Foxe's Book of Martyrs

Contemporary Protestant accounts, later collected by John Fox, describe men and women being taken to the stake and burned for refusing to abandon their beliefs.

Fox's Acts and Monuments, better known as Fox's Book of Martyrs, helped preserve their names and ensured the executions remained part of Protestant memory long after the reign of Mary had ended.

By the 19th century, Lewis Bonfire had developed into something far larger than a simple commemoration of Guy Fawkes.

Fire was everywhere.

And they've given great testimony, even as they're executed.

You read Fox's Book of Martyrs.

It's got many examples of this.

People literally being burned for their faith in Christ.

And that man's name is John Fox.

John Fox, in the book that he wrote, is called Fox's Book of Martyrs.

We actually have it on the shelf back there if anybody wants to borrow it.

Actually, I don't know.

Somebody might have taken it after first service, but if it's there, it's yours.

In Fox's book of martyrs are just stories of men and women and children who die because of their faith in Jesus.

It's filled with stories of people who are killed and persecuted for their obedience to Christ, like William Tyndale, the first man who translated the Bible from its original languages into English so that the common person could understand it.

He was strangled and burned.

Of course, Queen Mary, Henry's older daughter, didn't help when in her five years of the restoration of the faith between 1553 and 1558, she then burned a number of martyrs.

And of course, they appeared in Fox's Book of Martyrs, that was the only book allowed to be read in church, apart from the English translation of the Bible.

Now, this was annihilatory.

The British state hated the Catholic Church so much.

The Divine Comedy, same thing, Dante's work.

John Fox put in his Acts and Monuments, which now is typically called Fox's Book of Martyrs, he put all of William St. Amour's signs of the false apostles, these statements about the things that indicate that they were simply doing these things for money.

So this was something that was adopted by basically the reformational spirits of the time, William of St. Amour's arguments.

And Wycliffe repeatedly identifies begging in the context of preaching as simony.

So who would I like to sit down with? my difficulty there is that because I'm a Baptist if I sat down with any of them they'd probably hustle me off to prison or throw you in a river or have me drowned in the river Limat that's what Zwingli did to the Swiss Anabaptists if I could disguise myself as a as a magisterial Protestant who believed in infant baptism maybe who would I like to spend time with Well, this is a purely personal thing.

It doesn't necessarily reflect greatness of theology or anything, but John Fox, who wrote the Book of Martyrs, which was so influential on the development of English Protestantism, just because I like the man so much.

He has such a lovable personality.

And one of the things I really appreciate about Fox was his principled opposition to all religious persecution.