WITNESS OF THE BODY
The Past, Present, and Future of Christian MartyrdomWilliam B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Copyright © 2011 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-8028-6258-7Contents
Introduction Michael L. Budde.........................................................................................................................vii1. Christian Martyrdom: A Theological Perspective Lawrence Cunningham.................................................................................32. Early Church Martyrdom: Witnessing For or Against the Empire? Tripp York...........................................................................203. The Primacy of the Witness of the Body to Martyrdom in Paul Stephen Fowl...........................................................................434. Witness, Women's Bodies, and the Body of Christ Joyce E. Salisbury.................................................................................635. The Judgment of the Eucharist at the Trial of Joan of Arc Ann W. Astell............................................................................826. Persecution or Prosecution, Martyrs or False Martyrs? The Reformation Era, History, and Theological Reflection Brad S. Gregory.....................1077. Destroying the Church to Save It: Intra-Christian Persecution and the Modern State William T. Cavanaugh............................................1258. Martyrs and Antimartyrs: Reflections on Treason, Fidelity, and the Gospel Michael L. Budde.........................................................1519. Is Anything Worth Dying For? Martyrdom, Exteriority, and Politics After Bare Life D. Stephen Long and Geoffrey Holdsclaw...........................17110. "Threatened with Resurrection": Martyrdom and Reconciliation in the World Church Emmanuel M. Katongole............................................19011. Flashpoints for Future Martyrdom: Beyond the "Clash of Civilizations" Eric O. Hanson..............................................................204Contributors...........................................................................................................................................227
Chapter One
Christian Martyrdom: A Theological Perspective
Lawrence Cunningham
We offer thanks to God for their victories and by renewing their memory we encourage ourselves to emulate their crowns and victories.... Saint Augustine, The City of God, VIII.27
Introduction
Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is not much read anymore except by those interested in matters of historiography or lovers of eighteenth-century prose (and sonorously wonderful prose it is). This neglect is understandable because Gibbon is not a read for the faint of heart. After he published volume 1 in 1776, six more volumes would appear, until he finished the project in 1788 with the seventh one, provoking the Duke of Gloucester to exclaim: "Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mister Gibbon?" Despite the fact that in my long-distant school days Gibbon was out of bounds for me—since my church had put his works on the Index—I enjoy dipping into Gibbon not so much for history but for the sheer pleasure of his rounded Ciceronian prose and his pugnaciously expressed judgments, of which I will provide an example soon.
Gibbon, in chapters 15 and 16 of volume 1, derides the pride of place that the Christian church had given to its earlier martyrs. Gibbon's negative brief can be economically summarized: there were not as many martyrs as the church proclaimed; some who did die were clearly fanatics; and subsequently, Christians themselves were, in their various wars, responsible for more deaths than were the Romans. Gibbon's judgment, of course, was colored by the extravagant claims of hagiography with which he would have been familiar (the Legenda Aurea was still read in pious circles in his day), as well as the sixteenth-century exploration of the Roman catacombs, in which, it was thought—erroneously—all of those buried there were martyrs. Bones of deceased Romans were sent all over the world as putative relics of martyrs. Of course, beyond these testable facts there was the seeming hypocrisy of a church trumpeting martyrdom while ignoring its own bloody hands in the Wars of Religion.
Gibbon, of course, did not deny that the Christians were persecuted. What he did deny was that the number of martyrs was great; second, he asserted that the phenomenon of death under persecution ought not to be overemphasized from a historical point of view or overly praised from within the Christian tradition. Gibbon thought that too much of early Christian history in general, and martyrdom in particular, was seen through the rose-colored lens of piety. At the end of the first volume of his great work, he has a concluding paragraph that is both beautiful in its sonority and economical in stating his thesis:
We shall conclude this chapter by a melancholy truth which obtrudes itself on the educated mind that, even admitting, without hesitation or inquiry, all that history has recorded or devotion has feigned, on the subject of martyrdom, it must still be acknowledged that the Christians, in the course of their intestine dissensions, have inflicted far greater severity on each other than they had experienced at the hands of the infidels.
At the other end of the doubting spectrum, asserted rather than argued historically, would be Frederick Nietzsche's claim, in various of his works, that the Christian martyr died out of ressentiment and a will to power. Nietzsche saw the martyr as an example of self-exaltation who embraced death in order to possess power after death. Famously, he turned a line from Jesus into a summary of his own take on martyrdom: "Everyone who humbles himself, wills to be exalted."
