The Testimony of Blood: The Charisma of Martyrdom

By David F. Wright

[David F. Wright is Professor of Patristic and Reformed Christianity, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland.

This is article four in a four-part series “The Making of the Early Christians,” delivered by the author as the W. H. Griffith Thomas Lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 5-8, 2002.]

The first article in this series discussed an experience common to all Christians—baptism. This final article concludes with an experience that may be given to very few, if any, in the United States today—martyrdom. Historians commonly characterize the period leading up to Constantine as “the age of the martyrs,” and appropriately so. Constantine did not, as is often asserted, make Christianity the official religion of the Roman state, but he did put an end to the persecution of Christians, or their liability to persecution. Thus terminated an era, in fact the only era, in which the whole of the Christian church was exposed to harassment and possible martyrdom. In some subsequent centuries martyrs have been more numerous, but only in part of the church at any one time.

But the label “the age of martyrs” is misleading if taken to imply that persecution was continuous and universal and that martyrs were counted in huge numbers. No estimate of the sum of martyrdoms in the first three centuries can be more than approximate, but a good case can be made for there being neither too many nor too few—that is, neither too many nor too few for the roles they played in the making of the early Christians.

Martyrs as Super-Christians

Martyrs were beyond doubt the super-Christians of the early centuries. They were truly filled with the Spirit, and endowed with a kind of instinctively acknowledged charismatic authority. At times this clashed with the regular authority of bishops and presbyters, especially in the granting of pardon and reconciliation to those who had “lapsed” in persecution. Perpetua realized that she was “privileged to pray for” her young brother Dinocrates who had died.[1] Martyrs and confessors received visions and were given not only the words to speak by the Spirit, as Jesus Himself had promised, but also the strength to wrestle with demonic forces in a contest unto death.

The martyrs gained this exalted status partly because they died not only for and with Christ but also like Him. In martyrdom the imitation of Christ reached its highest level. This made Christian martyrdom unique. Martyrdom itself was not restricted to Christianity. It has long been argued, for example, that the accounts of the Jewish Maccabaean martyrs in the second century B.C. influenced not only the language of the New Testament in reference to the death of Christ but also later Christian martyrology. In Augustine’s time the North African church commemorated the Maccabaean martyrs annually. And on the pagan side Socrates was viewed almost as a martyr by some Christian apologists. But there was all the difference in the world between dying for a cause or a person and dying like Christ. Hence Ignatius wrote ahead to the Christians in Rome, where he was being transported under arrest almost certainly to die, dissuading them from attempting to prevent his martyrdom and so rob him of the opportunity to “become a disciple” of Christ. “When there is no trace of my body left for the world to see, then I shall be truly Jesus Christ’s disciple … leave me to imitate the passion of my God.”[2]

One of the earliest of extant narratives of martyrdom is the Martyrdom of Polycarp. It has been modeled on the passion of Jesus in its details. The introduction reads, “It was almost as though all preceding events had been leading up to another divine manifestation of the Martyrdom which we read of in the Gospel.”[3] So one finds quite different expressions of the character of martyrdom as imitatio Christi.

There is a deeper level to this motif in the letters of Ignatius. Some of his letters seek to rebut the false teaching known as Docetism, which denied the flesh-and-blood reality of Jesus’ humanity, including His death. So Ignatius emphasized repeatedly that Jesus was truly born and truly died “in the days of Pontius Pilate” (an emphasis eventually responsible for the inclusion of “under Pontius Pilate” in the Apostles’ Creed). If Christ’s passion was an “unreal illusion,” then the sufferings of the martyrs were empty also. Conversely the attainment by Ignatius to a death like his Lord’s would serve to seal by his blood his vindication of the historical veracity of Christ’s death. Similarly Ignatius told the Smyrnaeans that the Docetists absented themselves from the Lord’s Supper “because they will not admit that the eucharist is the self-same body of our Saviour Jesus Christ which suffered for our sins.”[4] So another strand of Ignatius’s instruction to the churches was to insist on the significance of the eucharist in strongly realist rather than symbolical language. He wrote to the Romans of his own imminent death in quasi-eucharistic terms. “Pray leave me to be a meal for the beasts, for it is they who can provide my way to God. I am his wheat, ground fine by lions’ teeth to be made purest bread for Christ. I am fain for the breath of God, even the flesh of Jesus Christ, who is the seed of David; and for my drink I crave that blood of his which is love imperishable.”[5]

In Ignatius’s rich and even fevered imagery, Christ’s death, the eucharistic meal of His body and blood, and his own forthcoming martyrdom authenticated each other. Martyrdom could thus become a renewed depiction of the centrality of Christ’s own sacrifice in Christian faith—which in turn sustained the significance of weekly worship at His table.

