Good question! ( Where did Baptists come from?)

 Not from John the Baptist, although some people may be 

really disappointed to hear this. 

The people we know today as Baptists, the largest Protestant grouping in the world, trace their origins to the early 1600s.Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603), in an attempt to unify religiously-divided England, had parliament legislate for a religious “middle way” between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. 

She hoped that most people in England would be satisfied with the terms of this religious settlement, and on the whole her hopes were realised. But there were minorities on both ends of the Roman Catholic/Protestant spectrum who regarded Elizabeth’s mediating Church of England as an ugly compromise.On the Protestant side, the Puritans (so-called because they wanted to “purify” the Church of England from all vestiges of Roman Catholicism) continued to agitate for further reform of the Church of England in a Protestant direction. 

Most Puritans remained faithful o the Church of England, hoping to reform the church from within. Some concluded, however, that the only way they would be able to worship freely in the way they believed God approved and Scripture required was to separate from the Church of England (an illegal and treasonable move in those days). From these “separatists” the first Baptists emerged, although the name “Baptist” only came later.The story of Baptists begins with John Smyth (1570-1612), a Cambridge university lecturer and Church of England preacher of the city of Lincoln. 

A contemporary described him as “a learned man, and of good ability, but of an unsettled head”. In October 1602 he was deposed from his position as preacher for “personal preaching” (!), an apparent reference to his rather reckless habit of rebuking prominent leaders for their sins from the pulpit. By about 1605 Smyth was beginning to have serious doubts about the Church of England, and attached himself to an (illegal) separatist congregation in the town of Gainsborough, Lincolnshire.

When part of this congregation left England for the comparative religious freedom of the new world in 1606, Smyth became the leader of the Gainsborough congregation. The dangers for separatists continued to increase, however, with the new King James I (1603-1625) threatening to “harrie them out of the land”. In early 1608 conditions were so hazardous that Smyth and about forty of his congregation left to go to Amsterdam, a haven of religious tolerance at the time. 

Bradford, a leader of the Gainsborough congregation, described their action as follows: “They shooke of this yoake of antichristian bondage, and as the Lord’s free people, joined them selves (by a covenant of the Lord) into a church estate, in the fellowship of the gospel, to walke in all his wayes, made known, or to be made known unto them, according to their best endeavours, whatsoever it should cost them, the Lord assisting them.” True worship, 

Smyth insisted, must come “from the hart”, and thus “reading out of a booke” (a reference to The Book of Common Prayer) “is no part of spiritual worship, but rather the invention of the man of synne.”By 1609, Smyth was convinced that the New Testament did not teach infant baptism and had become aware of the need for believers’ baptism which, he argued, constitutes the basis of the church. 

He thus persuaded his followers to disband and to reconstitute their congregation on the basis of believers’ baptism: “They dissolved their church ... and Mr. Smyth being the Pastor thereof, gave over his office, as did also the Deacons, and devised to enter a new communion by renouncing their former baptism, and taking upon them another.... Mr. Smyth, Mr. Helwisse, and the rest, having utterly dissolved and disclaimed their former church state and ministry, came together to erect a new church by baptism.” Thus, the first “Baptist” church came into being, four hundred years ago this year.John Robinson, pastor of another English separatist church in Holland and an eye-witness of this event, wrote that “Mr Smyth baptised first himself, and next Mr Helwisse.” The other forty members of the congregation were then baptised in turn. 

These baptisms were by affusion (pouring); but the important point is that Smyth and his followers had come to the conclusion that the proper subject of baptism is the believer. As Smyth explained in his book, The Character of the Beast (1609), “This therefor is the question: whither the baptisme of infants be lawful, yea or nay: & whither persons baptised being infants must not renounce that false baptisme, and assume the true baptisme of Chr[ist]: which is to be administered uppon persons confessing their faith & their sinnes.... Infant baptism has been an error], a cheef point of Antichristianisme, and the very essence and constitution of the false Church, as is cleerly discovered in this treatise.” 

Believers’ baptism was obviously of enormous importance to Smyth; even more important, however, was his conviction that this was what the New Testament taught.Early Baptist convictions were thus shaped by a firm belief that the word of Christ in the Scriptures is the final authority for both belief and practice. (So committed was Smyth to this principle that preachers should not even read from an English translation which might have been subject to “official” manipulation – the person doing the preaching should bring a Hebrew or Greek Bible into the pulpit and provide a free verbal translation on the spot!)

 Among other practices clearly taught in Scripture, as far as Smyth and his followers were concerned, was the baptism of believers, not infants. Following such convictions would inevitably bring religious dissenters such as these into conflict with the secular authorities, and raise acutely the question of how to respond when the law of Christ and the law of the land came into conflict. Wrestling with that question will comprise the next instalment of the Baptist story.