Martyrdom in Early Christianity

From the composition of the first biography of Jesus, the Gospel of Mark, Christians wrestled to explain how it was that the long-awaited Jewish messiah had died a humiliating death befitting a common criminal.

Throughout the New Testament, Paul and the authors of the Gospels and Petrine Epistles present dying for Christ as an expected part of the experience of discipleship.^[1111] In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus instructs his followers, not merely his disciples but the larger group (8:34), to ‘deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it' (8:35-6).

The basic premise throughout Mark is that following Jesus involves imitating his conduct and death. The exhortations to imitate the suffer­ings of Jesus are more explicit in the Pauline epistles. Paul encourages his churches to become imitators of those who suffer: ‘For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you suffered the same things from your own compatriots as they did from the Jews' (1 Thess.

The expectation of suffering and death, which reverberates throughout the New Testament, seems to come to fruition only in the example of Stephen and the book of Revelation. In the latter, a single character, Antipas, is described as having died for the sake of the name. The expectation, however, is that others will follow. In a series of letters to the churches of Asia Minor, the author of the Apocalypse describes the heavenly rewards that await those who ‘conquer' like the Lamb, that is, by dying.

In the first and second centuries ce the legal situation that undergirded state violence against Christians was murky and shifting. There was no formal or informal legislation against Christians. Though there is little evidence to suggest more than social alienation in this period, those examples of martyrdom - the execution of the Apostles, for example - left a deep impression on subsequent generations of Christians. Isolated experiences of exceptional cruelty no doubt long reverberated in the Christian unconscious.^[1112] Around 110 ce, Pliny, the Roman governor of Bithnyia-Pontus in modern-day Turkey, wrote to the emperor Trajan complaining about the Christians and enquiring about the best manner in which to proceed. He describes the religio-economic impact of Christian conversion on local religious practices prior to the measures he has taken. The temples, he records, had been deserted, and no one had been purchasing sacrificial meat. Christianity had won admirers from every quarter; its participants included ‘persons of every age and every class, both genders... not only [in] the town but villages and country­side as well'. Pliny writes that he has examined the Christians and found them innocent of any real crime. All the same, he is exasperated by their ‘stubbornness and inflexible obstinacy', which he feels deserves punish­ment (Ep.

In the exchange, Pliny's frustration with Christian obstinacy is almost palpable. Against Geoffrey de Ste Croix, Adrian Sherwin-White argues that it was for their defiance (contumacia) that Christians were arrested and executed.^[1113] Certainly, Christians attracted the derision and scorn of Roman writers and administrators, and the martyr acts present their protagonists as evasive and difficult in the courtroom. At the same time, however, as Geoffrey de Ste Croix notes in his rejoinder to Sherwin-White, obstinacy (obstinatio) and defiance (contumacia) were separate charges, and the latter is not mentioned in the Pliny-Trajan correspondence. Only once they were in the courtroom did Christians have the opportunity to display their obstinacy, and, therefore, it is unlikely that Christians were arrested for being defiant.^{[1114] [1115]}

Most of the early mistreatment of Christians, therefore, was performed on an ad hoc basis. Things changed in the mid third century ce, when the emperor Decius (249-51 ce) issued now lost legislation in an effort to deploy religion as a means of unifying the Roman Empire, which was then under­going a severe crisis.16 The result of this legislation, which appears to have been issued in the spring of 250 ce, was that people would have to sacrifice to the genius of the emperor and would receive, in exchange, a libellus (literally a ‘little book', but practically speaking a receipt of participation).^[1116] Those who refused to sacrifice would be executed.

