Historical Writings

Traditional date on which seven elderly Christian women at Ancyra (in modern Turkey) were drowned when they refused to apostasize.

Death of Pope St. John I, having been imprisoned in Ravenna, Italy, by Theodoric, an Arian, for not pressing the case of the Arians with the eastern emperor in Constantinople.

Acre, the last territory in Palestine taken by the first Crusaders, fell to invading Moslem armies. It signalled the end of a Christian "military presence" in the Near East. (Afterwards, friars sought to spread the gospel by preaching instead.)

The General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony decreed that 'no man shall be admitted to the body politic but such as are members of some of the churches within the limits' of the colony. (Separation of church and state was an unthinkable concept in early American colonialism.)

Death on Michigan's west coast of Jacques Marquette, Jesuit missionary to Michigan and midwestern North America.

The Church of the United Brethren in Christ was organized in Lancaster, PA, under the leadership of Martin Boehm, 41, and Philip William Otterbein, 39. (It became a branch of the Evangelical United Brethren in 1946.)

Death in Pennsylvania of Jacob Albright who had founded the “Dutch Methodists” of Pennsylvania, later known as the Evangelical Association.

In Philadelphia, the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States of America for Foreign Missions was established -- the first national organization of Baptists in the U.S. It was later called the Triennial Convention because it met every three years.

Death of Orthodox monk Macarius Glukharyov who had founded a successful mission among the Altai people of Siberia. Unlike most traditional Orthodox missions, he had recruited female missionaries. The Russian Orthodox Church will eventually declare him a saint.

Death of Cesar Malan, near Geneva. He had been a Swiss Reformed pastor, evangelist, and author of more than one thousand hymns.

Missionary nurse Amy Wilkes and missionary Samuel Zwemer are wed at the British Consulate in Baghdad. The Church Missionary Society, which had paid Amy's passage to the field, will require them to reimburse the cost of her journey because she had left their work. When Zwemer raises the funds it will be said he purchased his bride in true Arab fashion.

Funeral in Hong Kong for the Catholic priest Leong Chi Hing, long active in the care of China's Christian community as well as its missionary and linguistic work.

Popular evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, 34, disappeared while on a beach outing. Turning up five weeks later, she claimed to have been kidnapped and held prisoner, before escaping from her abductors.