Some of Gibbon's or Nietzsche's jibes echo similar ones made by those in Roman antiquity who were antagonistic to the claims of the early Christians. As Robert Wilken demonstrated two decades ago, the Christians were not followers of what the pagans considered a religion, but fell under the Roman rubric of the superstitious. Wilken makes it clear that, from the perspective of the Romans, it was unthinkable to consider the followers of Jesus Christ religious; they were merely the victims of some fanatical ideas that put them outside the realm of religio. Book Fifteen of the Annales by Tacitus, one of the classical non-Christian sources for the study of Christian martyrdom, actually uses the word superstitio in describing the growth of Christianity from Palestine into Rome, with the subsequent persecution that happened under the reign of Nero.
The Latin word superstitio, to quote that gold standard dictionary for Latin, Lewis and Short's A Latin Dictionary, is "excessive fear of the gods, unreasonable religious belief ... different from religio, a proper reasonable awe of the gods." It is clear from the sources that that famous dictionary provides that the word superstitio was a very pejorative term; thus Seneca's declaration (Epistle 123): superstitio error insanus est.
Now, it was bad enough to be considered superstitious from the Roman perspective, but what was worse from that perspective was the fact that this superstition made the Christians resistant to many claims of Roman religion. Central to these claims was that pietas was the essential glue ("religion" derives from the Latin verb religare: "to bind together") that held together the family, the state, and the gods, which in turn created, when all was in harmony, the pax deorum. From the perspective of the Romans, Christians were a kind of fifth column undermining the essential structure of Roman society. While the very charge of bearing the nomen of a Christian could hail one before the Roman tribunal, it was the concomitant refusal to sacrifice to the genius of the emperor and the gods and the refusal to swear oaths before the gods that sealed the deal. That the Christians were seen as disloyal or as traitors is clear from the extant Acta that have come down to us from the times of the persecutions.
The Christian Martyrs Considered
Christians were persecuted in the Roman Empire, as the testimony of both pagan and Christian sources clearly attest. This assertion has very few naysayers. For generations scholars have investigated a whole series of questions, ranging from the reason(s) for the persecutions, their geographical extent, their intensity, and — more controversially — the number of Christians who actually suffered.
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to give any detailed answers to those questions, but, following what most scholars agree to, I will here stipulate that in the early period, persecutions were localized, of varying intensity, and of undetermined length. It is also agreed that it was not until the middle of the third century, with the legislation of Decius in AD 250, that an empire-wide persecution of Christians occurred.
The issue of how many Christians were subject to persecution is very hard to determine for a number of reasons that go beyond the simple fact that we do not possess anything in the way of reliable statistics. Further, it is difficult to extrapolate from the historical records that we do have, because of the equally simple fact stated above: the periods of persecution were episodic and almost always somewhat localized. The persecution under the emperor Decius in 250 was, for the first time, empire wide, as was that of Diocletian on the cusp of the fourth century. However, prior to that time, it is not absolutely certain from the writings that reflect Christians dying in Rome or Lyons in Roman Gaul or in North Africa whether those deaths were or were not peculiar to those places or whether they were emblematic of larger persecutions. Estimates mentioned in the literature ranging from a few thousand to many thousands are just empirically too suspect to trust.
On the issue about the "why" of the persecutions, especially since the Romans were notoriously indifferent to what people actually believed except when their belief threatened the power of the state: one is on safe ground saying that the disapproval of the Christian movement by the Roman state is best understood as politically and not religiously inspired. If we look at both the pagan and Christian accounts of the persecutions from the earliest period, it seems that the very name (nomen) "Christian" was sufficient to trigger the punitive arm of Roman justice. Looking at the earliest redaction of the Acta, involving Justin and his companions from about ad 165, it is clear that the crucial point was the question, repeated to them, "Are you a Christian?" and the reply, "I am a Christian ..." (Musurillo, 45ff.). Other Acta pretty much show the same pattern. Even those Acta that have been heavily redacted by Christian hands to highlight the polarity of Roman cruelty and Christian forbearance (as, for example, in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity) still reflect that simple exchange between the Roman authority's question and the Christian confession: "I am a Christian."
Of course, there had to be a deeper meaning and motive behind the mere utterance of the name — of being a Christian — that brought such dire consequences to the one who bore the name "Christian." The legal basis on which Romans relied has been the subject of much research, but those who argue that no sure conclusion can be deduced in the early period, that is, before the Christian noncompliance with Decius's decree demanding that all Roman citizens sacrifice throughout the empire, seemcogent to me. Neither the classic description of Tacitus nor the famous letter of Pliny to the emperor explains why the name "Christian" should bring with it such a ferocious reaction.What we can guess is that the distaste for a superstitio—especially connected to the seemingly noxious deconstruction of Roman pietas—is the most plausible reason for the Roman persecution of the Christians.
