Second Only to the Bible

Within Mennonite and Amish communities, the Martyrs Mirror carries a description that gets used about very few books anywhere: second only to the Bible in its importance to the tradition's own thought and self understanding. That is not a casual compliment. It reflects centuries of the book being read, referenced and passed down as a working account of what earlier generations of Anabaptists actually suffered for holding to believer's baptism and nonresistance, the two commitments the movement was founded on and the two the book's martyr accounts most consistently illustrate.

Jan Luyken's engravings did as much as van Braght's prose to make that account stick in memory. Art historians describe his 104 images as having shaped an entire visual iconography of suffering, a way of picturing martyrdom that Anabaptist communities carried forward independently of the text itself, recognizable even to someone who has never read a page of van Braght's original account. A book that began as one author's historical record became, through an illustrated edition he never saw, something closer to a shared visual and textual inheritance, still read aloud and still referenced wherever Mennonite and Amish communities gather to remember why their movement exists at all.