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The Riot in Ephesus - About that time there arose a great disturbance about the Way. A silversmith named Demetrius, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought in a lot of business for the craftsmen ...
- The German Peasant’s War
- The End of The Kingdom of Münster
- The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day
- The Thirty Years War
- Christian Violence Against Non-Christians
Martin Luther’s search for a purer form of Christianity could appeal to different groups for different reasons. His doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, stressing the spiritual equality of all men in the eyes of God, was particularly powerful for those at the bottom of the hierarchy. The attempts by peasants in the Holy Roman Empire to real...
Just a decade after the Peasants War, the spectre of Reformation-inspired anarchy returned to the Holy Roman Empire. In Münster, a group of radical Anabaptists took control of the city and established a spiritual government. Its challenge to the religious and political status quo was considered immediate and grave: the practice of polygamy within t...
This massacre was perhaps the most notorious episode of religious violence of the Reformation era. On August 24, 1572, in the midst of celebrations of a marriage between a Catholic princess and a Protestant king, at least 2,000 French Protestants were murdered on the streets of Paris. The news of events in Paris also sparked massacres in other Fren...
This war, or series of wars, is sometimes remembered as the last of the wars of religion. Some of its origins lay with tensions over the religious settlement offered in the Peace of Augsburg (1555), which allowed for Lutheran and Catholic territories within the Holy Roman Empire. A Protestant revolt against Catholic Habsburg rule in Bohemia spirall...
As the historian Nicholas Terpstra recently argued, the Reformation-era drive for purity was turned not only against rival Christian denominations, but also against non-Christian populations. In this light, the victory claimed in 1492by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, rulers of Castille and Aragon, over the Muslim populations of the Iberian peni...
- Katy Gibbons
- Eve—The original baddie, she made the fatal-for-everyone mistake of listening to the serpent’s lie that God wasn’t telling the truth about the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.
- Jezebel—A Phoenician princess, she was married to Ahab, one of Israel’s worst kings. She worshipped Baal, who was heralded as the bringer of rain and prosperity.
- Athaliah—She was the daughter of Ahab and probably also of Jezebel, the Bible’s wickedest queen. Married to the King of Judah, she grew paranoid after his death, murdering her grandchildren in order to secure the throne.
- Herodias—The granddaughter of Herod the Great, she married two of her uncles, Herod Philip I and Herod Antipas. An ambitious and ruthless woman, she hated John the Baptist for thundering against her marriage to Herod Antipas, whom she had married after divorcing his half-brother Philip.
Mark 15:7-15. New International Version. 7 A man called Barabbas was in prison with the insurrectionists who had committed murder in the uprising. 8 The crowd came up and asked Pilate to do for them what he usually did.
Christians have wrestled with divine violence in the Old Testament at least since the 2nd century ce, when Marcion led a movement to reject the Old Testament and the Old Testament God. The movement was substantial enough that key church leaders such as Irenaeus and Tertullian worked to suppress it.
The bloody history of the tradition has provided images as disturbing as those provided by Islam, and violent conflict is vividly portrayed in the Bible. This history and these biblical images have provided the raw material for theologically justifying the violence of contemporary Christian groups.
For example, the Book of Judges includes the judge Deborah, who was honored, as well as two of the most egregious examples in the Bible of violence against women: Jephthah’s daughter (Judg. 11:29–40) and the Levite’s concubine (Judg. 19).
