March 16

37 Tiberias Caesar, Roman emperor, died (b. 16 November 42 BC).

1072 Adalbert, Archbishop of Bremen-Hamburg, died (b. ca. 1000).

1445 Johann Geiler von Kayserberg, Strasbourg preacher, was born at Schaffhausen, Switzerland (d. 1510).

1517 Pope Leo X (1475–1521) closed the Fifth Lateran Council. Leo had decreed a crusade against the Turks as well as a three-year tax on benefices to finance it, but he never enforced the council's legislation on these and other reforms.

1621 Georg Neumark, German educator, hymnist and musician, was born in Langensalza, Thuringia (d. 1681).

1641 A General Court convened (lasting until 19 March), which declared the state of Rhode Island to be a democracy, adopting a new constitution granting religious freedom to all its citizens.

1645 Georg Michael Pfefferkorn, hymnist, was born in Ifta, near Creuzburg on the Werra (d. 3 March 1732).

1789 Henry Ustic Onderdonk, hymnist, was born in New York (d. 6 December 1858).

1804 Friedrich Filitz, composer, was born in Arnstadt, Thuringia (d. 8 December 1876, Bonn, Germany).

1809 Henry Bleby, Methodist West Indies missionary, was born in Winchcomb, England (d. 22 May 1882).

1812 Carl Ludwig Geyer, Saxon immigrant, teacher and later pastor at Serbin, Texas, was born in Zwickau, Saxony (d. 6 March 1892).

1823 William H. Monk, English church organist and sacred music composer, was born in London (d. 1 March 1889).

1827 John Baptiste Calkin, English church organist, was born in London (d. 15 May 1905).

1861 Melanchthon Gideon Groseclose Scherer, president of the United Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the South, was born (d. 9 March 1932).

1889 Alfred Edersheim (b. 1825), European biblical scholar, died.

1895 John Albert Broadus (b. 1827), American Baptist preacher and scholar, died.

1909 Marianne Hearn, English Baptist religious teacher and editor, died (b. 17 December 1834, Farningham, Kent, England).

1921 L. J. Frohnmeier, missionary to Malabar Coast, India, died at Basel (b. 12 December 1850). He had been recalled in 1906 to be Inspector of Basel Mission.

1952 The first religious program on TV, This Week in Religion, debuted on Dumont television, airing on Sunday nights from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m. It was the only ecumenical program of the early religious television offerings and ran for two and a half years until 18 October 1954.

1970 The complete translation of the New English Bible was published simultaneously by the Oxford and Cambridge Presses.