I

It is common to treat the thought of Entfelder and Bünderlin together, often with the more or less explicit justification that they shared similar theologies. Rufus Jones therefore suggested that they ‘held almost precisely the same views’, whilst Packull has concluded ‘that the two men agreed on most issues’.Footnote ¹⁶ In turn, there have been claims of an intellectual, and perhaps even a personal, connection between them. Claude Foster argued that Entfelder was ‘probably greatly influenced’ by Bünderlin, whilst Jones went so far as to call Bünderlin ‘[Entfelder's] teacher’.Footnote ¹⁷ The little biographical information that is known about either man appears to support claims for their shared theology.Footnote ¹⁸ In the second half of the 1520s both were associated with Anabaptist communities in Moravia: Entfelder was an Anabaptist preacher at Eibenschitz, whilst Bünderlin spent some time in Nikolsburg, previously home to the Anabaptist martyr and theologian Balthasar Hubmaier.Footnote ¹⁹ Both left Moravia in the late 1520s, and Bünderlin at least was definitely in Strasbourg by March 1529, when he was arrested at an Anabaptist meeting and questioned by the city council.Footnote ²⁰ Entfelder noted in the Manifold divisions that he left Eibenschitz when he became aware of his errors as a leader, presumably meaning when he rejected Anabaptism.Footnote ²¹ It is more difficult to ascertain Bünderlin's reasons for leaving Moravia, or the precise nature of his relationship with Anabaptism on arriving in Strasbourg. Perhaps deliberately, there was little in the way of either explicit support or criticism for his one-time coreligionists in the three pamphlets he had published in the city in 1529: A general report about the contents of Holy Scripture; The reason why God descended and became man in Christ; and A general introduction into the proper understanding of Moses and the prophets.Footnote ²² However, for Bünderlin, as for Entfelder, the publication of a strongly anti-Anabaptist work in 1530 marked a break from the past.

At first glance, these works also indicate a shared theology. Entfelder's Manifold divisions and Bünderlin's Explanation through comparison both argued that the Anabaptist attempt to reintroduce the practices of the apostolic Church could never be successful. The ceremonies and offices described in the New Testament were historically specific, and a new commission from God was required before they could be restored. As Entfelder explained, ‘the Lord ordered special people, who we are not like, for special reasons, which ended long ago, to their own time, which has now passed’.Footnote ²³ Similarly, Bünderlin argued that the ceremonies and all that belonged to the apostolic office were only given to the early Church, and were no longer needed afterwards. Water baptism had been translated into spiritual baptism, ‘because of which we need not follow the example of the apostles in this matter’.Footnote ²⁴ Both writers agreed that the slavish attempt to follow this historical example produced only a dead religion, empty of true spirit, as demonstrated by the Anabaptists. Only by ending the use of ceremonies and any attempt to restore the apostolic Church could the individual believer be reunited with God in the inner worship of the heart.Footnote ²⁵

However, these similar critiques of Anabaptism appeared in works that remained strikingly different. Entfelder's Manifold divisions was very personal, referring repeatedly to the experience of discovering his own faults and errors, and was founded on a description of contemporary religious life.Footnote ²⁶ Entfelder's primary concern was the harmful effects of the division and discord that had recently struck the Christian faith. The abandonment of unnecessary and divisive ceremonies seemed to him the best way of ensuring unity.Footnote ²⁷ Bünderlin's Explanation through comparison, in contrast, was an abstract, impersonal survey of biblical and early church history, in which contemporary relevance was implicit at best. His rejection of ceremonies was not based on their negative effects, but rather on the claim that they were tainted with the mark of the AntiChrist, and therefore ruined forever.Footnote ²⁸ There was a similar distinction in the tone that the two writers used to address their former coreligionists amongst the Anabaptists. Entfelder portrayed himself as a friend and brother, concerned for the spiritual well being of his readers. He addressed a concluding passage ‘To the brethren at Eibenschitz’, and other parts of the work indicated that he retained some affection for the Anabaptist movement.Footnote ²⁹ Bünderlin, however, described the Anabaptists as a specific form of a multifaceted church of the AntiChrist, in which the act of rebaptism was recast as the mark of the devil.Footnote ³⁰ Bünderlin's personal break from Anabaptism appears to have been more complete than Entfelder's, and his written critique was therefore more radical.

