Conrad Grebel

Conrad Grebel (c. 1498–1526) was the principal founder of the Swiss Brethren and the first to perform believer's baptism in the Reformation era, pouring water over George Blaurock on 21 January 1525 in Zurich — an act that launched the Anabaptist movement. Educated as a humanist at Basel, Vienna, and Paris, he returned to Zurich in 1519 and joined Huldrych Zwingli's reform circle before breaking with Zwingli over the pace of reform and the city council's authority in church affairs. Grebel argued for a gathered, voluntary church, adult baptism as the seal of conscious faith, pacifism, and strict separation of church from civil power. His extant writings — chiefly 69 letters and a programmatic 1524 letter to Thomas Müntzer — show a thinker who rejected both Zwinglian reform-by-magistracy and the revolutionary violence Müntzer championed. He died of plague at Maienfeld in 1526, barely 28 years old, yet his ecclesiological vision became foundational for Mennonite, Amish, and broader free-church traditions.