Gabriel Ascherham

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Gabriel Ascherham († 1545 ) was a German Baptist and founder of the eponymous Gabrielites in Moravia and Silesia .

Life

Ascherham came from Nuremberg and later lived in Schärding near Passau . He was a furrier by profession . In Schärding, Ascherham joined the radical Reformation Anabaptist movement and was elected one of their preachers after a short time . A short time later, Ascherham emigrated to Silesia, where he founded new Anabaptist communities in Glogau , Breslau and Glatz . After the persecution of the Anabaptist movement also increased in Silesia in 1528, Ascherham moved with a group of Silesian Anabaptists to Rossitz in Moravia , where they temporarily lived with an Anabaptist group from Swabia , Hesse and the Palatinate led by Philipp Plener . After Philipp Plener Philippians however Baptist mentioned above had already settled in 1530 to the nearby Auspitz where shortly afterwards a group Tyrolean Baptist (later Hutterites had) found refuge. In 1531 these three Anabaptist groups living in communion formed a loose union with a total of around 4000 parishioners. Two years later, however, the three groups separated again and in the following years developed as independent Anabaptist denominations. After there was a shorter wave of persecution and corresponding expulsion mandates in Moravia in 1535/36, Ascherham and part of his community moved back to Silesia, where they were accepted in Rauden and Wohlau, among others . In the following years Ascherham wrote several polemics against Jakob Hutter and the Hutterites. In the year 1544 he published his main script with a difference of divine and human wisdom . In this, Ascherham no longer ruled out child baptism and thus alienated himself from part of his own community, so that in the last years of his life he was also described as a shepherd without a flock . With regard to the Lord's Supper , Ascherham spoke out against the symbolic approach widespread in the Anabaptist movement and here approached Calvin's later positions . Ascherham finally died a year after his main writing appeared. His place of death remains unknown. It was probably a town on the Polish-Silesian border (possibly Fraustadt ).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Joseph Jäkel: On the history of the Anabaptists. (PDF; 5.7 MB) Upper Austrian Provincial Museums , accessed on August 30, 2011 .
personal data
SURNAME Ascherham, Gabriel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Baptist
DATE OF BIRTH 15th century or 16th century
DATE OF DEATH 1545