The Martyrs Mirror is a 1660 Dutch book by Thieleman J. van Braght with well over 1,000 pages that depict the martyrdom of Christians from the time of the apostles until the 16th century. The book describes their suffering in great detail. Also included in the Martyrs Mirror are wills written by executed parents to their children and letters written by Christians in jail. Particular attention is paid to the deaths of Anabaptists and those who were threatened with the Anabaptist mandate during the Reformation.
The Martyrs Mirror contains graphic stories of the lives and deaths of more than 4,000 Christians persecuted for their faith in Jesus Christ. The book’s full title is “The Bloody Theater or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians who baptized only upon confession of faith, and who suffered and died for the testimony of Jesus, their Saviour, from the time of Christ to the year A.D. 1660.“
History of the Martyrs Mirror
In 1660, the Martyrs Mirror (or The Bloody Theater) was published for the first time in Holland, the Dutch Republic. Thieleman Janszoon van Braght (1625–1664), an elder in the Mennonite congregation of Dordrecht city, was the author of the book.
The book followed in the footsteps of earlier martyrologies such as Het Offer des Heeren (1561), the first book of its kind written by Anabaptists, and History of the Martyrs (1615) (‘Historie der martelaren‘), written by Hans de Ries. Both works were compilations of reports on the martyrs.
The Dutch artist Jan Luyken engraved the 104 copper etchings for the second edition of the Martyrs Mirror, which was published in Amsterdam in 1685. Now, 31 of these plates can be seen in the Mirror of the Martyrs exhibit at the Kauffman Museum in the US. There are also two plates displayed in the Muddy Creek Farm Library at Fairmount Homes.
The changes in the second edition of the book were minimal. The continuous persecution of Swiss Mennonites, however, added more context to the second edition.
It was at Ephrata Cloister, Pennsylvania, that the first translation of The Martyrs Mirror appeared in German in 1748. The Martyrs Mirror was second only to the Bible in importance in Amish and Mennonite communities.
Ephrata Cloister was a semi-monastic community founded in 1732 by the German emigrant Johann Conrad Beissel in the US.
The Dutch-to-German translation of Martyrs Mirror took 15 men three years to finish at the Ephrata Cloister after it was organized in 1745 by Jacob C. Gottschalk. By 1749, it had grown to 1,512 pages, making it the biggest book produced in America before the Revolutionary War.
This first German version was backed by German Mennonites living in North America who were concerned about the spread of war fervor across the colonies in the lead-up to the Seven Years’ War.
This version was republished in 1780 in the Pirmasens town of the Palatinate region in Germany.
The First English Edition
Moving on, the first English translation of the Martyrs Mirror appeared in 1837. This book was translated from the German edition by I. Daniel Rupp, and David Miller of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, published it.
Baptist historian Edward Bean Underhill, working for the Hanserd Knollys Society, translated and issued a second edition of “A Martyrology of the Churches of Christ” in England in 1850.
The first shortened version of Martyrs Mirror was published in 1699 in Haarlem, Holland, in Dutch. This same edition was also published in 1745 in Germany. It’s not known if this version was ever published in English at the time.
A large number of Anabaptist victims are omitted from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563), but the Martyrs Mirror specifically contains them all. The adjective “defenseless” in the book’s longer title alludes to the Anabaptist principle of nonviolence.
There are also some latecomers: a recent Spanish translation of this book was published in 2015 by Pau Ortega Calaf. The first Brazilian-Portuguese translation was published in 2009 by Monte Sião.
Contents of the Martyrs Mirror
Expositions of beliefs, creeds, and declarations of faith are present in this book, including those of the Waldensians and Lollards (Lollardism).
For Thieleman J. van Braght, the chronicle of the Anabaptist martyrs starts with The Stoning of Stephen (Acts 7, Verse 54ff), and concludes with Hans Landis, who was killed in Zurich in 1614 for his Anabaptist convictions. So, he followed this chronicle while authoring the Martyrs Mirror.
The original edition of the book has roughly 1290 pages. According to van Braght’s account, the brutal persecution by the state and its affiliated churches resulted in the deaths of 1,396 Anabaptists, a third of whom were women. They were nonviolent peace activists who paid a high price for their beliefs.
In the first edition, the books consisted of two parts. The first part had 450 pages, and the second part had 840 pages. In Part II, van Braght discusses 803 individual victims; 613 were murdered in the Netherlands and Belgium, while another 190 were slain elsewhere in Europe. In addition to this, other unknown martyrs are also cited.
Part I also includes the heroic deed of Dirk Willems, the man who refused to escape from prison to save his pursuer from drowning.
There are also the anonymous victims of the Waldensians and other groups condemned as heretics by the established churches.
On top of that, van Braght attempts to prove that the decrease in believer’s baptism, which he saw as scriptural, was the root and cause of this kind of martyrdom.
Christians who suffered persecution and death because of their faith were, in his view, the most devout followers of Christ. Although the Martyrs Mirror is less widespread now than it was in the 20th century, it is still often given as a wedding gift among Mennonite communities.
References
- The Bloody Theatre, or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenceless Christians, by Thielem J. van Braght—A Project Gutenberg eBook
- “The Mirror of the Martyrs”. Kauffman Museum. Original Page.
- Martyrs Mirror – By Thieleman Van Braght – 1938
