Bibliographic Essay

Much of the secondary literature on suicide and martyrdom among ancient Christians and Jews uses as its source texts the two-volume Herbert Musurillo collection Acts of the Pagan Martyrs and Acts of the Christian Martyrs.

Classic studies of martyrdom among ancient Jews include Saul Lieberman, ‘The Martyrs of Caesarea', Annuaire de l'Institut de Philologie et d'Histoire Orientales et Slaves 7 (1939-44), 395-446, which was the first scholarly piece to draw attention to the connections between Christian and Jewish martyrdom accounts, and Gerald Blidstein, ‘Rabbis, Romans and Martyrdom: Three Views', Tradition 2.3 (1984), 54-62. Both should be read with the more theoretically savvy approach of Ra'anan S. Boustan, From Martyr to Mystic: Rabbinic Martyrology and the Making ofMerkavah Mysticism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005).

For much of the Common Era commentators and scholars have used modern definitions of martyrdom and suicide to distinguish between the two. The result is a divided and often truncated body of primary sources that follows the canon of traditional religious groups rather than the ancient evidence. Exceptions to this rule include Arthur J. Droge and James Tabor, A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom among Christians and Jews in Antiquity (San Francisco: Harper, 1992), which should be leavened with William Tabernee, ‘Early Montanism and Voluntary Martyrdom', Colloquium 17 (1985), 33-44. On the invention of the category of ‘voluntary martyrdom' as a theoretical patch to create space between the categories of martyrdom and suicide, see Candida R. Moss, ‘The Discourse of Voluntary Martyrdom: Ancient and Modern', Church History 81.3 (2012), 531-51.

Introductions to the study of martyrdom in the ancient world abound. W. H. C. Frend's magisterial Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965) remains a standard only in the ambitiousness of its scope. It suffers from a tendency to homogenise ancient Christians. More recent scholarship has focused on the diversity of ancient evidence. A less monolithic version of Frend's theory is reproduced in Jan Willem van Henten's study of the Maccabean martyrs, in which he posits that the deaths of Jewish heroes for the ‘salvation' of their people formed the notion of martyrdom in the early church: J. W. van Henten, The Maccabees as Saviours of the Jewish People: A Study of 2 and 4 Maccabees (Leiden: Brill, 1997). Others have sought to diversify the phenomenon; in Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions, Anchor Yale Reference Library (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012) the present author traces the multiple ideologies of martyrdom that spanned the ancient world, while others have undertaken studies of individual martyrs or regions in an effort to diversify our understanding of the cult of the saints in antiquity.

Because martyrdom is a category that ancient writers used to distinguish themselves from other groups, Christian and Jewish martyrdom literature has often been treated quite separately. More recent scholarship has sought to redress this gap. On the intersection of Jewish and Christian martyrdom traditions in late antiquity, see Daniel Boyarin's Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) and Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Smaller studies comparing and drawing into dialogue Jewish and Christian relations include Jan Willem van Henten, ‘Jewish and Christian Martyrs', in J. Schwartz and M, Pooerhuis (eds.), Saints and Role Models in Judaism and Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 163-81.

On martyrdom as a means of shaping identity in particular vis-à-vis non-Jews and non­Christians, see Judith Lieu, Neither Jew Nor Greek? Constructing Early Christianity (London: T & T Clark, 2002). For the use of martyrdom in the making of Christian memory more broadly see Elizabeth A Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).