n 1531, he calls Buenderlin a
scholar, a {49} wonderfully reverent man, dead to the world, powerful in
the Scriptures, and mightily gifted with an enlightened reason; and this
letter shows that he himself has been moving rapidly in the direction in
which Buenderlin and Denck were travelling, though neither now nor at any
time was Franck a mere copier of other men's ideas.[5] "We must
unlearn," he writes, "all that we have learned from our youth up from the
papists, and we must change everything we have got from the Pope or from
Luther and Zwingli." He predicts that the external Church will never be
set up again, "for the inward enlightenment by the Spirit of God is
sufficient."

In his _Tuerkenchronik_, or "Chronicle and Description of Turkey,"
published in 1530, he had already declared his dissatisfaction with
ceremonies and outward forms of any sort, his refusal to be identified
with any existing, empirical Church, his solemn dedication to the
invisible Church, and his determination to be an apostle of the Spirit.
"There already are in our times," he writes, "three distinct Faiths,
which have a large following, the Lutheran, Zwinglian and Anabaptist; and
a _fourth_ is well on the way to birth, which will dispense with external
preaching, ceremonies, sacraments, bann and office as unnecessary, and
which seeks solely to gather among all peoples an invisible, spiritual
Church in the unity of the Spirit and of faith, to be governed wholly by
the eternal, invisible Word of God, without external means, as the
apostolic Church was governed before its apostasy, which occurred after
the death of the apostles."[6]

The year that dates his autobiographical letter to Campanus saw the
publication in Strasbourg of Franck's best-known literary work:
_Chronica, Zeitbuch und Geschichtsbibel_ ("A Universal Chronicle of the
World's History from the Earliest Times to the Present").[7] It has {50}
often been pointed out that much of the material of this great Chronicle
is taken over from earlier Chroniclers, especially from the Nuremberger
Schedel, and it is furthermore true that Franck's _Book of the Ages_
contains large tracts of unhistorical narrative, set forth after the
manner of Chroniclers without much critical insight, but the book,
nevertheless, has a unique value. It abounds in Franck's peculiar irony
and paradox, and it unfolds his conception of the spiritual history of
the race, under the tuition of the Divine Word. At t