ZWICKAU, Prophets of. - Three illuminati from this small town in Saxony, the weavers Nikolaus Storch, Thomas Drechsel and the student Marcus Thomae, called Stübner, who, claiming to be called directly by the Holy Spirit to teach, at Wittenberg strengthened the radical iconoclast party, 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 Zwickau by Luther himself; from him they had learned the principle of the primacy of the spirit over the letter, that the inner word was worth more than the outer word read or heard, that those enlightened by the Spirit must form compact communities, called to establish the kingdom of Christ on earth and his judgment upon unbelievers. True believers had to be rebaptized as a sign of their conscious faith, since the Baptism of children had no value; just as Baptism, so too the Eucharist had only a symbolic meaning (a Zwinglian conception); salvation derived neither from the opus operatum of the Sacraments nor from Lutheran fiducial faith, but from personal commitment to the practice of God's commandments, interpreted, however, 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, through a singular interpretation of the "freedom of the children of God"; this kingdom was to be governed by 12 apostles and 72 disciples, to reproduce the structure of the apostolic Church. In 1521, after the flight from Zwickau of Müntzer, who was their supporter among the ruling class, they, who preached revolutionary ideas to the lower classes, were expelled through the concordant intervention of the ecclesiastical and civil authorities. They therefore transferred the center of their propaganda to Wittenberg, where, in Luther's absence (he was then hidden at the Wartburg to escape execution of the ban of Worms), the radicals, under the leadership of Carlstadt, had taken control, feebly opposed by Melanchthon. The latter had received the newcomers with consideration, and they immediately provided further arguments for the polemic against the old Church, moreover reproaching Luther for having truly reformed it. The prophets of Zwickau fed the disorders already underway in so alarming a manner that Luther himself intervened to oppose them with the writing A Faithful Admonition to All Christians to Guard Against Disorder and Insurrection (1522). Expelled from Wittenberg, where they had gained numerous adherents even in the University, they moved into Thuringia, preaching Anabaptism in the countryside with success: here Storch was one of the leaders of the Peasants' War and, with the defeat, suffered the same death as the other insurgents.