Though it was directed at everyone, Christians felt an especially heavy burden.1^[1117] Some died as martyrs, but for other Christians the prospect of choosing between hell or death proved too daunting. Whether out of fear of torture or fear of apostasy and damnation, they elected either to try and obtain a certificate by bribery or to follow a fourth path: exile.1^[1118] For the first time, Christians felt organised imperial pressure to conform to the religious standards of their day.^[1119] The persecution, however, appears to have lasted only a short period: all of the extant libelli can be dated to a few months.^[1120]

For six years after the death of Decius, Christians enjoyed a period of relative peace. The calm was broken, however, during the reign of Valerian (253-60 ce), as the new emperor struggled with his military campaigns against the Persians. In late 253 and in 254 ce Valerian travelled east to deal with the eastern threat in Antioch, remaining there until his capture in 260 ce. During this period he composed two letters to the Senate about Christians. The first was issued in 257 ce and demanded that church leaders participate in pagan rituals and that Christians stop meeting en masse in cemeteries. After the first edict failed to make any sizeable impact, he issued a second stronger state­ment about Christians in 258 ce, in which he directed that bishops, priests and deacons were to be put to death at once.^[1121] Additionally, Christian senators and high-ranking officials were to lose their status and property and, if they did not deny Christ, were to be executed as well. Christian women of senatorial rank were to lose their properties, as were members of the imperial household who, additionally, were to be dispatched to imperial estates where their views would make them less of a political liability.

The implementation of these regulations so soon after the Decian decree suggests that Christianity was not significantly undermined by Decius' efforts. Similarly, only a handful of Christians seem to have died as a result of Valerian's second letter in 258 ce. After Valerian was captured by the Persians, his successor, his son Gallienus, revoked his legislation. For the following forty years Christians were not subjected to any state-sponsored persecution.

In the opening years of the fourth century, as a commemoration of twenty years of rule, the emperor Diocletian, sponsor of the fourfold leadership of the Roman tetrarchy, issued a series of edicts designed to elicit unity and foster the peace of the gods, which targeted Christians. The ensuing violence, known as the Great Persecution, came in waves. It began on 23 February 303 c e with the destruction of the newly constructed church in Nicomedia. The publication of the first edict the following day made the holding of Christian meetings illegal and ordered the destruction of Christian places of worship and the confiscation of Christian scriptures. Christians were denied the right either to petition the courts or to respond to legal actions brought against them, making them especially vulnerable in judicial contexts. Christians with distinguished social statuses lost their rank and imperial freedmen were enslaved. Everyone, including Christians, was now expected to sacrifice before engaging in any legal or official business. According to the Christian writer Lactantius, Diocletian's goal was to enforce the edict ‘without bloodshed'.^[1122]

A second edict was published in the summer of the same year, ordering the arrest of Christian clergy (Euseb. Hist. eccl. 8.2.5). According to Eusebius, the impetus for the second edict was a series of political uprisings in Melitene and Syria in which Christians were implicated.²⁴ In November, in preparation for the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of his reign the following year, Diocletian issued a third edict (Euseb.

The fourth and final edict, issued in the spring of 304 ce, was the most severe.^[1124] It required that everyone, including children, gather in a public space to offer sacrifice. If they refused, they were to be executed. For such a firm piece of persecution, the fourth edict is overlooked by most ancient Christian commentators. It is never referred to by Christians in the west, by Lactantius in his On the Deaths of the Persecutors, or by Eusebius in his Church History. Eusebius mentions this edict only in his Martyrs of Palestine. It is difficult to deduce from Eusebius exactly how far-reaching the persecution was. Of the ninety-nine Christians executed in the Martyrs of Palestine, only sixteen can be said to have been actively sought out by the authorities.^[1125]

The ferocity of the persecution varied based on geography and the char­acter of individual Roman governors and authorities. In the west, only a portion of the legislation was enforced, and even then somewhat sporadi­cally; in northern Africa executions began in Cirta, modern-day Algeria, in May 303; and the persecutions in Britain and Gaul, the area of the empire controlled by Constantius, were relatively mild. Lactantius tells us that things progressed no further than the destruction of church buildings, while Eusebius protests that no buildings were destroyed there at all.^[1126] Persecution appears to have died out in the west during the following year and was officially ended by the emperor Constantius in July 306 ce. Constantius went further, though: he not only granted freedom to Christians in Britain, Gaul and Spain, but he even restored their confiscated property to them.²⁹ By 313 ce the rights of Christians throughout the empire were restored, although the persecution of Christians continued, according to historiographers, in the east under a succession of Persian kings.

