Friday, January 23, 2026

It is the 23rd of January 2026. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

It was on the show this past Tuesday that I told the story of Sebastian Munster- a mysterious mapmaker- and then yesterday’s show was about the Münsterite Rebellion- no relation- and today I come back at you with another mysterious reformer and mapmaker from the 16th century…. But this time, from Transylvania.

Let’s get it over with- if I don’t say something about the place, you’ll be wondering about Dracula the whole time. SO- Transylvania was a region in Central Europe in modern-day Romania. “Transylvania” means “on the other side of the woods” (‘sylvania’ means ‘woods’- like “Penn’s woods” are called “Pennsylvania”).

Transylvania and its neighbors in Central/Eastern Europe had found themselves in a precarious position by the 1400s. With the advancing Turks, much of the former Eastern Roman Empire would fall by midcentury.

And thus, when the Reformation began in the 16th century, many of these places were struggling for survival, let alone any measure of reform. There had been a pocket of “Transylvanian Saxons” who had lived in Transylvania from the 12th century, and as part of their arrangement, they were able to call their own priests and maintain their own language.

BY the 1520s, some of Luther’s writings were making their way eastward and found their way to Transylvania. In 1526, the Battle of Mohacs would see Suleiman the Magnificent defeat the Hungarians, and the Transylvanians would be nominally part of the Eastern Hungarian Empire until they gained some element of independence in 1570 before being passed between the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires.

One of Transylvania’s most famous sons was born in 1498 in Brașov, the son of a tanner, Johannes Honter. He was educated by the local Dominicans until he left for the University of Vienna in 1520, graduating in 1525 and steering clear of his home while wars raged.

Instead, he spent time teaching in Regensburg, Krakow, and Basel. In Basel in the 1530s, he developed his theology- something of a mishmash of Reformation sources. One historian has called it a “position between Erasmus, the Lutherans, the Swiss, the enthusiasts and Augustine”.

In Basel, he would not only work on the humanist disciplines of language but also on a new favorite in the 16th century: cartography. Johannes Honter would create maps, perhaps most importantly of his native Transylvania- he would be in correspondence with that other humanist/reformer/map maker Sebastian Munster.

In 1533, Honter would return home to put into practice his learning about education, languages, and reform. He had seen the Reformation advance to varying degrees of success and would become a member of the town council by 1536. He would have to work with the town's Catholics and those inclined towards reform. By the same year, 1536, the Transylvanian Saxons had called a Lutheran to serve their parish.

From 1539, he would become renowned for his publication of texts for education, for maps and almanacs, and had established a connection to other centers of reform. The likes of Martin Luther, Phillip Melanchthon, and the Swiss Heinrich Bullinger would all write to him.

His two most important texts for the development of the church in Transylvania are his “Reformationbuchlein” or “little Reformation book” of 1543 and his Church Order of 1547.

His little Reformation book was less a call for Reform than a report on what had already taken place in the church- things such as “we use the usual chants… except for the superstitious gestures”- and the texts are read sometimes in our own language and sometimes in Latin. These weren’t loud calls for radical reform, but treatises arguing for incremental change.

He was not a model of swift reform or allegiance to one confession. The Reformation in the Eastern reaches of the Continent didn’t have the wholesale support of one particular confession, and the alliances were varied. In Transylvania, the Saxon clergy continued to pay the Cathedral tax to the Catholics and were invited to their synods.

It would be the German-speaking Saxon Transylvanians after Honter who would help usher in a distinct Lutheran community- and thus Honter, the preeminent name in the Humanist tradition who had been keen to see reform, would be hailed as the “founder” or key architect for the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession- the name of the church in modern Romania. Today we remember Johannes Honter, who died on this, the 23rd of January in 1549, he was 51 years old.

The Last word for today comes from the daily lectionary and the right hand of fellowship being offered to Paul in Galatians 2:

6 As for those who were held in high esteem—whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not show favoritism—they added nothing to my message. 7 On the contrary, they recognized that I had been entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been to the circumcised. 8 For God, who was at work in Peter as an apostle to the circumcised, was also at work in me as an apostle to the Gentiles. 9 James, Cephas and John, those esteemed as pillars, gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship when they recognized the grace given to me. They agreed that we should go to the Gentiles, and they to the circumcised. 10 All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I had been eager to do all along.

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 23rd of January 2026, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man who has plumbed the theological depths of Hotel Transylvania- he is  Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who read it was the Transylvanian Saxons who developed the Dracula legend… true story, I’m 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.