This was apparent in the rhetoric used by the two writers to describe how spiritual religion should be attained. Entfelder's approach was essentially passive, and the concept of patience played an important role in his thought. First, patience was a key stage in the process of individual salvation. The believer could only surrender his or her self, and then ‘await God's acceptance with patience, in spiritual poverty, in sorrow and sighing’.Footnote ³¹ Second, patience was the necessary response to the obvious abuses of external religion that were common in the contemporary Church. The model here was Elijah, who, despite a sincere desire to destroy the priests of Baal and reinstate the true sacrifice of the Lord, waited patiently until the time was right for action.Footnote ³² Entfelder's attack on those who sought to change religious practice without a new commission, like the Anabaptists, was therefore put in terms of Christian patience and passivity versus worldly zeal and activity.

This portrayal was switched in Bünderlin's rhetoric, so that the positive, independent attainment of truth was described in active terms: a spiritual religion was thus promoted through the use of surprisingly physical language. For example, Bünderlin termed Christ's public revelation of spiritual worship ‘a leap into the spiritual’.Footnote ³³ Similarly, he saw the destruction of the apostolic community in Jerusalem as proof that it was not necessary for Christians to rely on others, ‘so that we learned to swim by ourselves’.Footnote ³⁴ Building on the more common image of the religious life as running a race, Bünderlin also noted that ‘in the progress of the fast-running word of God … it is no longer necessary to wait for one another’. True Christians did best by running on and gladly leaving those who were far behind, rather than going back to them or helping them on like a crutch.Footnote ³⁵ In this way Bünderlin made it clear that the Anabaptist concern for ceremonies was to be left behind, and true spiritual worship actively sought out. At the same time he described an approach quite distinct from that put forward by Entfelder.

II

In part, this rhetorical contrast is merely an illustration of Dipple's conclusion that, whilst Entfelder and Bünderlin shared a similar critique of ceremonialism, ‘they parted ways on how one should deal with this problem’.Footnote ³⁶ However, one aspect of Bünderlin's rhetoric suggests that there may have been something more significant in his choice of language. On three occasions Bünderlin compared his own approach to religion with what he called ‘standing still’ (stillstehen), a term which captured much of his attack on the contemporary churches. Pointing to the Old Testament, he noted that spiritually minded individuals such as Abraham ‘did not stand still by the signs on the way [seind bey dem hantzeichen vff dem weg nitt still gestanden], but hurried into the depths of the Lord’. This was even more the case in the New Testament, the spirit of which ‘does not stand still, but hurries always further [steet nit still/eilt immer fürbass]’. As a result, this was to be the model for all true Christians. ‘He does not want us to stand still by the signs and be distracted by them, as unfortunately many now do [bey dem zeiger stillsteen/vnd mit jm kurtzweylen/wie leider vil yetz thůn], but to hurry after him whose word runs swiftly.’Footnote ³⁷

Bünderlin's use of the term ‘standing still’ in the Explanation through comparison is important for two reasons. First, it did not appear with the same meaning in any of the three works he published in 1529. The only time it was used, in A general introduction, was in a neutral sense, referring to the end of the Old Testament prophets. They ‘had to stand still according to the external course [nach dem eusserlichenn lauff stilsteen müsten], because no more was revealed to them’.Footnote ³⁸ This was quite different from the pejorative way in which the phrase was used in the Explanation through comparison, and it thus seems that the desire to reject ‘standing still’ was not part of Bünderlin's thought in 1529. By 1530, however, it had become a significant issue. Second, Bünderlin's attack on ‘standing still’ did not fit very well in a work that was apparently targeted at the Anabaptists. ‘Standing still’ was not a crucial part of their rhetoric, which more commonly emphasised the need to go beyond the changes already implemented by reformers such as Luther and Zwingli.Footnote ³⁹ It thus seems unlikely that the Anabaptists would have recognised themselves in Bünderlin's attack on ‘standing still’. Significantly, however, the idea was crucial to certain Spiritualist theologies.