Attesting the Truth of Christ

So one of the purposes that martyrdom served was to distinguish orthodox Christians from the Gnostics and others who denied both the crucifixion of the Son of God and the need for Christians to stand fast unto the shedding of blood, if called on. Tertullian wrote The Scorpion’s Sting to defend martyrdom against Valentinians and other Gnostics, who, when the church is disturbed by persecution, creep forth and bubble up to oppose martyrdom. “Representing salvation to be destruction, they transmute sweet into bitter, as well as light to darkness; and thus, by preferring this very wretched life to that most blessed one, they put bitter for sweet as well as darkness for light.”[6]

Discounting martyrdom, in Tertullian’s eyes, subverted all the values of Christianity. In particular it denied the deeply other-worldly orientation of the faith of the early Christians. Christian teaching, Christian devotion, Christian hope were all directed to the certainty of the resurrection of the flesh and the life of the world to come. This found overt expression in the joy with which martyrdom was welcomed. In some accounts of martyrdom one feels that the veil between this life and the next has almost been drawn aside. The proto-martyr Stephen, “being full of the Holy Spirit … gazed intently into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:55). Perpetua was granted a vision of a ladder leading up into a garden where a shepherd was milking sheep, surrounded by thousands of people clad in white garments. To Perpetua he said, “I am glad you have come, my child,” and gave her a mouthful of milk. Perpetua related the vision to her brother, and “we realized that we would have to suffer, and that from now on we would no longer have any hope in this life.”[7]

Martyrdom was often inflicted in public, sometimes before crowds in an amphitheatre or a stadium. As such it challenged Christians to be publicly identifiable by openly rallying round fellow believers who had been arrested. There is ample evidence of the tender loving care lavished on confessors, the title given to martyrs-designate, in prison. “If there happen to be any [Christians] in the mines or banished to islands or shut up in prisons for nothing but their fidelity to the cause of God’s church, they become the nurslings of their confession. It is mainly the deeds of so noble a love that lead many to put a brand upon us. ‘See,’ they say, ‘how they love one another.’ ”[8]

Occasionally some charlatan benefited from such royal treatment. A second-century pagan writer, Lucian of Samosata, satirized the experiences of an adventurer called Proteus, who joined the Christians’ bandwagon and got himself imprisoned. When attempts to secure his release failed, “every other form of attention was shown him, not in any casual way but with assiduity; and from the very break of day you could see aged women lingering about the prison, widows and orphans, while their officials even slept inside with him after bribing the guards. Then elaborate meals were brought in, and sacred books of theirs were read aloud, and excellent Peregrinus [his assumed name] was called by them ‘a new Socrates.’ ”[9]

As Cyprian was led to his death by beheading, he was escorted by crowds of Christians as in a triumphal procession. The heightened emotion of such an occasion and the identification of believers with the martyrs led sometimes to others volunteering to join the victims. After sentence was pronounced on Cyprian, the throng of Christians said, “Let us also be beheaded with him!”[10] Such impetuosity did lead occasionally to more headstrong souls being arrested and condemned. But the teaching of church leaders and writers did not approve of voluntary martyrdom—unflinching steadfastness if faced with the crunch, but no turning up at the governor’s court and provocatively inviting arrest.

What perhaps was not always realized by bishops and other clergy was the intensity of zeal for martyrdom aroused by the exalted terms in which it was praised, especially to believers in custody awaiting trial or punishment. Readers of Ignatius’s letter to the Christians at Rome not infrequently find his passion to die extravagant and accuse him of a morbid death wish, forgetting that he was already under arrest, being taken to Rome to face almost certain execution. The circumstances made him one privileged to die like his Lord, and he would make the most of it. Even at a prudential level one could say he was making a high virtue out of a necessity. “I am truly in earnest about dying for God … I am yearning for death with all the passion of a lover.”

He wrote, “I do not know what is best for myself. This is the first stage of my discipleship; and no power, visible or invisible, must grudge me my coming to Jesus Christ. Fire, cross, beast-fighting, hacking and quartering, splintering of bone and mangling of limb, even the pulverizing of my entire body—let every horrid and diabolical torment come upon me, providing only that I can win my way to Jesus Christ!”[11]

How could one prevent rhetorical outbursts like that inciting some believers to court martyrdom by hook or by crook?

