John Smyth (c. 1570-1612) is an important figure in Baptist
history, mainly because of his commitment to religious liberty,
a believer’s church, and “baptism” of believers. He was not,
however, the founder of Baptists (Wikipedia is wrong.). His
baptism was not technically baptism as it was done by affusion
(pouring) and he did this to himself (se-baptism). The
seventeenth-century English Baptists did not acknowledge Smyth
as their founder or initiator of the practice of baptism. In his
work on baptism published in 1691, Hercules Collins directly
refuted the claim that the English Baptists had received their
baptism from John Smyth. This refutation was made in response to
the paedo-baptist Thomas Wall who had claimed in his book
Baptism Anatomized that the current “English Anabaptists” had
“successively received” their baptism from Smyth who had
baptized himself. In Believers-Baptism from Heaven, Collins
asserted that the Baptist community of which he was a part had
not, in fact, had their baptism passed down