The verb stillstehen and its noun der Stillstand were common in late medieval and early modern German, meaning to stop, halt or bring to an end.Footnote ⁴⁰ From the mid-1520s, however, they took on a new theological significance as a result of the writings of Caspar Schwenckfeld.Footnote ⁴¹ He had been an early supporter of Luther, but from around 1525 he began to develop his own distinctive eucharistic theology.Footnote ⁴² He maintained that the believer truly ate and drank the body and blood of Christ, but that it was primarily a spiritual eating of Christ's heavenly flesh. The physical ceremony was of less importance, and Schwenckfeld feared that, without proper instruction of the laity, the bread and the wine themselves could become objects of idolatry and false worship. From the autumn of 1525, therefore, Schwenckfeld and his followers in Silesia abandoned the eucharist. In a circular letter issued in April 1526 they announced that they would ‘stand still for a time in the practice of the most worthy sacrament [ein weyl mit dem brauch des Hochwirdigenn Sacraments stillstehen]’.Footnote ⁴³ Schwenckfeld himself never received the eucharist again, and the Stillstand, as it became known, remained a key part of Schwenckfelder self-identity until the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the Stillstand was not intended to be permanent, and Schwenckfeld emphasised that there would come a time when the eucharist could be reintroduced safely. However, he explained in a letter of June 1526, ‘this does not require our powers, but only the spirit of the Lord. We wait, therefore, eagerly and with sighs until Christ invites his guests through his spirit’.Footnote ⁴⁴

This emphasis on patient waiting for divine action bears some similarity to the Manifold divisions, and McLaughlin and Dipple have pointed to the closeness in the general thought of Entfelder and Schwenckfeld.Footnote ⁴⁵ It appears that this closeness extended to a similar understanding of Stillstand. The term itself occurred only once in the Manifold divisions, in a passage describing the three-fold baptisms of John, Christ and the Holy Spirit. Entfelder noted that Christ's baptism brought together the lost sheep of Israel, but came to an end with the death of the shepherd himself. This did not, however, indicate that baptism had lost its command or truth, but happened ‘so that the stand still of these things [der stilstand diser ding] testified to the suffering of their Lord, who at that time himself gave up his honour, power and strength’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Much as Schwenckfeld had done with the eucharist, Entfelder suggested that baptism retained its spiritual power even when it was not actually practised.

Although this was the only direct reference to Stillstand in the Manifold divisions, the idea was also implicit in Entfelder's call for patience, which envisaged future restoration. Here there was a clear distinction from Bünderlin. As Dipple has recently shown, both men were surprisingly historically-minded, with the symbolism of the Babylonian Captivity particularly important in their thought.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Israelites in Babylon provided an ideal model for the ways in which true Christians could survive without using the perverted ceremonies of the contemporary churches. However, Entfelder went beyond this to liken an imagined future restoration of these ceremonies to the end of the Babylonian Captivity. He thus noted that Daniel's prayers and Tobias's good works ‘should be our service, ceremonies, sacrifice and Mass, until God has mercy on us, the son truly makes us free, and the Holy Spirit enlivens us. Then truthful Cyrus himself brings forward the vessels of the temple, and hands them over to us with righteousness’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Once again, the links with Schwenckfeld's understanding of a eucharistic Stillstand are clear.

It is therefore unsurprising that many historians have associated Entfelder with the idea of Stillstand. Packull uses the term in noting Entfelder's desire to end divisions: ‘A moratorium (Stillstand) on the performance of church ordinances seemed preferable to increased bickering and fragmentation.’Footnote ⁴⁹ Likewise, Dipple, highlighting the importance of Entfelder's reference to Cyrus, has suggested that the attack on ceremonies in the Manifold divisions ‘should be regarded as a Stillstand more than a categorical rejection’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Finally, the editors of a recent collection of Reformation pamphlet texts have noted that Entfelder ‘insisted on the Stillstand of ceremonies’, and termed this ‘the central idea of his writing about the “divisions”’.Footnote ⁵¹ If these historians are correct in associating Entfelder with the concept of Stillstand, then it may be necessary to reconsider our understanding of the relationship between Entfelder and Bünderlin, and above all the meaning of Bünderlin's Explanation through comparison. The attack on ‘standing still’ does not seem to apply to the Anabaptists, but would fit much more closely if the target was Entfelder, as the phrase captured the very real distinctions in their approaches. This explanation might also help to clarify why a term that appears not to have been important for Bünderlin in 1529 became so in 1530. It seems at least possible that Bünderlin's attack on standing still was not coincidental, but was rather a deliberate allusion to Entfelder's alternative form of Spiritualism, newly arrived in Strasbourg. Contained within Bünderlin's Spiritualist demand for Anabaptists not to stand still on the path to truth may have been a coded rejection of Entfelder's call to stand still and avoid further error in sacramental change.

