Southern Baptist missionary Lynda Bethea is beaten to death by robbers in Kenya when she and her husband stop to help a 'wounded' African lying in the road - March 27

Nineteen-year-old William Hunter is burned to death in Brentwood, England, for refusing to accept the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation.

1555 - Nineteen-year-old William Hunter is burned to death in Brentwood, England, for refusing to accept the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation. He had resisted both threats and bribes.

1667 - English poet John Milton publishes Paradise Lost, an epic of humankind's creation and fall.

1683 - King Christian V of Denmark commissions pastor and poet Thomas Kingo to prepare a new hymnal for use in Danish churches.

1716 - Death of George Keith, an Anglican rector. As a young man, Keith had joined the Quakers but later withdrew from them, believing their doctrine had drifted from truth, and became instead an Anglican priest. He had served as a missionary to American Quakers before becoming a rector in Sussex, England.

1837 - Death at Bancoorah, India, of James, a convert from Hinduism. After his conversion, he had superintended a string of Christian schools and evangelized his people as he had the opportunity, to overcome the prejudices of his father, brothers, and some others who became Christians.

1889 - Death in Britain of John Bright, an English Quaker parliamentarian, famous for his speeches and advocacy of reforms.

1920 – Death of Francis Nathan Peloubet, American Congregational clergyman known for his annual volumes of Select Notes on the International Sunday School Lessons.

1929 – Death in Lausanne, Switzerland, of Charles Henry Brent, an Episcopal priest active in the ecumenical movement. Two years before his death, he had presided over the 1927 World Conference on Faith and Order, in Lausanne, Switzerland.

1991 – Southern Baptist missionary Lynda Bethea is beaten to death by robbers in Kenya when she and her husband stop to help a “wounded” African lying in the road.

1993 – Security officers in Shaanxi Province, China, descend on a house church and beat the leaders. They then force the lay Christians to beat the leaders, too. They beat and expose some of the church’s women, hang some Christians from beams, and beat them again, before forcing Lai Manping and several other badly beaten Christians to crawl eighteen miles to a police station. Fearing that Lai will die in custody, they order him to leave. He is found dead on a roadside, having tried to crawl home.

– Sources: Christian History Institute, www.lutheranhistory.org, baptistpress.com,  christianitytoday.com