Servetus was burned at the stake just outside Geneva with what was believed to be the last copy of his book chained to his leg. Historians record his last words as: "Jesus, Son of the Eternal God, have mercy on me."

The next time someone tries to persuade you that Islam (for instance) is a "backward" religion, you can refer them to Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone's "Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World."

Born to the Spanish Catholic gentry in 1511 -- at a time, the Goldstones report, when "the medieval world, the Renaissance, the Inquisition, the New World, and the modern world all met" -- Servetus was marked in childhood as a prodigy and a brilliant mind: "By the time he was 13 years old, in addition to his native language, he could read French, Greek, Latin and, most significantly, Hebrew," a forbidden language in most of Europe. "Knowledge of Hebrew meant that the Old Testament could be read in its original form," the Goldstones explain -- a dangerous idea, ultimately, on both sides of the Catholic-Protestant line.

...he read the Bible and discovered "not one word about the Trinity, nor about its Persons, nor about Essence, nor about a unity of the Substance."

"Servetus was so smart," the Goldstones assert, "that it never seemed to occur to him that his arguments would be more effective if he didn't imply that anyone holding an opposing view was an idiot."