III

This argument remains inconclusive, but it would be strengthened if further evidence could be found either to link Entfelder with the idea of Stillstand, or to demonstrate a division between him and Bünderlin. Although the sources are difficult to interpret, it appears that two other contributors to the Strasbourg debates, Pilgram Marpeck and Sebastian Franck, did provide evidence of this kind. The significance of Marpeck in this respect has been misunderstood previously, whilst Franck's contribution appears to have gone unnoticed by historians. Nevertheless, comparing their works with those by Entfelder and Bünderlin allows a fuller understanding of the situation in Strasbourg.

Pilgram Marpeck arrived in Strasbourg in 1528, and managed to balance being a known Anabaptist leader with serving the city council as a kind of civil engineer.Footnote ⁵² This official position perhaps explains why the printed works associated with Marpeck, including those against the Spiritualists, were published anonymously. He also anonymised his opponents in the Clear refutation and the Useful instruction, identifying them only as ‘the spirits’ and ‘the false prophets’ respectively. As a result, there has been considerable debate concerning his intended targets, with Entfelder, Bünderlin, Schwenckfeld and Franck all suggested. However, most recent studies have concluded that Bünderlin was attacked in the Clear refutation, whilst Entfelder was the primary focus of the Useful instruction.Footnote ⁵³ Marpeck did not refer directly to any division between his two opponents, which could have been a useful strategy in refuting their combined critiques. Nevertheless, the fact that he addressed each writer's ideas separately might suggest that Marpeck saw some distinction between them. Perhaps he did not feel it was possible to tackle both perspectives within one work.

Significantly, Marpeck's pamphlets distinguished between the active and passive rhetoric of his opponents. In the Clear refutation, Marpeck highlighted the potentially dangerous over-confidence implicit in Bünderlin's active rhetoric. For example, he criticised the concept of the spiritual leap, noting that his opponents ‘desire to make the kingdom of Christ too spiritual, and make too great a leap’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Similarly, the image of running a race was rejected, with Marpeck instead describing the true Christian as ‘a faithful disciple, who does not long to be a master or to run ahead of Christ’.Footnote ⁵⁵ However, what Marpeck chose not to mention is also important. At no point did he challenge or even refer to Bünderlin's call not to stand still by the signs of ceremonial worship. One possible explanation for this surprising omission is that Marpeck recognised that it was not directed against the Anabaptists. He may have understood the implications of the attack on standing still, and therefore felt able to ignore it.

Whilst Stillstand was not raised in the Clear refutation, it appeared repeatedly in the Useful instruction as part of a more general rejection of Entfelder's passive and patient approach. Marpeck noted that his opponents urged simple believers ‘to stand completely still with respect to the command of Christ’, so that many had been ‘moved to a complete standstill’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Similarly, he suggested that they were not driven by Christ, otherwise they ‘would never persuade anyone to stand still or to discontinue in the faith and teaching of Christ’.Footnote ⁵⁷ In an interesting application of the Spiritualists' own argument for historical specificity, Marpeck even claimed that patient waiting had been correct for the Apostles before Pentecost, but was no longer appropriate: ‘Christ now commands no one to wait as He did to the apostles … Therefore, your waiting will finally be fruitless.’Footnote ⁵⁸ Much as the Clear refutation appears to have been an attack on an over-confident, active rhetoric, the Useful instruction can be read as a rejection of a passive approach to religion, and of Stillstand in particular.

Marpeck's rejection of Stillstand is not a new discovery, and has played a central role in debates on the intended target of the Useful instruction. William Klassen initially suggested that the work was aimed at Schwenckfeld, and noted the frequent use of the term Stillstand as evidence in support of his claim.Footnote ⁵⁹ However, much else about the work indicated that Entfelder was the target, and Neal Blough has therefore argued that the Stillstand argument alone should not be seen as proof that Marpeck wrote against Schwenckfeld. He concludes that there is ‘a much stronger case for Entfelder being the primary adversary’.Footnote ⁶⁰ In response, Klassen has recently reiterated his claim, noting that whilst Stillstand was a vital idea for Schwenckfeld, ‘it occurs only once in the writings of Christian Entfelder’.Footnote ⁶¹ This is certainly true as far as the Manifold divisions is concerned. Nevertheless, it remains possible that Marpeck identified Entfelder with the practice of Stillstand, despite having little written evidence for doing so. It has already been suggested that Bünderlin may have done the same, and it seems likely that Sebastian Franck agreed.

