Opening the Canon of Martyrdoms: Pre–Decian Martyrdom Discourse and the Hypomnēmata of Hegesippus (original) (raw)
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The Discourse of Voluntary Martyrdom: Ancient and Modern, Church History 81: 3 (2012): 531-551
While the social and intellectual basis of voluntary martyrdom is fiercely debated, scholarship on Christian martyrdom has unanimously distinguished between “martyrdom” and “voluntary martyrdom” as separate phenomena, practices, and categories from the second century onward. Yet there is a startling dearth of evidence for the existence of the category of the “voluntary martyr” prior to the writings of Clement of Alexandria. This paper has two interrelated aims: to review the evidence for the category of the voluntary martyr in ancient martyrological discourse and to trace the emergence of the category of the voluntary martyr in modern scholarship on martyrdom. It will argue both that the category began to emerge only in the third century in the context of efforts to justify flight from persecution, and also that the assumption of Clement’s taxonomy of approaches to martyrdom by scholars is rooted in modern constructions of the natural.
" Ego Christianus Sum " : Cultural Appropriation and the Discourse of Early Christian Martyrdom
The Martyr Acts are captivating, dramatic and emotive texts that document the trials and executions of Christian confessors during the Roman imperial period. Amidst a backdrop of sporadic persecution and intolerance, a new literary genre emerged that would aid in the promotion of suffering as a characteristic unique to the identity of Christians. However, the idea that Roman government officials deliberately sought out Christians for the purpose of execution only serves to amplify the false dichotomy that exists between ‘Christians’ and ‘Romans.’ The purpose of this study is to examine the function of martyrologies in the development of early Christian identity, as well as assess the extent to which the authors of the Martyr Acts appropriate and reinterpret Roman cultural practices and ideologies throughout these texts. This will be achieved through the analysis of three distinct narratives that emerge from the wider collection of Martyr Acts: the trial narrative, the agonistic narrative and the soldier for Christ narrative. Corresponding with these narratives, the Roman legal system, public spectacles and military ideologies serve to form the basis for assimilation by the authors of the Martyr Acts. As such, this thesis will illustrate that Christians were not a separate entity to the Roman Empire; they existed within the realms of the Empire and consequently forged a unique identity with distinctly Roman attributes at its core.
Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses, 2022
The Latin transmission of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, particularly its different versions and their relationship to one another, presents one of the many problems in parabiblical literature that-in contrast to the considerable effort that has been invested in New Testament studies all over the world-remains virtually untouched by scholarship since the time of Adolf von Harnack 1. Unlike the Latin versions of the Letter to Polycarp and the Shepherd of Hermas 2 , the Latin versions of the Martyrdom seem to contribute little to our understanding of the original Greek text. Nevertheless, the following contribution will show that the Latin versions of the Martyrdom furnish an interesting showcase for the Latin reception of parabiblical literature from the postapostolic age. The Latin Martyrdom has come down to us basically in three versions. The most influential is Rufinus' translation of the passage in Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History, where the bishop of Caesarea quotes most of the extant Greek text, but also paraphrases some passages, which makes it unclear whether he actually knew the Martyrdom in the so-called Pionius recension, which is preserved by the extant Greek manuscripts and the
Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches, 2009
This paper seeks to test a venerable scholarly and popular commonplace: that the ideology of religious martyrdom is based upon and further reflects a literal or even hyper-literal interpretation of Scriptures. Through two test-cases from late antique Christian writings, Tertullian’s scorpiace and Origen’s exhortatio ad martyrium, I seek to demonstrate the inadequacy of the literal/allegorical dichotomy to comprise and comprehend the complex, ingenious ways in which “the dialect of the holy Scriptures” (Origen’s phrase) is claimed to speak in one unambiguous voice that instructs the Christian to accept martyrdom under persecution through confession. Self- and other-characterizations using the labels of the lexicon of hermeneutical claims of fidelity to or apostasy from the Scriptures is pressed into service by authors who, like Tertullian in Carthage and Origen in Caesarea, craft careful apologetic and protreptic arguments to support the claim that for Christians “it is better to prefer a religious death to an irreligious life.”