Soon after Ignatius’ death, his letters were collected by Polycarp, who had received one of them. Polycarp himself was to die gloriously as a martyr some half a century later at the age of eighty-six. The account of Ignatius’ sufferings records the preservation of his remains. “So, after all, we did gather up his bones—more precious to us than jewels, and finer than pure gold—and we laid them to rest in a spot suitable for the purpose. There we shall assemble, as occasion allows, with glad rejoicings; and with the Lord’s permission we shall celebrate the birthday of his martyrdom. It will serve both as a commemoration of all who have triumphed before, and as a training and a preparation for any whose crown may be still to come.”[12]

The anniversaries of the martyrs’ deaths took place annually, normally at the place of burial or sometimes of their martyrdom, and included the reading of the narratives of their sufferings. These varied in form from official minutes of court proceedings to the testimony of eyewitnesses. Perpetua’s Passion is unique in including diaries, which she and Saturus, her catechist, kept in jail. These records of the martyrs were subject to embellishment, and later sheer invention, if it was felt that a martyr in a church’s calendar lacked adequate commemoration.

The martyrs became the first “saints” of the church, and thus developed the cult of the saints and their relics. Great abuse lay this way, but the beginnings were largely honorable. Within the age of the martyrs itself such commemoration was essential to the community’s identification with those whose deaths were a public, visible, and concrete attestation of the truth of the gospel.

The Public Face of Christianity

In fact martyrdom and what preceded it were not only the most public face of Christianity before Constantine but almost its only public manifestation. This must have enhanced its importance enormously—and made it essential that the Christians got it right, as it were. Services of worship were not advertised, although the unbaptized would be generally welcome for the pre-eucharistic part. Kreider goes so far as to assert that “in pre-Christendom, there was no connection between worship and evangelism…. [the] church did not grow because its worship was attractive.”[13] The difficulty lay partly in the fear of hostile informers creeping in unrecognized. So a text called The Testament of the Lord, a later derivative of the Apostolic Tradition attached to the name of Hippolytus, described part of the deacon’s duties as follows: “Let him observe and look at those who come into the house of the sanctuary. Let him investigate who they are, so that he may know if they are lambs or wolves. And when he asks let him bring in the one who is worthy, lest, if a spy enter, the liberty of the church be searched out, and his sin be on his head.”[14] The deacon was a bouncer, as Kreider puts it.[15]

Martyrdom, on the other hand, was not in the control of the Christians. Especially if a Roman governor had sanctioned measures against them in order to appease the hostility of the local populace, he might deliberately make the event crowded and festive. Or he might take advantage of some regional annual assembly, as at Lyons in 177, to rally the provincials’ loyalty to Rome by an entertaining disposal of some Christians. Since in the empire only the governor of a province could order execution, Christians were often brought to a provincial capital for treatment. Thus in 180 the martyrs of Scilli (or Scillium), a small village in Roman North Africa, were brought to Carthage for trial and dispatch. It is doubtful whether in any setting a Christian could be martyred in secret or even in private.

The visibility of martyrdom was significant for more than one reason. It helps explain why pagan criticisms frequently deplored the demeanor of Christians in the face of death. They could not fathom the pigheaded stubbornness of Christians who refused to release a pinch of incense over a flame in front of a statue. They need not give up the worship of their own God; all they had to do was give ceremonial recognition to the gods and goddesses everyone else honored. Instead their mindless eagerness for the shadowy life to come rendered them scornful of this present world and its benefits and enjoyments. Not every pagan observer of the Christians’ fearlessness in the face of death treated it with such scorn. Galen of Pergamum, the most famous medical writer of the second century, admired their contempt of death and its sequel as worthy of philosophers.[16]

A Converting Ordinance

The visibility of martyrdom attracted outsiders to the faith of the victims. The following is Tertullian’s conclusion to his Apology.

