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<jats:p>Hans Sachs dated his play <jats:italic>Die Enthauptung Johannis</jats:italic> in January 1550, and the most recent editors suspect it expresses his bitter disappointment at developments unfavourable to German Lutheranism. This is true, but the play is much more precise and topical: in the story of the martyred Baptist, Sachs depicts the persecution of the two principal preachers of Nuremberg. The play’s epilogue laments the death or exile of the ‘Gottesknecht’ who attacks the wrongdoings of ‘certain high‐placed persons’ and thus makes enemies of them; they, in turn, complain to the ‘Magistrat’, which yields to their pressure and punishes the preachers. It is not the general course of religious history at mid‐century that grieves Sachs, but the harsh treatment of Veit Dietrich and Andreas Osiander by the Nuremberg council in the years 1547–9: for his attacks on the ‘wuocher’ of three prominent men, Dietrich was suspended as a preacher and died twenty‐one months later; for his scurrilous song attacking the three men who drafted the Interim of 1548, Osiander was forced into exile. The latter event explains Sachs’s introduction of the motif of exile into the dialogue between Herod, Herodias and Salome, for which neither the Bible nor Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities offers a precedent.</jats:p>