Franck arrived in Strasbourg at some point in 1530 as an independent Spiritualist, refusing to join with any religious group or sect.Footnote ⁶² He soon made contact with Bünderlin, describing him in a letter of February 1531 as ‘my brother in faith … a learned man, wonderfully God-fearing and utterly dead to worldly things’.Footnote ⁶³ Although there is no evidence of direct contact with Entfelder, Franck clearly knew and valued his writings, and included a passage from Entfelder's later work On the true knowledge of God and Jesus Christ our Lord in his own 1538 compendium, The golden ark.Footnote ⁶⁴ He therefore seems to have been in a good position to comment on relations between Entfelder and Bünderlin: like Marpeck, an eye-witness, but, unlike Marpeck, not hostile to their basic theology.

In September 1531 Franck published his Chronicle, a massive work of sacred and secular history.Footnote ⁶⁵ The section that has drawn most attention from historians was a ‘chronicle of heretics’, in which Franck gave more or less impartial accounts of the beliefs of those declared heretical throughout the history of the Church, including the Anabaptists.Footnote ⁶⁶ Building on his claim that heretics were always divided amongst themselves, Franck described the numerous divisions between different groups of Anabaptists. The discussion of one division focused upon issues similar to those encountered in the works of Entfelder and Bünderlin. Due to the importance of this passage it is worth quoting in full:

Of the two positions described by Franck, the second is easy to identify. The title page of Bünderlin's Explanation through comparison included the claims that ceremonies had been ‘destroyed after the departure of the apostles’, and that worship should take place ‘in spirit and in truth’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The emphasis on not going back to signs on the path was a key part of Bünderlin's rhetoric, and the reference to not recognising the Anabaptists as brethren fits with his identification of them as a church of AntiChrist. It is therefore clear that the second position described by Franck was that of Bünderlin.

Identifying the first position is more problematic. Rufus Jones, apparently the only historian to have noted this intriguing passage, assumed that the ‘waiting, seeking attitude’ described in it, combined with the reference to Stillstand, could only apply to Schwenckfeld.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, the presence of this passage within Franck's article on the Anabaptists is significant. He generally avoided the common practice of grouping all non-conformists together. For example, he did not include Thomas Müntzer amongst the Anabaptist leaders, despite this being a popular claim in evangelical polemic. It thus seems improbable that he would have termed Schwenckfeld an Anabaptist, particularly as Schwenckfeld was at this time assisting the Strasbourg authorities in converting recalcitrant Anabaptist prisoners.Footnote ⁷⁰

It remains difficult to find more plausible candidates when the search is limited to those who could be described as Anabaptists. It is possible that Franck had in mind Anabaptists with Spiritualist leanings, such as Hans Denck, Ludwig Hätzer or Jakob Kautz.Footnote ⁷¹ However, Denck and Hätzer were both named elsewhere in Franck's account of the Anabaptists, leaving no reason to conceal their identity in this passage. Crucially, both were dead by 1531, and so could not have taken part in what Franck indicated was an ongoing debate. Kautz, meanwhile, only gave up baptising others in 1532, and was banned from Strasbourg immediately before this, making it unlikely that Franck could have known of his new understanding when writing the Chronicle.Footnote ⁷² Similarly, the apocalyptic Anabaptist Melchior Hoffman, who called for a two-year Stillstand on adult baptism following the execution of ten of his followers in the Low Countries, might appear a possible candidate, were it not for the fact that the executions and subsequent Stillstand occurred in December 1531, three months after the publication of the Chronicle.Footnote ⁷³

In the absence of a more likely candidate, it seems probable that the unidentified Anabaptist was Entfelder. The emphasis on the need for a new command from God fits closely with the message of the Manifold divisions, although the claim that he wished for nothing more than the return of baptism was perhaps a questionable exaggeration. Franck's refusal to name those he wrote about in this passage also becomes more understandable if they are taken to be Bünderlin and Entfelder. Both, like Franck himself, were in Strasbourg at a time when the city council was beginning to take tougher action against the nonconformist community. Franck had no desire to cause difficulties for two men who broadly shared his own theology.

