ZWICKAU, PROPHETS OF. — Three illuminati of this town in Saxony, the weavers Nicholas Storch and Thomas Drechsel, and the student Mark Thomae, called Stubner, who claimed to be called directly by the Holy Spirit to teach, strengthened the radical iconoclastic party at Wittenberg, aggravating religious and social disorders.
They had been initiated into the prophetic-millenarian interpretation of the Bible by Thomas Müntzer, who had been sent as a preacher to Z. by Luther himself; from him they had learned the principle of the primacy of the spirit over the letter, that the inner word was more valuable than the outer word read or heard, that those illuminated by the Spirit should form compact communities, destined to establish Christ’s kingdom on earth and His judgment on unbelievers. True believers had to be rebaptized as a sign of their conscious faith, for infant baptism was of no value; just as baptism, so too the Eucharist had only a symbolic meaning (a Zwinglian conception); salvation did not come from the *opus operatum* of the Sacraments nor from the Lutheran fiducial faith, but from personal commitment in the practice of God’s commandments, though these were interpreted according to inner illumination. Every distinction and every existing institution was condemned, not only in the Church but also in civil society; thus their kingdom of Christ excluded all private property, and admitted polygamy, according to a singular interpretation of the “freedom of the children of God”; this kingdom was to be ruled by twelve apostles and seventy-two disciples, repeating the structure of the apostolic Church. In 1521, after Müntzer’s flight from Z. (he was their supporter among the ruling class), they, who preached their revolutionary ideas to the lower classes, were expelled by the joint intervention of ecclesiastical and civil authorities. They then transferred the center of their propaganda to Wittenberg, where, in Luther’s absence (he was then hidden at the Wartburg to escape the execution of the Edict of Worms), the radicals, under the leadership of Carlstadt, had taken over, weakly opposed by Melanchthon. Melanchthon had received the newcomers with consideration, and they soon provided further arguments for the polemic against the old Church, even contesting that Luther had truly reformed II. The prophets of Zwickau exacerbated the disorders already in progress to such an alarming degree that Luther himself intervened to oppose them with the writing *A Faithful Admonition to All Christians to Beware of Sedition and Unrest* (1522). Expelled from Wittenberg, where they had gained numerous adherents even in the university, they moved into Thuringia, where they successfully preached Anabaptism in the countryside: here Storch was one of the leaders of the Peasants’ War and, with the defeat, met the same death as the other insurgents.