Whatever the legal reason for the persecution(s) of Christians might have been, martyrdom, from the Christian side, if not welcomed, was at least seen as a logical price to pay for one's faith. Untangling the motives of Christians who were willing to face death during the periods of the Roman persecution is not an easy task. From the Roman point of view, they seemed to be fanatics; from the Christian side, judging from the considerable martyrdom literature that has come down to us, the motives seem inextricably entangled with the way they understood their faith in general and their Founder's story in particular.
The primary motive, of course, rested in the fact that at the center of their faith was a person who himself died in defense of his faith. Not only had Jesus died, but he died by crucifixion following a Roman prosecution. In the Roman view, this form of execution was a quite horrific and loathsome punishment that was typically preserved for the worst malefactors: rebellious slaves or non-Roman felons. We have so domesticated the religious language of the Bible that it is almost impossible for a contemporary audience to understand the shocking rhetoric of Paul's outcry to the Corinthians: "For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block (skandalon) to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, the power of God and the wisdom of God" (1 Cor. 1:22-24). Later in that same letter, reflecting a core tradition (paradosis) of the nascent Christian faith, Paul hands over to the Corinthians one of the earliest formulas of faith in Christianity: "Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures ..." (1 Cor. 15:3-14).
Furthermore — and this point is often overlooked — the essential core of the Christian faith is not the doctrines of Jesus or his teaching, but Jesus himself. Christianity is not a religion of the book, pace the fundamentalists, but a faith directed to a person. Jesus does not say, "Come, follow my teachings," but "Come, follow me." Paul conceptualizes baptism not as washing in water but in a symbolic death and rising up in Christ. It would take too long and would take us too far from our topic to further elucidate this primary fact about the Christian faith, but it needs to be noted for a simple reason. If a follower of Jesus finds him- or herself in a hostile situation in which faith is set over against possible punishment or death, there is a certain logic that, from the believer's perspective, urges one to accept death precisely because there is a paradigm for such behavior, namely, that the fundamental object of faith himself accepted death at the hands of the hostile.
It is patent in the early Christian martyrdom literature that the trials of the Christian martyrs were seen in the light of the experience of Christ. as the author of the Martyrdom of Polycarp clearly declares:
We would never abandon Christ, for it was he who suffered for the redemption of those who are saved in the entire world, the innocent one dying on behalf of sinners. Nor could we worship anyone else. For him we reverence as the Son of God, whereas [we] love the martyrs as the disciples and imitators of the Lord and rightly so because of their unsurpassed loyalty towards their king and master. May we too share with them as fellow disciples. (Musurillo, 15-17)
A similar paean may be observed at the conclusion of the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas (by Tertullian?): "Ah, most valiant and blessed martyrs! Truly are you called and chosen for the glory of Christ Jesus our Lord! And any man who exalts, honors, and worships his glory should read for the consolation of the church these new deeds of heroism ..." (Musurillo, 131).
It would be otiose to cite other such texts. Anyone who has read through the martyrdom literature can cull similar sentiments. In fact, Tertullian, who lived through a period of persecution in North Africa in the late second century, aimed several of his writings at the subject of martyrdom (e.g., Scorpiace, De Fuga, Ad Martyres, etc.), and anyone who looks at those treatises will soon see that not only does Tertullian link martyrdom to the death of Jesus, but he reads the life of Christ typologically as shedding light on the plight of the martyrs as well as on the witness of every Christian. So did the author of the Martydom of Polycarp nearly a century earlier. In fact, that earlier text, with any number of explicit allusions, retells the story of Polycarp in terms of the life of Jesus.
We must keep the biblical tropes in mind when we read the bemused, impatient, and hostile responses of the Roman prefects and the pagan onlookers who have the accused Christians standing before them. At times they seem genuinely puzzled at the obstructive resistance of the accused. The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas is especially poignant in that regard. Perpetua's father is desperate in the face of her seeming obstinacy. He pleads: "Have pity on my grey head—have pity on your father.... Do not abandon me to be the reproach of men. Think of your brothers, think of your mother and your aunt, think of your child...." When Perpetua arrives before the tribunal, he urges her: "Perform the sacrifice — have pity on your baby!" The father's pleading in the court was so vehement that the officiating officer ordered the father to be thrown down to the ground and to be beaten with a rod (Musurillo, 113-15).
At times, of course, the substance of the Roman charge against the Christians seems to have a more substantive claim. From the time of Nero it was the mere nomen of being a Christian that seems to have been sufficient reason to bring down the iron arm of Roman justice. There may have been an echo of the charge of the nomen in 1 Peter: "Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice in so far as you are sharing Christ's suffering, so that you may be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed. If you are so reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed because of the spirit of glory which is the Spirit of God resting upon you" (1 Pet. 4:12-14).
(Continues...)
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