Tuesday, January 20, 2026

It is the 20th of January 2026. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

Hold on to your hats- because I’m taking you to a quick story about the church, but also how I got to that story by means of emails, maps, and the date.

Shout out to Susan, formerly of Upland, California- now in the “slower and greener” world of Chattanooga, Tennessee- where Reggie White- the Minister of Defense once lived; he was both a minister and a defensive lineman for the Eagles and Packers. So, Susan writes me an email, like this morning, about the order of the books of the Old Testament and the Reformation. Great question- and the answer has to do with a guy called Sebastian.

And I’m trying to figure out today’s show, which will very likely be about somebody named Sebastian- because today is the feast of St. Sebastian (we told his story before) and he was so popular during the Renaissance that we have a glut of Renaissance folks born today called Sebastian.

And the one that interests me the most is kinda hard to talk about- he was a mysterious fellow who worked in then-obscure fields, like map making and Hebrew. He was called Sebastian Muntzer- (there is a Thomas Muntzer- a radical anabaptist- this is Sebastian- born on this day, St. Sebastian’s day in 1488.)  

And just yesterday, I was teaching a live class on the 16th century, and I had them absolutely filled to the brim with maps from, you guessed it, Sebastian Muntzer. Who, by the way, Susan, was the first Protestant to publish an Old Testament and might tell us something about the ordering of the books.

Born in 1488 in Ingleheim, Sebastian was trained by Franciscans and entered their order, where he would study at the University of Tubingen.

His conversion to the Protestant cause is shadowy- he would take a position at the University of Basle in 1529 after they adopted the Reformation, and he followed suit. He would later be a preacher at Heidelberg and seems to have converted authentically. There were those, however, in the Reformation who considered him to be curious with his love of maps and perhaps dangerous with his studies with Jewish rabbis.

His fascination with maps led to the publication of the Cosmographia of 1544- a vernacular map, almanac, and history of the world. It would be one of the most popular books in the 16th century, undergoing numerous editions and translations into other languages. It contained practical topography and anecdotes and tidbits collected from travelers and other scholars. It did for maps and Germans what Luther’s Bible did for Scripture.

But, he was also a student of scripture- a student of the rabbi Elias Levita. And it was his work with the Rabbis that led to his publication of the first Protestant Hebrew bible- his project included a Hebrew text, a Latin translation, and annotations from Jewish and Christian sources. This, finished in 1535, came a year after Luther’s full Bible came out in 1534. And Susan… they didn’t do the Old Testament in the same order!

Part of this “what order”? Questions come from a post-codex people- that is, post books with spines and pages that flip… the Hebrews had scrolls- and a wall full of them, and you went and grabbed the one you wanted… order wasn’t as important as grouping.

And throughout church history, we find all kinds of tweaking with the order- but the major division would be between what Luther did (and the Latin Vulgate before him) and what Sebastian Münster did in his Old Testament. Luther, the Vulgate, etc, had used an order of books something like: law, history, poetry, prophets.

Muntzer, studying under a Jewish Rabbi, uses his version of Scriptures- or what they call the Tanakh- (it stands for TNK, Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim- the “Ketuvim” means “writings”- these books, like Psalms, Ruth, Job… come at the end, instead of the Prophets.  

The question is about the apocryphal books, and where, and if to include them… but as for the order of the books of the OT- we’ve long had two traditions- the Latin western and the Masoretic, or Hebrew text. So, even the Reformation didn’t decide there was “one way” to order the Hebrew texts- no one ever “decided”-, but we tend to follow the Latin Western and not the Hebrew tradition. Which is fine- unless you are that mysterious cartographer and hebraist- born on this the 20th of January in 1488, he died of the plague in Basel in 1552. Sebastian Münster was 64 years old.

The Last word for today comes from the daily lectionary and Hebrews 10:

The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming—not the realities themselves. For this reason it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship. 2 Otherwise, would they not have stopped being offered? For the worshipers would have been cleansed once for all, and would no longer have felt guilty for their sins. 3 But those sacrifices are an annual reminder of sins. 4 It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 20th of January 2026, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man who once lived in Chicago, where they should be happy they beat the Packers… he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who really thought we were gonna lose- my oldest son almost ran through a door in shock… here we go Rams… I’m the very excited Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.