Christian understandings of the experience of martyrdom and persecution and the value of death for God varied from place to place, author to author, and time period to time period. Second-century understandings of martyrdom in Asia Minor tended to focus upon the martyr as an imitator of Christ, portraying their protagonists as following in the footsteps of Jesus and dying ‘in accordance with Gospel' (Ignatius, Letter to the Romans, 6.3; Martyrdom of Polycarp, 1). Among Christian authors located in Rome in the second century ce, martyrs were philosophically styled (Acts of Ptolemy and Lucius, Acts of Justin and Companions, Acts of Apollonius), their deaths emulating Socrates as much as they do Jesus, while the generic form and style of the stories conform to the genre of the apologia. Apocalyptically styled visions feature in the early Latin martyrdom literature produced in North Africa (Passion of Perpetua and Felicity), and a similar sense of the cosmic battle reverberates beneath Gallic discussions of martyrdom (Letter of the Churches of Lyon and Vienne).

By the time of the Decian decree, these traditions had taken on a more sharply dualistic view. Greek martyrdom accounts edited during this period reveal an increased interest in portraying the martyrs as victims of the machinations of the Devil. In the same vein, Decius is presented as acting in consort with Satan himself. By the time of the Diocletianic persecution, Christian authors, following the terms of the legislation itself, are interested in the fate of Christian books and the moral status of those who safeguard the sacred scriptures. Violence towards these artefacts came to be understood as synonymous with violence against human beings.

One challenge for the scholar of persecution and violence is the veritable explosion in the production of martyrdom stories in the post-Constantinian period, a period in which Christians were no longer persecuted. Many of the stories from this era concerned with martyrdom perform ideological work and served to police orthodoxy and orthopraxy as well as justify violence against Jews and pagans.^[1127] The reconfiguration of ‘martyrdom' in the fifth century so that it came to include, for example, dying in the course of destroying pagan temples, is evidence of how the experience of violence could be mobilised against dissenting groups.

In ancient Christian literature the distinction between martyrdom and suicide is sharply drawn only in conversations about martyrdom among here­tical groups. A number of orthodox Christians martyrs - Agathonike, Lucius, the unnamed bystander of the Acts of Ptolemy and Lucius - die deaths that could be safely designated as suicidal. Unprompted, Agathonike throws herself into the pyre on which other martyrs burned (Acts of Carpus, Papylus and Agathonike, 44). Her death proved problematic for the Latin translator of the account, but to the original author she is described, with the others, simply as a martyr. Chronologically speaking, the first objector to the idea of volunteering for death was the Christian philosopher Clement, who fled violence in the city of Alexandria in 202 ce. Clement denounces voluntary martyrdom as something done by the heretics: ‘We... say that those who have rushed on death (for there are some, not belonging to us, but sharing the name merely, who are in haste to give themselves up, the poor wretches dying through hatred to the Creator) - these, we say, banish themselves without being martyrs, even though they are punished publicly' (Clement, Miscellanies, 4.16-17). While Clement is believed by most to be denouncing adherents of the New Prophecy movement, there is no evidence that these Christians were prone to martyrdom by suicide.^[1128] Clement is framing the conversation in a way that protects himself from accusations of cowardice, and in doing so constructs an idea of ‘true martyrdom' as distinct from volunteering for death or suicide.

For Christians in particular, the crystallising moment that distinguished suicide from martyrdom was the composition of Augustine's City of God. Here Augustine makes the first systematic argument that the Bible prohibits voluntary martyrdom and suicide.^[1129] Augustine's stance should be read against the backdrop of the fall of Rome and clashes with violent schismatic groups whom he had sentenced to death. The salient point is that it was only in the fifth century that Christians firmly divorced suicide from martyrdom.