ABSTRACT
Ambrosius was married in Kesmark in 1579, and in accordance with local tradition, the city council gave him a silver chalice as a wedding gift. ‘In the 1580s, when the city of Eperjes unexpectedly offered the position of pastor, he decided to embark on a clerical career and accepted’, wrote an earlier researcher who studied Ambrosius’ life. As a candidate for pastor, Ambrosius was required to undergo the process of ordination, which as the people have seen, did not take place in Wittenberg. Like the regional confessions of faith which had been compiled before it, the Confessio Scepusiana is a brief document composed in extraordinarily diplomatic terms, the primary sources for which were the Invariata, or unaltered version of Melanchthon’s Augsburg Confession, and the associated Apology. The early phase of Ambrosius’ pastoral career has to be evaluated within an even more nuanced context of religious politics and confessional conflict.
