The Anabaptist Community Bible

Five centuries ago, the Radical Reformation began.

On January 21, 1525, the city council of Zurich, Switzerland, forbade advocacy and organization around believer’s baptism. That night, a group gathered anyway, secretly assembling in defiance of the government and baptizing one another as they understood the Scriptures to require. They would come to be called Anabaptists, distinguished not only by their practices of baptism but by their commitments to nonviolence, to church disentangled from the state, and to robust community life centered on obedience to God’s Word.

Against popular misconceptions, modern Christian pacifists sometimes have to clarify that our calls to peace are not passive or cowardly. It is difficult to imagine those early Anabaptists feeling any need to mount a similar defense. Fervid and brave, they were so staunch in their convictions – as editor John D. Roth notes in his introduction to the Anabaptist Community Bible – that for many, fidelity would “lead to imprisonment, torture, and even death.”

Undergirding those convictions was a zealous knowledge of Scripture, which makes this new volume from MennoMedia an apt endeavor to mark five hundred years of Anabaptism. The Anabaptist Community Bible is intended to help present-day Christians imitate the first Anabaptists’ communal, Christocentric engagement with Scripture as the authoritative Word of God. It’s a thoughtful and thought-provoking project, valuable particularly for its integration of commentary from historic Anabaptist figures and for the revealing glimpse it gives of Anabaptism in America today. (Not all the community and scholarly notes come from the United States, but skimming the remarkable list of contributing study groups and institutional affiliations, all of which state their locations, indicates these are overwhelmingly American.)

The most distinctive feature of the Anabaptist Community Bible is the marginalia, which come in three varieties. Readers of study Bibles will find familiar the notes from Anabaptist scholars who usually offer tidbits of biblical, historical, and linguistic context for the passage at hand. The Hebrew verb for “to know” in Micah 3:1 (“Isn’t it your job to know justice?”) indicates that Israel’s leaders “should have an intimate, accurate, and comprehensive understanding of justice,” a typical note explains.

Matthew Regier, Ezekiels First Vision, linocut, © 2025 by MennoMedia. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

The second batch of notes consists of brief excerpts from Anabaptist writings dating to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These are reliably interesting and galvanizing, often making a connection or offering a gloss that a contemporary commentator would be unlikely to supply. “Even as Samson primarily felled his enemies in his death,” observes a note from Peter Jansz Twisck, a Dutch Mennonite elder, on Judges 16:28, “so Christ has laid low and conquered the hellish enemy through his death.” These historic commentators can be particularly bracing in passages pertaining to sin and holiness, and their testimonies are rendered uniquely credible by their lives and, in many cases, martyrdoms.

Finally, comments drawn from present-day Anabaptists are included. They easily outnumber the historic notes and perhaps the scholarly commentary too. “Nearly six hundred Bible study groups, gathered in a wide variety of Anabaptist communities in the United States, Canada, and fifteen other countries, read and commented on every chapter in the Bible,” Roth explains. “The insights – and especially the questions – of thousands of lay Anabaptist Christians are distilled here.”

Perhaps predictably, this third group of notes is more difficult to summarize than the other two. Some notes are clearly intended to prompt group discussion in a study setting, like a note on Nehemiah 8:12 that asks whether the reader’s “faith community [has] ever returned to a practice that has fallen out of use.” Others have an agenda. “We wonder why, even today,” says a pointed comment on 2 Kings 22:14, “some persons object to the idea of women in leadership.” Still others are straightforward expressions of confusion or comfort, frustration or faith.

At their best, these community notes are reminiscent of the odd jumble of observations and queries any lay Bible study is likely to produce. This is a description I believe the Anabaptist Community Bible team would take as a compliment. One of the most striking community notes I ran across was among the few that identified the source group’s location. On Galatians 5:1 (“Christ has set us free for freedom. Therefore, stand firm and don’t submit to the bondage of slavery again”), the lay comment reads:

Our group is from Burkina Faso, where over 95 percent of Christians have a Muslim or traditional background, and the practices of these religions are like observing the law. But in Christ, through faith, we are freed from the slavery of ancestor worship, traditional rights, fetishes, bracelets, and other means of seeking protection.

Anabaptists have characteristically insisted that God’s people should read and interpret his Word together, and this Bible is explicitly designed to facilitate that kind of conversation. One of its final resources is a method for group study, and each book is prefaced with an introduction short and accessible enough to be digested in a single meeting, no homework necessary. A series of original woodcuts scattered throughout the book and a collection of essays about scriptural interpretation and the Anabaptist tradition are also presented as fodder for conversation.

This is probably about all a study Bible team can do to get people to engage with Scripture in community settings instead of defaulting to solitude. But is it enough? A congregation or small group already dedicated to routine, diligent, and collective Bible reading could find the Anabaptist Community Bible a useful aid. Its physical form and beauty are an asset in our digitally distracted age.

When my family lived in Minnesota and were members of a Mennonite church, I spent a number of years co-leading a small group that often defaulted to Bible study as our main activity. We called this gathering “house church” – at once announcing our usual meeting spot and nodding back to Anabaptism’s underground era – and the experience was so formative that I doubt I’ll ever manage to replace that phrase with our present congregation’s preferred nomenclature.

Thinking back to those days, I can imagine the book introductions and marginalia being helpful in our conversations. But I can also imagine spending considerable time in the essay collection, particularly the contributions on Christocentrism from Meghan Larissa Good, on canonization history from Nancy Heisey, and on early Anabaptist scriptural engagement from Stuart Murray (whose best-known book, The Naked Anabaptist, I believe we did read).

