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Hello, in the early 16th century, the Protestant Reformation revolutionized Christian belief.

One radical group of believers were the Anabaptists, who rejected infant baptism and formal clergy, and believed that all good should be held in common.

They were also convinced, as were others, that the second coming was imminent.

In 1534, in a German city of Munster, a group of Anabaptists' temptists established a new Jerusalem, ready for the last days before the apocalypse.

But the city was besieged and descended into tyranny. Books were burned and women were forced to marry.

A starvation spread, the city's ruler lived in insane luxury. The horrors of the Anabaptists of Munster have resonated through the European memory ever since.

With me to discuss the siege of Munster and his impact, a German McCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford,

Charlotte Methion, University Research Lecturer in Ecclesiastical History at the University of Oxford, and Lecturer in Church History and Liturgy at Rippen College, Kudsten,

and Lucy Wooding Lecturer in Early Modern History at King's College, London.

German McCulloch, the Anabaptists emerge out of the earliest of the Protestant Reformation.

Can you begin by setting out how far Martin Luther and the early reformers wanted to go in reforming Christianity, before he came to the Anabaptists?

Well, what they wanted to do was to make Christianity truly biblical again, and go back to the Bible's message, look at the New Testament, and try and line up the church to make it look like the New Testament.

So that's Martin Luther, and that's the early reformers, and all the Anabaptists were doing were taking that idea seriously, trying to take the Bible seriously.

And the one Anabaptist is a term of abuse, it means re-baptiser, because what they did was to make people baptise themselves again or be baptized again as adults having been baptised as infants by the old church.

And the reason they did that was a biblical one. They looked at the New Testament and said, you can't find infant baptism in the New Testament.

Therefore, if we're going to be serious about the Bible, we've got to make baptism for believers, for adults.

But there are lots of other things that they discovered in the Bible, because it is a very remote alien book, and the church had domesticated it in various ways.

Even Martin Luther was horrified by the sheer logic of what they were doing.

What did they come out of the Anabaptists? Did they think they were putting it globally, and would be pleased with what they were doing?

They were taking his ideas, and as they were running with them, did they think they were challenging his ideas as if there's an intellectual thumb going on in the intellectual, with the great intellectual capital of the day, and that capital is religion.

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