Burned by the Church — Miguel Servet, Maria Barbara Carillo, Thomas Cranmer, Giordano Bruno, and William Tyndale: Christians Executed for Heresy by Other Christians

Five Christians — a physician, a 95-year-old woman, an Archbishop, a philosopher, and a Bible translator — were all executed by other Christians for holding beliefs that the dominant church of their day declared heretical. The institution that claims to represent Christ burned his followers alive.

The history of Christian persecution of Christians is one of the most consequential and least discussed dimensions of the history of the Church. The individuals profiled here were not executed by Muslims, by pagans, or by atheists. They were executed by the institutional Church — Catholic or Protestant — for disagreeing with its theological positions. Among those positions, the Trinity occupies a central place: Miguel Servet and Giordano Bruno were both burned in significant part for denying it. The doctrine that Christians claim defines the nature of God was enforced with fire.

Miguel Servet — The Anti-Trinitarian Physician Burned by Calvin’s Geneva

Miguel Servet argued that the Trinity was not based on Biblical teaching but on the deceptive teachings of Greek philosophers. Calvin’s Geneva burned him alive for it.

Miguel Servet (Spanish: Miguel Servet; born September 29, 1511, Villanueva de Segna, Huesca, Spain — died October 27, 1553, Geneva, Switzerland) was a Spanish physicist, physician, translator, and theologian. His interests included astronomy and meteorology, geography, jurisprudence, biblical study, mathematics, anatomy, and medicine. He is best known for his contributions to medicine and theology.

His Theology

Servet wrote a theology arguing that the belief in the Trinity was not based on Biblical teachings but rather on what he saw as the deceptive teachings of Greek philosophers. He saw himself as leading a return to the simplicity and originality of the Bible and the early church fathers. In part, he hoped that the expulsion of the Trinitarian doctrine would increase Christianity’s appeal to Judaism and Islam.

Servet maintained that the divine Logos, which was an expression of God and not a separate divine personality, was united to a human being — Christ — when the Spirit of God came to the Virgin Mary. Only from that conception is the Son really created. So the Son was not eternal, but the Logos from which he was formed was eternal. For this reason, Servet always rejected the idea that Christ was the “eternal Son of God,” and instead described him simply as the “Son of the eternal God.”

This theology, though entirely original, was often compared to Adoptionism and Sabellianism — early Christian positions condemned as heresies. Under intense pressure from both Catholics and Protestants, Servet modified this interpretation somewhat in his second book, the Dialogues, making the Logos coterminous with Christ. This brought his views close to the pre-Nicene position, but he was still accused of heresy because of his insistence on denying the doctrine of the Trinity and the individuality of the three persons in one God.

Arrest, Trial, and Execution

On 16 February 1553, while Servet was in Vienne, he was denounced as a heretic by Guillaume Tri — a wealthy merchant of Geneva and a close friend of Calvin [1] — in a letter sent to Antoine Arnais in Lyons. On behalf of the French inquisitor Mathieu Ory, Servet and Arnais were questioned, but they denied all charges and were released for lack of evidence.

On 26 March 1553, the book and letters were sent from Servet to Calvin and forwarded to Lyons by Guillaume Tri. On 4 April of the same year, Servet was arrested by the Roman Catholic authorities and imprisoned in Vienne. He escaped from prison on April 7. On June 17 he was convicted of heresy by the French Inquisition and condemned to be burned with his books. His effigy and his books were burned in his absence.

Intending to escape to Italy, Servet stopped in Geneva, where he was denounced by Calvin and his reformers. On August 13, 1553, he attended a sermon by Calvin in Geneva. He was immediately recognized, arrested [2], and imprisoned again with all his property confiscated.

Calvin was at this time fighting to maintain his weakened power in Geneva. His health and usefulness to the state meant that he did not appear personally against Servet [3], but Calvin’s opponents used Servet as a pretext to attack the theocratic Genevan reform government, making it a matter of reputation for Calvin to insist on Servet’s trial. Nicholas de La Fontaine took the most active part in the trial and in recording the points by which Servet was convicted.

At his trial, Miguel Servet was found guilty of two counts: denying and preaching Nontrinitarianism, and opposing infant baptism. [4] Servet said that the common Christian tradition on these matters was “the work of the devil, and a hellish counterfeit for the destruction of Christianity.” [5] His description of the common Christian tradition as “of the devil” greatly hindered his ability to find allies.

Although Calvin believed that Servet deserved death, he nevertheless wished that the execution not be by burning but by a more merciful method. [6] Calvin expressed these sentiments in a letter to Farel written a week after Servet’s arrest. In the Protestant world of Basel, Servet’s book was banned for sale. Martin Luther condemned his writing in explicit terms. Most Protestant reformers saw Servet as a dangerous revolutionary, and the concept of religious freedom did not exist at that time. The Catholic world also wanted him imprisoned and sentenced to death, which led Calvin to match their severity.

