Martyrologies Essay ⋆ History Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The heroic response of early Christians to persecution led to a genre of literature that inspired later Christians to the same zeal. This genre is called martyrology, and it flourished after the Roman Empire made peace with the church under Constantine the Great. The spirituality inspired by martyrs goes back to a confluence of ideas and regional influences found as early as the fourth century b.c.e. Greek philosophy and Mesopotamian myth had put forward the idea of the heroic struggle for personal convictions and virtue. Later, as Persian theories of Zoroastrian dualism spread, the sense of martyrdom as a life-and-death struggle of good versus evil found a place in religious literature. Early Judaism, for example, began to see the world as a struggle of its heroic remnant people against polytheism and corrupting influences of neighboring peoples. This is vividly expressed in the martyrologies of the Maccabees and in the apocalypticism of the Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha and the Dead Sea Scrolls compiled as Christianity began.

Early Jewish Christians met resistance and found in the ideology of the martyrs an expression of what had happened to Jesus (Christ) of Nazareth. At the same time they took advantage of the popular fascination with the asceticism of the philosopher. The philosophers of Stoicism, as in the Soliloquies of Epictetus, showed that the pagans could put forward individual teachers who were willing to lay down their lives to prove their ideals and beliefs. As Christianity took root outside of Judaea in Mesopotamian regions, a unique synthesis of Greek and Asian concepts produced the first generation of martyrologies. The cult of the martyrs was in place by the end of the second century c.e. One of the earliest tales concerned the Syrian bishop Ignatius of Antioch, who was condemned by imperial authorities during the reign of Trajan (98–117 c.e.) and transported to Rome for execution. Ignatius never called himself a “martyr,” but an “imitator” and “disciple” of Jesus. He describes his martyrdom as a demonstration that Jesus suffered in the flesh (countering the idea of Docetism, that Jesus did not have a real body).

Polycarp of Smyrna received one of Ignatius’s last letters, thus a link was forged between two great martyrs of the faith. Polycarp was martyred around 156 c.e., and his death generated at least two accounts that can be called martryologies. In the earliest one (written about 165), the sense of “martyr” is embraced and becomes the standard way that later lives of martyrs are told. Martyrologies feature representatives who are not just witnesses (martyr in Greek means “witness”) in a judicial sense to proper beliefs about Jesus but champion Christian confession and its vindication over its antagonists.

In these stories, usually enemies of the faith, those who are judicial, military, or religious functionaries of the predominant world powers, confront the martyrs. The martyrs are prosecuted as terrorists, criminals, or deviants who threaten fundamental order, and yet the martyrs in the martyrologies triumph in their death because they refuse to adopt these fundamental societal priorities. They confound the sensibilities of their persecutors, confirm the faith of their coreligionists, and often convert their pagan audience.

Both men and women are featured in the martyrologies. One of the more brilliant stories tells of the women martyrs Perpetua and Felicity (d. 203). However, since martyrologies tend to promote figures already in leadership in the Christian community, it is more frequently the male bishops and pastors who are celebrated. Where women had more responsibility in the ancient world, that is, in domestic contexts, they are featured in martyrologies. Thus, Barbara’s father beheaded her when she took a vow of virginity in the course of conversion, and Cecilia died with her husband and friends. Both died in the early third century.

As martyrologies flourished, they grew in importance in church spirituality. Some early documents claimed that martyrdoms were like a “second baptism” or “baptism by blood” (for example, Shepherd of Hermas, or Tertullian’s writings) because they took away all sins since the first water baptism. Another early writing said that the moment of martyrdom was epiphanic, that is, divinity possessed and transfigured the otherwise mortal body, so close was its imitation of Jesus in his own physical suffering. Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Lactantius all affirmed this belief.

As the reputation of martyrs grew, popular zeal went way beyond concern for a proper burial and hallowing of their memories. Relics, funereal meals (refrigeria, agapai), and martyrdom days (dies natalis) began to play a role among Christians. Emperor Julian the Apostate compared the cult of the martyrs to the hero worship of the Greeks: Many of the same devotions occurred for both groups, including gravesite meals, festal days, and special oracles or revelations from the dead person. Martyrologies would tell of the signs and wonders surrounding the expiration of the martyr, much like the events that surrounded the death of Jesus. Basil the Great made the statement that “anyone who touches the bones of the martyr is partaking in the holiness and grace that resides in them.” The sense was that the martyrs by their death had earned a place as powerful patrons of the living who were devoted to them. If the soul of the martyr was in heaven, the physical remains of the martyr were worth treasuring on earth: the body, the relics, and even images.

Later church teachers attempted to control the unbridled customs of martyrologies. Augustine of Hippo, especially, but also Jerome emphasized that the context for understanding the martyrs was devotion to Jesus, not the intrinsic and mystical power of the saint. They also suggested that the real value of the saints was in their demonstration of virtue. The lesson for later generations of Christians, these fathers of the church said, involved pursuing virtue in the midst of everyday life.

References:

Bowersock, G. W. Martyrdom and Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995;
Castelli, E. A. Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Marking. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

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