Mennonite Ministers - Menno Simons, Alan Kreider, Pierre Widmer, John H. Oberholtzer, Joseph B. Hagey, Claas Epp, JR., Moses M. Beachy (Paperback)

Chapters: Menno Simons, Alan Kreider, Pierre Widmer, John H. Oberholtzer, Joseph B. Hagey, Claas Epp, Jr., Moses M. Beachy, Klaas Reimer, Theodore Epp, Herman Op Den Graeff, B. B. Janz, Hans Herr, Nguyen Hong Quang, Martin Boehm, David Augsburger, Anton Van Dale, Johann Funk. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 64. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Menno Simons (1496 31 January 1561) was a Dutch Anabaptist religious leader from the Friesland region of the Low Countries. Simons was a contemporary of the Protestant Reformers and his followers became known as Mennonites. Menno Simons () was born in 1496 in Witmarsum, Friesland, Holy Roman Empire. He grew up in a poor peasant environment, but very little is known concerning his childhood and family. His father's name must have been Simon, Simons being a patronym, while he had a brother named Pieter. Simons grew up in a disillusioned and war torn country. Friesland was ravaged by war in the late 15th and early 16th century. Landsknecht soldiers haunted the Frisian lands in the 1490s to force the 'Free' Frisians to accept the duke of Saxony-Meissen as their head-of-state. The duke was the governor of the Netherlands for the Habsburg family. One of the archenemies of the Habsburgs, the Duke of Guelders, invaded Friesland in 1515 and conquered half of it. The other half was ceded by Saxony to the Habsburgs. The Frisians tried to regain their freedom but they were too weak and eventually accepted the imperial authority of the Habsburg emperor Charles V. Simons learned Latin and some Greek and he was taught about the Latin Church Fathers during his training to become a priest. Before or during this training, he had never read the Bible, out of fear that he would be seduced, once he would do this. When he later reflected about this period, he cal...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=30150