THE ANNUAL MONSIGNOR PATRICK J. CORISH LECTURE 2017 Dying to Live Forever: Identity and Virtue in the Resurrection of the Bodies of the Martyrs (original) (raw)

FAITH AND IDENTITY OF MARTYRS IN THE EARLY CHURCH

Christians find new identity in their faith that cut across all other social barriers, expressed by martyrdom. This paper was begun for a class in History of Orthodox Christianity, which I didn't finish, and then used for another class.

Pathology, identity, or both?: Making meaning from early Christian martyrdom

Mortality, 2022

Partly in response to an earlier 'pathological approach' that seemingly stigmatised early Christian martyrdom, recent scholarship has adopted an 'identity approach' that explains martyrdom as a normative discourse of self-construction. This explanation of martyrdom as Christian identity-making, not willing death, is insufficient for three reasons. First, this approach implicitly reaffirms the theological claim that religious identity alone makes martyrs. In doing so it reduces the complexity of the individual martyr to 'Christian.' Second, this approach excises the existential phenomenon of the martyr from martyrdom. Third, the term 'identity' has become ubiquitous, and its use to mark both sameness and difference has mitigated its value. As a result, the identity approach cannot answer a critical question: what makes the martyr different? Given the early Christian martyr's pride of place in cultural understandings of martyrdom and the present-day persistence of martyrdom across ideologies with tragic results, relevant scholarship must continue to address the impetus of the martyr-agent in addition to exploring martyrdom's identity-making functions. A multidisciplinary approach is required to avoid apologetics for early Christian narratives and to understand the complex psychosocial dynamics of martyrdom, whether in the ancient past or the present.

Body and Soul in the Pre-Valerian Christian Martyr Acts

J. Frey and M. Nagele (eds), Der Nous bei Paulus und in seiner Umwelt, Tübingen: Mohr Siebck, 259-78, 2021

It is from a complicated mixture of old and new beliefs, traditional and innovative concepts that the Jesus movement had to develop its own ideas of the soul and afterlife. Given its Jewish origin and the scarcity of information about the soul and the underworld in the books of the later New Testament, it is hardly surprising that in the beginning the Jesus followers stuck to their Jewish background and that the Greek anthropological and eschatological ideas only slowly began to permeate the Christian world view. Now instead of looking at the development of these ideas in the works of established theologians like Clement and Origen, I will take a closer look at the Acts of the Christian martyrs, the so-called acta martyrum, that is, the early Christian accounts of the deaths of their fellow Christians through the hands of the Roman authorities.