Book review, MAIER, HARRY O. & WALDNER, KATHARINA (eds.) (2021). Desiring Martyrs. Locating Martyrs in Space and Time. Berlin: De Gruyter, xviii + 236 pp., 59,95 € [ISBN: 978-3-1106-8248-9]. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Current Trends in the Study of Early Christian Martyrdom
Bulletin for the Study of Religion, 2012
This paper investigate recent scholarship on early Christian martyrdom. It discusses the shift away from the study of the origins of martyrdom to an interest in martyrdom and the body, Christian identity formation, and martyrdom and orthodoxy. It further discusses the need for a reappraisal of the evidence for early Christian martyrdom and the renewed attention that questions of dating, authorship, and provenance have received.
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.”
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.
Early Christian Martyrdom Narratives and Contemporary Genre Theory
This chapter, a contribution to John Collins's recently published Festschrift, takes its inspiration from one of Collins’s longstanding research interests: literary genre. In the 1970s, Collins participated in a groundbreaking study of the apocalypse genre as a part of the Society of Biblical Literature’s Biblical Literature Genres Project, culminating in the publication of the seminal issue of Semeia 14 under Collins’s editorship (1979). Collins’s own contributions to that issue have been highly influential, as have the many publications over the intervening three decades in which he picked up, expanded, clarified, and further nuanced his earlier ideas about the apocalypse genre. In this chapter, I explore the implications of Collins’s theoretical genre-related insights, but with a different literary corpus in view: early Christian martyrdom accounts of the first few centuries CE.
Many studies of early Christian martyrdom have noted the phenomenon of voluntary martyrdom. However, most scholars, drawing on criticism of the practice found in the Martyrdom of Polycarp and Clement of Alexandria, dismiss those who provoked their own arrest and death as deviant, heretical, or numerically insignificant. This article argues instead that the earliest Christian martyrologies celebrate voluntary martyrdom as a valid mainstream Christian practice, which faced only isolated challenge in the first three centuries. Furthermore, pagan sources support the view that voluntary martyrdom was a significant historical as well as literary phenomenon. As there is no reason to conclude voluntary martyrdom was anything other than a valid subset of proto-orthodox Christian martyrdom, more attention should be paid to this phenomenon by early Christian historians.
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
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.