The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow. The blood of Christians is seed. Many of your writers exhort to the courageous bearing of pain and death, as Cicero [and] Seneca … and yet their words do not find so many disciples as Christians do, teachers not by words, but by their deeds. That very obstinacy you rail against is the instructor. For who that contemplates it is not excited to enquire what is at the bottom of it? Who, after enquiring, does not embrace our teachings? And when he has embraced them, desires not to suffer that he may become partaker of the fullness of God’s grace, that he may obtain from God complete forgiveness, by giving in exchange his blood? … As the divine and human are ever opposed to each other, when we are condemned by you, we are acquitted by the Highest.[17]

One need not rely on Tertullian’s typical rhetoric to be confident of the magnetic pull of the spectacle of martyrdom. Many of the narratives of the martyrs’ experiences record individuals who were drawn in and overborne by their dignity and courage. The adjutant in charge of the Carthaginian prison where Perpetua and her companions were kept was one such person. There were other instances of military or court personnel in the midst of trials of Christians suddenly abandoning their posts and switching allegiance to Christ. The impact of the unflinching bearing of martyrs was most probably a factor in the conversion of some prominent Christians like Justin and Tertullian. And to return to the first martyr, Stephen, how noteworthy it is that Saul witnessed his death. Who knows what seeds Stephen’s defense and dignity sowed in Saul’s mind?

Most martyrs did not have Stephen’s opportunity, but many records include oral exchanges, sometimes at length, whether in court or with people in the crowd. The context of martyrdom afforded perhaps the only opportunity for outsiders to hear Christians speaking out for their Lord. It was scarcely preaching, but it was the nearest thing to public and open-air witness in many communities. (No one hired the Colosseum for mass evangelism!) One might apply to early Christian martyrdom what a tradition in Scottish Reformed church life used to say about communion—it was a converting ordinance.

In his book The Rise of Christianity Rodney Stark devotes an entire chapter to martyrdom entitled “The Martyrs: Sacrifice as Rational Choice.” Much of his argument is expressed in the terminology of the sociology of religion, as one would expect. He draws particular attention to the opportunity martyrs often had to attest to their perseverance in the presence of other Christians, and of pagan spectators also. He claims that “martyrs are the most credible exponents of the value of religion, and this is especially true if there is a voluntary aspect to their martyrdom. By voluntarily accepting torture and death rather than defecting, a person sets the highest imaginable value upon a religion and communicates that value to others.”[18]

Stark rebuts the notion that “costly demands must always make a religion less attractive.” He acknowledges that “high costs tend to screen out free riders,” and so “sacrifice and stigma mitigate the free-rider problems faced by religious groups.” But “high costs tend to increase participation among those who do join.”[19] Hence although martyrdom itself was the fate of a limited number of believers, it exercised a cohesive force in strengthening the Christians’ sense of solidarity. The martyrs’ steadfastness of resolve recovered and restored other Christians who had earlier given in and apostatized. Thus although martyrs were few, many a martyrdom was a “group phenomenon,” an experience that involved the entire body of the faithful.[20]

Stark cites two other sociologists’ writings on martyrdom who highlighted the importance for the martyrs themselves of the knowledge that the church they would soon leave behind would treasure their memory. “What was distinctive about martyrdom was not only promise of reward in the hereafter, but the certainty of being memorialised in this world. The martyr saw before dying that he or she had earned a place in the memories of the survivors and in the liturgy of the church.”[21]

It is remarkable that the names of a good portion of the martyrs of the early church are known. The first Christians we know of in Roman Africa are the Scillitan martyrs of A.D. 180. Their names are given in the spare two-page minutes of the court proceedings, which give priceless glimpses into the earliest public emergence of what became the strongest regional church in the western Roman Empire, no less influential than Rome itself in the shaping of Latin, European Christianity. It was birthed in martyrdom.

The first Christian in Britain who is known by name was Alban, who was martyred at the place north of London that commemorates him, St. Albans. Undoubtedly the same is true of other areas.

It would be wrong to ignore the debit side of persecution. Lives of great promise were cut off in their prime. Furthermore by no means all Christians stood firm. The persecution ordered by the Emperor Decius in 250 made devastating inroads into the ranks of Christians in Alexandria and Carthage. Cyprian’s work The Lapsed makes disconcerting reading. Persecution was the unmaking of too many Christians. Moreover, the aftermath of major persecutions like this one led the churches into tricky and potentially divisive measures for dealing with the “lapsed” who wished to re-enter the fold. The question whether Christians, especially church leaders, should retreat into hiding in order to escape being caught also elicited divergent answers. Tertullian changed his mind on this issue. Cyprian lost face when he fled the city of Carthage in the first outbreak under Decius, but he redeemed himself some years later in dying in triumph under Emperor Valerian. Devotion to the martyrs was capable of being taken to excess. One of the several factors that caused the Donatist counter-church movement in North Africa was the pique of a powerful woman who was refused permission to kiss the bone of a martyr in the eucharistic service. From time to time one observes a tendency to accord to the martyrs’ sufferings almost a redemptive, or at least a reconciling and pardoning, virtue.

