Historical Writings

According to tradition, Roman Emperor Diocletian orders a slaughter of Christians at an English town which, because of the event, becomes known as Lichfield, "field of corpses."

The Moors surrender Granada to their Catholic majesties Ferdinand and Isabella.

Calvin's Ecclesiastical Ordinances are ratified as church law in Geneva.

Colonial missionary to the American Indians David Brainerd wrote in his journal: 'We are a long time in learning that all our strength and salvation is in God.'

Death in Canterbury, Kent, England, of Edward Perronet who had written the hymn “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name.”

Seventeen-year old John Norton Loughborough gives his first public talk. Filled with certainty Christ will soon return, he has rented a church in upper New York to lecture on the subject. Eventually he will become an influential leader of the Seventh-day Adventists.

Death near Birmingham, England, of Edward Caswall, author of the hymn “When Morning Guilds the Skies.”

Death in Philadelphia of Charles Porterfield Krauth. A Lutheran pastor, editor, and educator, he had spent his life promoting conservative Lutheran theology and a literal reading of the Augsburg Confession.

Sergius Georgievich Golubyatnikov, known as "Seraphim," is consecrated Bishop of Mozhaisk. While serving in a later post at Ekaterinburg and Irbit he will condemn the Bolsheviks' February revolution, for which he will be sent to the Novospassky monastery in Moscow, becoming its first prisoner when it is turned into a prison. There he will be shot.

Future Foursquare Gospel church founder Aimee Elizabeth [n‚e Kennedy] Semple [later McPherson], 19, along with her husband Robert Semple, was ordained to the ministry in Chicago by evangelist William H. Durham.

The first religious program heard over the radio was broadcast from Calvary Episcopal Church of Pittsburgh over local radio station KDKA. (The first licensed radio station in the US, KDKA had been on the air only two months.)

Death of Sabine Baring-Gould at Exeter, England. An Anglican clergyman, he will be remembered as the author of two popular hymns: "Onward Christian Soldiers" and "Now the Day Is Over."

Sri Lanka’s Parliament nationalizes the island’s church schools, most of them Roman Catholic.

Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth wrote in a letter: 'In the Church of Jesus Christ there can and should be no non-theologians.'

A team of Israeli scholars announced the discovery in Jerusalem of a 2,000-year-old skeleton of a crucified male. Found in a cave-tomb, it was the first direct physical evidence of the well-documented Roman method of execution.