IV

Much of the evidence presented in this article is circumstantial, and there is no clear indication that Bünderlin, Marpeck or Franck had Entfelder in mind when they wrote the works considered. Nevertheless, their apparent agreement presents two related conclusions. First, although there was little reference to it in the Manifold divisions, it appears that Entfelder's contemporaries associated him with the concept of Stillstand in relation to baptism. Second, it seems that this concept was at the heart of a dispute between Entfelder and Bünderlin concerning the correct alternative to Anabaptism.

In exploring these two conclusions further, it is necessary first to consider how Entfelder may have come to be associated with a concept that did not play a significant role in his printed work. Here the importance of understanding the Strasbourg context for the Anabaptist-Spiritualist debates is most clear. Following the pioneering work of R. W. Scribner, it has become commonplace for historians to emphasise the primarily oral and visual nature of communication in the early Reformation world. Despite the impact of the printing press, low literacy rates ensured that word of mouth was still the surest way for information and ideas to spread from person to person and from place to place.Footnote ⁷⁴ In part this has led historians to explore previously overlooked sources, most famously in Scribner's work on pamphlet woodcuts. Nevertheless, as Arnold Snyder has noted, this need not imply the abandonment of written evidence, but instead requires ‘fresh approaches to the sources already at hand’.Footnote ⁷⁵ This has been the method followed in this article.

In particular, it has sought to build on McLaughlin's explanation of the significance of Strasbourg as a home to so many nonconformists at this time. ‘Personal acquaintance gave greater relief to personal styles, approaches and preconceptions that might have been overlooked in written works.’Footnote ⁷⁶ Whilst it is not possible to prove personal acquaintance in all cases for the figures discussed in this article, it should be expected that they knew one another, or at least shared contacts. They were significant members of a nonconformist community that numbered at most 2,000, and perhaps many fewer. Perhaps more important, they were also members of a literary community, made up of book readers, writers, printers and sellers.Footnote ⁷⁷ For example, Bünderlin, Franck and Schwenckfeld all shared a printer in Balthasar Beck, himself a committed nonconformist.Footnote ⁷⁸ The finding of the Strasbourg city censors, Christian Herlin and Jakob Bedrot, in July 1531 is equally significant. They noted that Windelin Rihel's bookshop was selling works by Marpeck, Bünderlin and Michael Servetus: Anabaptist, Spiritualist and anti-Trinitarian works were available side by side.Footnote ⁷⁹ Rihel's shop was another place where the nonconformist and literary communities could converge, and a likely site for people to meet and exchange gossip and ideas. In this context, it is easy to imagine how Entfelder's name could become associated with the idea of Stillstand, and how apparently obscure references in works by Bünderlin, Marpeck and Franck could be highlighted and interpreted appropriately.

It is also important to note that the Anabaptist-Spiritualist debates were not limited to the printed word. It is clear that they had a public and oral nature, which would have aided the spread of information within the nonconformist community. The title page of Marpeck's work against Bünderlin, the Clear refutation, observed that his opponent spread his ideas ‘in writing and orally’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Likewise, in the passage from Franck's Chronicle quoted above, it was noted that those apparently associated with Bünderlin's views acted against the Anabaptists ‘orally and in writing’. It is perhaps significant that Marpeck and Franck linked this oral communication with Bünderlin in particular, as there is evidence of his activities in this respect. The meeting at which he was arrested in March 1529 had been brought together by Bünderlin himself, and its main focus was the reading aloud of one of his pamphlets.Footnote ⁸¹

There is no firm evidence that Entfelder ever gave public readings of his works in this way, but there are two interesting indications that it was a possibility. The Manifold divisions ends with the words: ‘Given at Strasbourg, the 24th of January 1530’.Footnote ⁸² This has commonly been assumed to refer to the date of printing, but more recent bibliographical work has suggested that the first edition was printed not in Strasbourg, but rather in Augsburg.Footnote ⁸³ It therefore seems likely that the phrase ‘Given at Strasbourg’ refers to an oral delivery of the work in January 1530, after which it was printed in Augsburg. This may also explain an even more obscure passage in Entfelder's last work, On the true knowledge of God, printed in 1533. In concluding the pamphlet, Entfelder noted that three men had testified to its contents: ‘The writer, a reader, and a hearer who can read no writing, and yet few things are hidden to him from God's grace’. All unanimously recognised that the pamphlet was ‘truthfully true’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Obviously, this passage plays with ideas about the honest simplicity of the unlearned, and may have been a fictional construction, designed to capture the work's theme of the contrast between worldly and godly knowledge. Yet it may also reflect a real event, suggesting that Entfelder again presented his work orally before it was printed.

