Body and Soul in the Pre-Valerian Christian Martyr Acts (original) (raw)
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Narrating the Body in Early Christian Martyrology
Adamantius 25, 2019
This paper takes into view texts from the roughly two hundred years of early Christian history, when martyrs were established as powerful agents. My observations follow the textual constructions of martyr’s bodies that allow weak, old and vulnerable bodies to be in focus. The single narratives are differentiated according to their specific communicative strategies of presenting suffering martyr bodies and the connected social constructs. The actual violability of an individual confessor’s body is contrasted with his or her self mastery of that vulnerable body and the tendency of eschatological negligence of feeling pain. However, a bias in the presentation of Christian and non-Christian slave bodies as well as in the textual exposure and narration of male and female bodies can be observed.
Many different forms of Christianity emerged in the early first centuries after the death of Christ. These groups were based on perceived significances in texts and cultural interpretations. Among all these various communities of Christians, one consistency seems to have been the concept of martyrdom. This paper will examine the concepts of suicide, sacrifice and martyrdom in the ancient world and how those understandings may have changed over time to affect our modern-day constructions of these ideas.
Toward the end of the sixth century, Eustratius, a leading presbyter of Constantinople, refuted a series of arguments which threatened to undermine both the cult of saints and the church's ritual care for the souls of the dead. Based in part on more scientific and materialist models of causality, along with the concern to protect the sovereign activity of the divine, Eustratius' opponents denied the ability of dead souls to involve themselves in, or be affected by, the affairs of the living. However, rather than reject the then widespread phenomena of saintly apparitions, Eustratius' critics argued that they were in fact produced by a divine power simulating the forms of dead martyrs and saints. Eustratius' refutation of these arguments applies the language of contemporary christology to the cult of saints in order to develop a theological anthropology and eschatology commensurate with ritual practice. Eustratius' work, and the arguments of his opponents, which have never been the focus of a major study, are here considered in detail, and this paper suggests that the views of both parties anticipate respectively the iconophilic and iconoclastic theologies of later centuries.
Journal of Early Christian Studies, 2006
Christian martyrdom, a complex amalgam of late Jewish fidelity to the law and aspects of Greco-Roman thought embodied in the exitus illustrium virorum tradition, fashioned an eschatological ideology of sacrifice founded on a Pauline paradox: to live outside of Christ is to die, and to die in Christ is to live (Phil 1.21-23; 1 Cor 9.15; 2 Cor 6.9 and Col 2.20). 1 Origen, in his Exhortatio ad Martyrium, illustrates such an understanding in a remark to the imprisoned Ambrosius and Protoctetus. Here he reverses the classical understanding of death as annihilation and life as animation, as he makes clear by the phrase, "When you are at the gates of death or rather of freedom." 2 The Christian Latin tradition
Radical Martyrdom and Cosmic Conflict in Early Christianity. By PAUL MIDDLETON
The Journal of Theological Studies, 2010
Martyrdom has become a 'fashionable' subject in the last decade, with many volumes being published on volitional death, some no doubt due to the emergence of 'martyrdom' in radical Islam as a religious rejection of the intrusive values of the West. Middleton's book, happily, has a clear focus and is fi rmly rooted in his investigation of those who sought to die for Christ, albeit his introduction does raise questions concerning contemporary martyrs and the diffi culty of constructing a cross-cultural and diachronic defi nition of martyrdom. Middleton argues persuasively that it is the narrative constructed by the martyr's fellow cult members that makes martyrdom and martyrs, and not the persecution by the state. Yet this was a narrative which could not have been written without the clash of the Roman Imperium and Christians wedded to an extreme apocalypticism. Middleton's book began as his dissertation, and it is chiefl y concerned with the "radical" martyrdom sought by those Christians in the period between the death of Ignatius (c. 112 ce ) and that of Cyprian (258 ce ). His study is devoted to understanding the collective infl uences which motivated individual Christians to valorize death over life, to see death paradoxically as the gate to life, to model their lives literally in imitation of Jesus' life and death, and to see the martyr's death as part of God's cosmic eschatological plan for bringing the world to fruition. Th e work is divided into an introduction and fi ve chapters, which clearly lay out his argument. Chapter One surveys some of the more radical documents concerning martyrdom, Ignatius' Letter to the Romans , the Martyrs of Lyons and Vienne , and Tertullian's On Martyrdom . Th ese three narratives, although very diff erent in genre and context, do share what might be labeled a radical commitment to the paradox that to die for Christ is to live in Christ. In Ignatius' case this is set in a matrix of an eschatology so extreme that Ignatius views his impending death as providentially ordained as an act of the last times. Middleton shows how this extreme point of view was not without its critics who, like the Gnostics and Clement of Alexandria in his Stromata and the Acts of Cyprian , viewed proponents of such martyrdom as heretics who really did not understand the message of Christ. Clement believed he represented orthodoxy and those who sought death heterodoxy. Despite the fact that the theology of the moderates was to become normative after the legalization of Christianity in the fourth century, the proponents of radical martyrdom appear