David Joris

David Joris (born 1501/02, Ghent or Bruges, Flanders [now in Belgium]—died August 25, 1556, Basel, Switz.) was a religious reformer, a controversial and eccentric member of the Anabaptist movement. He founded the Davidists, or Jorists, who viewed Joris as a prophet and whose internal dissension led—three years after his death—to the sensational cremation of his body after his posthumous conviction as a heretic.

A painter of stained glass by trade, Joris settled in Delft (now in the Netherlands) in 1524. He was soon involved in the controversies of the Reformation, then at their peak, and he engaged in outspoken attacks on behalf of Lutheranism against the Roman Catholic Church. An adventurous eccentric, he verbally assaulted a religious procession in 1528 and was condemned by the court at The Hague to a fine, whipping, tongue boring, and three years’ banishment. He was later drawn into struggles between the pacifist and the revolutionary Anabaptists, a sect that stressed the necessity of adult baptism. In an effort at mediation, Joris presented himself as a prophet, basing his claim on mystical visions that he was the “third David.” After David the king and Christ the son of David, the third David was a messianic figure who would complete the work of salvation.

In 1543 Joris, with some of his followers, fled to Basel, Switz., where he took the name Jan van Brugge (John of Bruges). In addition to his Wonder Boeck (1542, 1551; “Wonder Book”), a ponderous volume of fantasy and allegory, he produced innumerable tracts. He became a wealthy and respected citizen who professed Reformed beliefs, and he moved from visions of his messianic role to more personal mystical experiences. Deprecating dogmatic disputes, he came to view inward individual religion as the only true faith. As a result, controversy arose among his followers between those who wished to dissolve the movement in the wake of his abdication and those who persisted in their belief that he was the third David. In 1559, three years after his death and amid this factionalism, confusion over whether David Joris and Jan van Brugge had been the same person was resolved, and the University of Basel tried and condemned him posthumously as a heretic. His body was then exhumed and burned at the stake. Repeated heresy trials of his followers caused the sect to die out by the end of the century.