continental Anabaptists, he was a product of the English Reformation, as were a number of Baptist churches that began popping up across England in the early 17th century. A number of these churches sent representatives to draft the 1644 London Confession, which later was slightly revised to make the 1689 London Baptist Confession. Look at these confessions and you will see a heavily Reformed emphasis on soteriology, eschatology and most other things. The only real "distinctive" for Baptist churches when they began was, in fact, believers baptism - the idea that the church consists entirely of believers. While an alternate strain of English Baptists later adopted more of a free-will approach, a la the Methodists, it was in North America in the 19th century that the majority of Baptist churches began to take on much of their stereotypical identify from today, including a heavily Finneyist approach to evangelism and soteriology. Many were also consumed by the legacy of fundamentalism in the 20th century. Happily, there has been a rediscovery of Puritan and Reformed writing among many Baptists, and the number of churches taking a Reformed theology with a baptistic view of the church (a la Spurgeon), is growing through groups like the Founders Conference www.founders.org