On October 24, 1553, Servet was sentenced to death by burning for denying the Trinity and infant baptism. When Calvin asked that Servet be executed by the sword rather than by fire, William Farel, in a letter of September 8, 1553, rebuked him for what he considered unwarranted leniency. [7] On October 27, 1553, Miguel Servet was burned alive.

Maria Barbara Carillo — The 95-Year-Old Woman Burned by the Spanish Inquisition

Maria Barbara Carillo (Jaén, 1625 – Madrid, 18 May 1721) was a Spanish woman burned at the stake for heresy during the Spanish Inquisition. She was the oldest person to be executed by the Inquisition, being between 95 and 96 years old at the time of her death. [1]

Carillo was one of thousands of Jews forcibly baptized — converted to Christianity against their will under the policies of the Spanish state and the Catholic Church. She was sentenced to death for heresy for having converted to Judaism, having been accused of practicing Judaism in secret after her forced baptism.

A woman was taken from her faith by force, baptized into a religion she did not choose, lived her entire life of nearly a century, and was then burned alive at the age of 95 for not having abandoned her original faith completely enough. This is the record of the institution that claims to represent the mercy of Christ.

Thomas Cranmer — The Archbishop of Canterbury Burned at the Stake

Thomas Cranmer (2 July 1489 – 21 March 1556) was a leader of the English Reformation and Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII and his son Edward VI, and for a short time under Mary I. Cranmer helped arrange a divorce for Henry VIII from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, which led to the separation of the Church of England from the Catholic Church. With the help of Thomas Cromwell, he passed a law giving the king absolute sovereignty over the church in his realm.

Henry VIII appointed him Archbishop of Canterbury on 3 December 1533 [2], and in this role he was responsible for establishing the doctrinal and liturgical structures for the reforms of the Church of England. During Henry VIII’s reign, Cranmer did not make radical changes to the Church due to the power struggle between religious conservatives and reformers. However, he succeeded in publishing the first vernacular prayer book, the Book of Exhortation and Prayer, in 1544.

With the accession of Edward VI, Cranmer was able to make major reforms, writing and compiling the first two editions of the Book of Fundamental Prayer — the Complete Liturgy of the Church of England. He set new religious standards in the areas of the Eucharist, clerical celibacy, the role of religious images in places of worship, and the veneration of saints, issuing these standards through the Prayer Book, the Book of Sermons, and other publications.

Under the Catholic Mary I, Cranmer was tried for treason and heresy and imprisoned for more than two years. Under pressure from the church authorities, he made several amendments and pretended to believe in the Catholic faith. However, on the day of his execution he revoked his last amendments — dying a heretic to Catholics and a martyr to Protestants. Cranmer was burned at the stake, and his ashes were scattered after his death.

Giordano Bruno — The Philosopher Burned for Denying the Trinity and the Infinity of the Universe

Giordano Bruno, also known as Nolano or Bruno di Nola (1548 in Nola – 17 February 1600 in Rome), was an Italian theologian and philosopher condemned as a heretic by the Catholic Church. He was initially a monk but later moved from theological studies to philosophy. He embraced the Copernican theory of the rotation of the Earth — despite it being forbidden by the clergy at the time — and went further by hypothesizing that the solar system was one of a set of systems covering the universe in the form of stars, a divinity, and an infinite universe. His theory also assumed that each of the other star systems contained planets and other intelligent beings.

Beginning in 1593, Bruno was tried as a heretic by the Roman Inquisition for denying fundamental Catholic doctrines — including the doctrine of hell, the Trinity, Christology, the virginity of Mary, and transubstantiation. [3] The Inquisition found him guilty, and in 1600 he was burned at the stake in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori.

After his death he gained great fame and was regarded by a number of scholars, especially in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as a martyr for science [4], although historians have argued that his trial was due primarily to his philosophical, religious, and theological views rather than his astronomical views. [5][6][7][8] Bruno’s case is still considered a landmark in the history of free thought and emerging science. As an expression of remorse, the Church erected a statue of him in the Campo de’ Fiori — on the very site where it burned him alive.

William Tyndale — The Bible Translator Hanged and Burned

William Tyndale (1494–1538) was an English Protestant scholar and reformer of the sixteenth century. He translated the Bible into contemporary English. Although there had been several partial and complete translations in Old English since the seventh century and other translations in Middle English during the fourteenth century, he is considered the first to produce an English translation derived from the original Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible, and the first to exploit the means of printing — which allowed for the wide distribution of the translated Bible.

In 1535, Tyndale was arrested and imprisoned in Villevoorde Castle outside Brussels for more than a year, tried on charges of heresy and treason. He was then hanged and burned at the stake. The man who gave English-speaking Christians access to the Bible in their own language, translated directly from the original texts, was executed by the Church for doing so.