Heisey and Murray offer succinct and satisfying historical sketches. And though Good gets off to a shaky start, the bulk of her piece is a beautiful meditation on Jesus as “the Word by which all the words are interpreted,” “the principle by which all tensions are mediated,” and “the logic of the narrative arc of all creation.” Particularly in study groups in which participants have varying familiarities with Scripture, church history, and Anabaptism, these essays would have a positive orienting effect.

A section of the final essay, however, brings me to the Anabaptist Community Bible’s function as snapshot of two eras of Anabaptism: the movement in its first two centuries, and the movement as it exists in America today.

The essay in question is about contextual theology, and its author, Jonny Rashid, devotes the bulk of it to explaining that every reading is, in fact, contextual. He rehearses the usual list: liberation theology, black liberation theology, womanist theology, and so on. Then he turns to queer theology, lauding its quest to “skew … binary lines in all theologies.” Rashid argues that Anabaptists should “join queer theologians in resisting dichotomous thinking” and, quoting another scholar, contends that “Christianity is queer.”

Anabaptism requires the hunger for and submission to Scripture that, five centuries ago, its progenitors modeled to the death.

This is a surprising and strident way to conclude the essay section of a Bible intended for the whole of contemporary Anabaptism. As a fascinating population map in the Anabaptist Community Bible documents, most Anabaptists now live in the Global South, where Christians tend to be quite theologically conservative on issues of sex and gender. Africa is the most Anabaptist continent today.

Realistically, of course, the Anabaptist Community Bible will largely sell in the West, so it’s not as if many of Ethiopia’s 370,000 Anabaptists will be put off by this part of Rashid’s contribution. Still, there are conservative Anabaptists in the West too, and beyond this essay, they may raise an eyebrow at some of the marginalia attached to passages about immorality, and particularly sexual immorality, where the distance between the historic and modern sentiments occasionally yawns.

Randy Horst, A Shoot Will Grow Up from the Stump of Jesse, digital artwork, © 2025 by MennoMedia. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Consider the note on the vice list that opens with sexual immorality in Galatians 5:19. Here Joriaen Simons, burned to death for his faith in 1557, tells Christians to “read Paul, or have him read to you; he will tell you the works of the flesh.” This is the classic Anabaptist hermeneutic of obedience at its most blunt. By contrast, a modern community note on Romans 1:18-32 asks outright what Christians should do about “scriptures we don’t like or don’t agree with.”

Sometimes this difference of eras is evident in the notes on a single passage. In Proverbs 17, for example, the historical comment speaks of God’s hatred of sin, while the modern note proposes softening the biblical language of “foolishness” by saying “poor choices” or “inappropriate” instead.

In Leviticus 20, the early Anabaptist commentary on instructions for sexual morality is an unflinching call to purity: “Sanctify yourself to the Lord, my son; sanctify your whole conduct in the fear of your God.” The modern commentary instead wonders, “What are sexual sins for us today? Are they different for followers of Jesus in different cultures throughout the world?” And the scholarly commentary follows historical context with the observation that “cultural understandings of gender and sexuality continue to change.”

Beyond this, the study group notes sometimes evince a basic unfamiliarity with Scripture. Micah 1:5, a prophecy of judgment for idolatry and oppression, “seems focused on delivering the bad news; indeed, some of this language suggests a vindictive and judgmental God,” says one comment. “This seems quite different from the prophet of Micah 6:8 that we like to quote.” Reading only one verse further, to Micah 6:9, would bring this commenter to a section whose header, in the Anabaptist Community Bible, says, “Punishment is near.”

It’s not fair, of course, to expect a lay reader to know the Bible like a scholar would. And there is something to be said for the volume’s editors deciding to include not only the incisive and knowledgeable community notes but the misguided and ignorant ones too. We are not saved by our smarts (1 Cor. 1:18–31), nor are we born with encyclopedic knowledge of Scripture, and Anabaptism has long had an above-average tolerance for internal disagreement on the nonessentials.

But it is impossible to ignore the difference between this level of biblical knowledge and that of the Anabaptists of five hundred years ago. “Many Anabaptists could not read Scripture for themselves, but they were passionately concerned to explore its implications for their lives and communities,” Murray writes in his essay:

Not only did they listen to it read aloud by those who were literate, but they memorized it, heard expositions, discussed it together, contributed insights, and tried to obey its teaching. What they found in Scripture shaped their ecclesial and ethical convictions. These convictions, in turn, informed how they read Scripture. And they frequently shocked their inquisitors with their knowledge and understanding.

They frequently shocked their inquisitors with their knowledge and understanding. Just as much as the peace tradition, this is the priceless legacy of the Radical Reformation. This is what makes a community study Bible a rightful commemoration of five hundred years of Anabaptism. It is also a legacy that, in my observation, both in these marginalia and in my experience in the Mennonite Church USA, is at risk of being lost.

One big reason I’m no longer a member of a Mennonite church is that I moved to another state. But another big reason is that I saw firsthand how unsteady Anabaptism becomes if it is not solidly grounded in this foundation of scriptural knowledge and authority. Other Christian traditions – those that also catechize with creed and liturgy and tend to concentrate instructional authority in ordained, seminary-educated ministers – may more reliably hold on to their convictions without intensive, universal lay Bible study.

But Anabaptism doesn’t work that way. It requires understanding, as Roth writes, that “Scripture – and especially the teachings of Jesus – [are] a road map for living,” a map to be constantly consulted because it is always “relevant and authoritative for the Christian life.” It requires us to read the Bible, in Roth’s words, “with the expectation that it will change our lives.” Anabaptism requires the hunger for and submission to Scripture that, five centuries ago, its progenitors modeled to the death.

If the Anabaptist Community Bible can encourage that hunger, enticing Christians to consume Scripture like a community feast, its makers have done well indeed. That would not only commemorate Anabaptism but extend its legacy for generations to come.