If this was the case, the opportunities for an audience to question him and to make associations between the implications of his words and the idea of Stillstand are clear. By considering the circumstances in Strasbourg at this time, and above all the ease with which information could pass from person to person, it becomes clear that the relative absence of the concept of Stillstand in Entfelder's written work need be no barrier to his association with the concept in the minds of his contemporaries. Of course, the question of why Entfelder himself did not make the connection with Stillstand more explicit in print remains to be answered. One possible explanation is that he was keen to avoid any confusion with Schwenckfeld's eucharistic Stillstand, a confusion that some recent scholarship has shown to be all too plausible.

Second, the uncovering of a possible dispute between Entfelder and Bünderlin regarding the correct alternative to Anabaptism is further demonstration of the divisive potential of Spiritualist rhetoric, and perhaps Spiritualist thought itself. The case of Entfelder and Bünderlin is in many respects similar to the better-known example of Franck and Schwenckfeld. Here again, biographical similarities and broadly comparable views caused historians to overlook the significant theological differences between them. More recent work by Horst Weigelt and McLaughlin has rectified this, so that the distinctions in the thought of Franck and Schwenckfeld are now more apparent.Footnote ⁸⁵ The ideas explored in this article about the correct response to Anabaptism suggest that some of the same distinctions were also present for Entfelder and Bünderlin, and Dipple has thus pointed to connections between Entfelder and Schwenckfeld on the one hand, and Bünderlin and Franck on the other. He therefore argues ‘that groups were forming within the Spiritualist camp writ large in Strasbourg already at the beginning of the 1530s’.Footnote ⁸⁶

However, it is important to recognise that such ‘groups’, if they existed at all, were not permanent, but appear to have broken down once the Spiritualists left Strasbourg in the years immediately following the debates. Franck praised Bünderlin effusively in 1531, but his Worldbook of 1534 placed him alongside Schwenckfeld, Luther, Zwingli and the pope in a derogatory list of those who had their ‘own church, opinion and even faith’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Likewise the similarities between Schwenckfeld and Entfelder did not stop a Christological dispute developing between the two men in the 1540s.Footnote ⁸⁸ In both instances, apparent ties break down in the face of what is perhaps best termed the Spiritualists' discourse of independence. The necessity of emphasising one's relationship with the Holy Spirit as the centre of religious experience seems to have brought with it a requirement to downplay any spiritual or intellectual debts to other believers. Dependence on the Holy Spirit could not be compromised by mere human concerns, and as a result highlighting what might appear today to be minimal differences was crucially important for the Spiritualists. Thus the paradox of Spiritualist rhetoric: whilst promoting a spiritual church, made up of all true believers across time and place, they often did not recognise as members of that Church those who appear to historians as their closest allies. Explaining this paradox remains one of the key tasks of Reformation Spiritualism scholarship.

V

The works published by Entfelder and Bünderlin in 1530 indicate that they had much in common, not least the desire that their readers should abandon whatever divisive churches they were members of and join instead the unity of the one true, spiritual Church. This was the crux of the Strasbourg Anabaptist-Spiritualist debates, and it seems to have been an argument that many found appealing in the early 1530s. This article has not sought to challenge this conclusion, but rather to offer a complementary perspective. Whilst most of Bünderlin's Explanation through comparison reads as a critique of the Anabaptists, his rejection of Stillstand seems to have a different target: his presumed colleague in striving for the spiritual Church in Strasbourg, Christian Entfelder. Bünderlin therefore appears both to have attacked Anabaptism and to have rejected alternate views of the spiritual Church. This article has sought to uncover this dual focus by piecing together evidence from all the participants in the Spiritualist-Anabaptist debates and, crucially, by going behind these texts to consider how ideas and information may have been shared and debated within the Strasbourg nonconformist community. Through reconsidering the social and intellectual context in which the works of Entfelder and Bünderlin were produced and read, it has been possible to redefine what these debates were about and reassess what their impact might have been. As a result of uncovering these differences, however, any sense of a united Spiritualist movement seems further away than ever.