Conclusion

The importance of martyrdom for the formation of Jewish and Christian theology and identity should not be underestimated. At the same time, however, claims about the importance, uniqueness and ubiquity of martyrdom in Christianity are ideologically fraught.

For much of the Christian era, martyrdom has been seen as an exclusively Christian practice and, perhaps, also as an indication of Christianity's possession of religious truth. There is much at stake, therefore, in claims that martyrdom emerged only with the birth of Christianity. In the same way, claims that Christians were under constant attack by Jews and Romans serve to distinguish Christians fromJews in the 40s and 50s ce and also to celebrating the remarkable ‘against the odds' survival of Christianity. Both sets of claims - that martyrdom is a Christian invention and that Christians were constantly persecuted - should be evaluated in the light of the ancient evidence, if only because the theological work that martyrdom does in twenty-first-century settings is different from that of antiquity. The presence of suicidal martyrs in both traditions highlights a complicating tension in the history of Jewish and Christian martyrdom: that prior to the rise of Christianity in general and the turn of the third century, martyrdom and suicide were not clearly distinguished from one another. Instead, they are part of the larger category of the good death in antiquity. Ultimately, the significance of martyrdom within either Judaism or Christianity does not rest on the existence of continuous political oppression or persecution, or on the supposed uniqueness of these practices.

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Source: Fagan Garrett G., Fibiger Linda, Hudson Mark, Trundle Matthew (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 1: The Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 756 p.. 2020

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