Life Spans of Anabaptists baptized between 1525-1530: A Generous Approach

I had a free afternoon and thought I would conduct a rather unscientific collection of data to hopefully begin to answer this question asked in an earlier post. Was the average lifespan of an Anabaptist after baptism really eighteen months? As I wondered then, the fact never seems to have a solid citation. It only floats around as an anecdote assumed true, from what I have thus seen. So, I decided on a method to begin to assess the plausibility of the claim in order to judge whether it would be worth the while to investigate the question further.

My method was this: I went onto the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online,[1] and searched the names of a variety of Anabaptists who were baptized between the years 1525-1530. Since we are looking for an average in months, I did not consider the actual day of baptism or death but on the month. I compiled two lists: one where GAMEO had the month information available and another for those Anabaptists for whom GAMEO had only had a year or other less precise date. When it came to rounding, I tended toward rounding in advantage of a shorter lifespan. This is bad math, yes, but I am not trying to find the actual figure. I am only trying to assess the plausibility of the given figure. So, if I can skew the results toward that figure and still cannot support it, then my purpose has been served even though I had biased the test against myself.

Here are the life spans of those whom I looked up for whom the months of baptism and death were available (sorry that I don't have my columns in nice clean lines).

                                    Baptism                  Death                     Months as Anabaptist

George Blaurock                     1/25                        9/29                        56

Conrad Grebel                         1/25                        7/26                       18

Balthasar Hubmaier                 4/25                        3/28                        35

Hans Hut                                 5/26                        12/27                      19

Michael Kürschner                   6/28                        6/29                        24

Felix Manz                               1/25                        1/27                        24

Michael Sattler                         1/25                        5/27                        16

Leonhard Schiemer                  4/27                        1/28                         9

Ambrosius Spittlemayr             7/27                        2/28                         7

             The average among these guys is 23 months, five months more than the anecdotal life span. This at first gives some plausibility to the 18 month reference and from such a small sample size (9), I don’t have enough information to say this with great certainty, even if the result is 28% greater than the 18 month claim. So, I came up with another list with those whose months aren’t listed. These are the numbers I had to skew against me and they may help us if the results turn the average significantly one way or the other.

Hans Amon                               before 29            42                     156

Gabriel Ascherham                    before 28            45                     204

Wolfgang Branhuber                  before 27            29                     24

Johannes Brötli                         1/25                    28                     36

Johannes Bünderlin                   26                       after 32             72

Andreas Castelberger                1/25                    after 3/28           36

Hans Denck                               before 6/25        11/27                 30

Andreas Fischer                         28                      40                     144

Oswald Glait                              before 3/26        10/46                  247

Jakob Hutter                              29                       2/36                  63

Jakob Kautz                               26                      32                     72

Hans Nadler                               27                      after 2/29           24

Philip Plener                               early 27              after 35              96

Wilhelm Reublin                         1/25                    after 59              408

Peter Riedemann                        before 29            12/56                 324

Hans Schlaffer                           26                        2/28                  18

Wolfgang Uliman                        4/25                     28                     36

Jacob Wiedemann                     27                        35 or 36             96

George Zaunrig                          before 28              31 or 38            36

The average I got for these guys is roughly 111 months, which is more than nine years. Combined with the first list, that average comes down to about seven years. The result of this is to say that for those very first Anabaptist, baptized within the first five years of the movement’s inception, the average lifespan was nowhere near the purported eighteen months unless I happened across a whole lot of outliers or there is a big group that got chopped down very shortly after their baptism. It may have been that the eighteen months was originally a limited figure, perhaps only describing Dutch Anabaptists in the 1530s, for example, and then later erroneously applied to all Anabaptists.

This in no way is meant to minimize the persecution that the Anabaptists faced. It was very real. Even if they were not killed in so short amount of time, the exiles, being taken away from the families and homelands they loved, their status as social outcasts and lives of instability and uncertainty were true persecutions. I plan on giving a short notice on the opposite effects that this persecution had on the movement’s vigor in a future post called “Seed and Sickle.” Though I do not mean to downplay the severity of the Anabaptist plight, I do nonetheless hope to prevent it from being mythologized.

And for those who might denounce my unscientific method here, I plead that this rough work is sufficient for testing the plausibility of the questioned claimed. Should this method have produced a result under three years, then further, more precise, study would be warranted. Besides, if I were writing for a seminar or journal, I would hold up the higher standard from the outset of this little study. Luckily, as a blog, I don’t have to always restrict myself to that standard, although I usually do.

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[1]http://www.gameo.org.