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To: vladimir998
May I recommend a book for you to read?

The Martyr's Mirror. A book about Christians being persecuted and killed for their faith by the Catholic Church, and the state.
Written in the 1600's.
157 posted on 03/16/2006 6:21:16 PM PST by JRochelle
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To: JRochelle
The Martyr's Mirror. A book about Christians being persecuted and killed for their faith by the Catholic Church, and the state. Written in the 1600's.

Is it as ridiculous as the Fox book? That atrocity I put on the level of a KKK or Neo-Nazi pamphlet, or even worse, a Jack Chick tract.
160 posted on 03/16/2006 11:01:26 PM PST by Conservative til I die
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To: JRochelle

You wrote: "May I recommend a book for you to read?"

Please do.

"The Martyr's Mirror."

Been there, done that. I can't claim to have read the whole thing, but I read enough of the chapters online to know it is so biased that it mentions nothing about the destruction wrought by anabaptists at Munster, their polygamy there, etc. The anabaptists were kooks -- or at least were viewed that way by all of society (both by Catholics and Lutherans), they broke the law, they paid the price. The stories are also rather embellished to say the least. These people abandoned and attacked true Christianity. That was viewed as a crime by the state. They were sometimes put to death by the state.

You should know: "Of course, the masterly work of van Braght is neither complete nor without error. He did not do scholarly work in the method of modern historiography, and too often he uncritically inserted accounts without checking them. There are mistakes, both in the names of the martyrs and in the dates of their execution. Some martyrs are named twice. The question has arisen whether van Braght may have falsified history. This accusation was made by Christian Schotanus in Van de Gronden der Mennisterij (Leeuwarden, 1671), while Hermann Haupt called the Martyrs' mirror a prejudiced book, composed mostly from impure sources (DB 1899, 72; ML III, 53). W. Wilde, a Dutch Roman Catholic, attacked van Braght in two papers published in Studiën (1877, 1-88; 1894, 270-332) and in Zonderlinge Critiek (Amsterdam, 1900). (See DB 1899, 70-72; 1900, 192-210.) Also Karel Vos (DB 1917, 161, 170-74) and recently A. F. Mellink (Wederdopers, 419 and passim) accused van Braght of partiality. But Samuel Cramer proved (DB 1899, 65-164; 1900, 184-210) that van Braght, though sometimes too unsuspecting and naive, and a few times careless, may in general be called reliable. Those who criticized van Braght and accused him of omitting a large number of Anabaptists who were executed, forget that van Braght only wanted to list such martyrs as gave testimony to a Biblical faith and held the strict nonresistant principles. For this reason he excluded all those Anabaptists put to death because of their religious convictions who had contacts with or were influenced by the Münsterite or other revolutionary principles, though occasionally a few Münsterites were inserted in the Martyrs' mirror, of whose real opinions van Braght was not aware. The fact that van Braght, a champion of Trinitarianism and averse to all kind of Unitarianism, did not do justice to a martyr like Herman van Vlekwijk is a shortcoming in his work, which is, however, excusable not only on the basis of his personal convictions, but also by the fact that the martyr book of 1626 had likewise omitted a few sentences from the accounts of some anti-Trinitarian martyrs. The same explicable imperfection may be noted concerning the doctrine of the Incarnation. In summary it may be said that van Braght's Martyrs' mirror is a reliable, trustworthy book, as has been stated not only by Cramer, but also by other outstanding historians like Ludwig Keller, Chr. Sepp, J. G. de Hoop Scheffer, F. van der Haeghen, Adolf Fluri, L. Knappert, and W. J. Kühler."

http://www.gameo.org/index.asp?content=http://www.gameo.org/encyclopedia/contents/m37858me.html


184 posted on 03/17/2006 3:28:42 PM PST by vladimir998 (Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ. St. Jerome)
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