How Many Martyrs?

The number of martyrs may be lower than has often been thought. Stark twice puts the total as less than a thousand over the three centuries, but he seems to have misread his source.[22] Such a low figure seems inconsistent with the facets of the picture he paints.

However, Christians ought not irresponsibly inflate “the noble army of martyrs” as the “Te Deum” describes them. Churches can be and have been wiped out by persecution. The two strongest regions of the church in the pre-Constantinian period, Asia Minor (Turkey) and North Africa (chiefly Tunisia and Algeria, not including Egypt) have long been largely bereft of a Christian presence. Believers today ought not to take a kind of macabre satisfaction in exaggerating the number of believers who died.

If on the one hand martyrdom had been a rare event, so that the great majority of Christians only heard of one at a remote distance, it could scarcely have received the honored and influential place it did in early Christian piety. On the other hand had Christians too often been slaughtered by the score, even by the hundred, that must have severely deterred recruitment to the Christian ranks. Therefore one may conclude that the number of martyrs in primitive Christianity was neither too few to have been a significant force nor too many to have devastated the church and its growth.

Someone has said that Christianity both outlived and outdied the ancient world. No doubt both were necessary, and each reinforced the other. Much more was involved in the making of a martyr than beheading or burning alive. The making of a Christian preceded the making of a martyr, for the latter needed a strong sense of his or her Christian identity, of the exclusive distinctiveness of the Christian people to which he or she belonged, of the priority of loyalty to Christ over all other calls on his or her fidelity—to parents, for example, or to children—and a strong faith in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come. Many a martyr was fired by a vision of heaven ahead. For martyrdom stood for nothing so much as the other-worldly, future-worldly orientation of early Christianity. Of Perpetua and her fellow martyrs the compiler of the Passion wrote, “The day of their victory dawned, and they marched from the prison to the amphitheatre joyfully as though they were going to heaven with calm faces, trembling, if at all, with joy rather than fear.”[23]

May it be so when believers today are called on to face suffering or death for Christ, like Christ.

Notes

1. Passion of Perpetua and Felicity 7.2, ed. and trans. Herbert Musurillo, in The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 114–15.
2. Ignatius, Romans 4.6, ed. Andrew Louth, trans. Maxwell Staniforth, in Early Christian Writings (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1987), 86, 87.
3. Martyrdom of Polycarp 1, trans. Maxwell Staniforth, in Early Christian Writings, 125.
4. Ignatius, Smyrnaeans 1, 2, 7, trans. Staniforth, 101, 102.
5. Ignatius, Romans 4, 7, trans. Staniforth, 86, 87.
6. Tertullian, Scorpion’s Sting 1, in The Ante-Nicene Christian Library 11 (Edinburgh: Clark, 1869), 382.
7. Passion of Perpetua 4, trans. Musurillo 110–13.
8. Tertullian, Apology 39, in The Ante-Nicene Christian Library 11:119.
9. Lucian, On the Death of Peregrinus 12, in J. Stevenson, A New Eusebius, rev. W. H. C. Frend (London: SPCK, 1987), 129.
10. Acts of Cyprian 5, trans. Musurillo, 172–73.
11. Ignatius, Romans 4, 7, 5, trans. Staniforth, 86–87.
12. Martyrdom of Polycarp 18, trans. Staniforth, 131.
13. Alan Kreider, Worship and Evangelism in Pre-Christendom, Joint Liturgical Studies 32 (Cambridge: Grove, 1995), 9, 8 (italics his).
14. The Testament of the Lord, 1:36, quoted in ibid., 9.
15. Kreider, Worship and Evangelism in Pre-Christendom, 9.
16. Galen, quoted in Stevenson, A New Eusebius, 137.
17. Tertullian, Apology 50, in The Ante-Nicene Christian Library, 11:139–40.
18. Stark, The Rise of Christianity, 174 (italics his).
19. Ibid., 177 (italics his).
20. Ibid., 183.
21. Eugene Weiner and Anita Weiner, The Martyr’s Conviction: A Sociological Analysis (Atlanta: Scholars, 1990), 80–81.
22. Stark, The Rise of Christianity 164, 179, citing W. H. C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), 413, where Frend is referring only to the persecutions of Decius and Valerian in the 250s.
23. Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, 18:1, trans. Musurillo 124–27.