There is no example in history of a Baptist church ever breaking off from Rome. Laugh all you want, it has never happened.
I never made the claim that the Baptist faith came down from John the Baptist.. .although, if he were alive today, he would probably be a messenger to the SBC. :)
You're right, they broke off from someone else who broke off from Luther who broke off from Calvin. The SBC is probably the most correct and Christian of the Protestant churches left but they're still a Protestant church that can trace itself back no further than Luther or perhaps Wycliffe. Period.
Anything that goes any further back is fantasy at best and deliberate deception at worst. Actually, it's not funny, it's sad that people try to develop theories to counter obvious history and replace it with something they think makes them somehow look better or be more sincere. I don't doubt the faith of any of the SBC folks I know but I do wonder why they're hung up on pretending they're from some sort of little group that hid in caves for fifteen hundred plus years rather than admitting that they're at the root just more Protestants. And I spent many years in a SBC or Independent Baptist Church so I've heard all the theories and they didn't even make any sense with I was a kid fifty years ago.
Or, were you saying that the Baptists are Protestants who broke away from the wave of Protestant groups Luther fostered and I've misunderstood you?
Actually, the Baptists have Menno Simons to thank. They are a branch of anabaptists.
So they have zero connection to Luther, but Menno Simons was a Catholic priest.
Really there are two broad branches of protestants, mainline and the anabaptists. Mainline are Calvinists, Lutherans and Anglicans. Anabaptists tend to be Zwinglian and Mennonite.
True enough -- they broke off from the Puritans who broke off from the Anglicans who broke off from Rome.