Pagans and Christians by Robin Lane Fox

Author:Robin Lane Fox
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780141925851
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2008-10-29T21:00:00+00:00

9. Persecution and Martyrdom

I

The most excellent Christians in the early Church were neither the virgins nor the visionaries. They were the Christians whom pagans put to death. The spread of Christianity, the conversions, the over-achievement took place in an era of persecution. In heaven, said the authorities, the rewards of a virgin were sixty times greater than an ordinary Christian’s, but a martyr’s were a hundred times greater, the highest of all. Christians’ deaths were idealized as martyrdoms, “second baptisms” which effaced all previous sins and ensured an immediate crown in Paradise.

Persecution has been an enduring fact of Christian history: “it is by no means impossible that in the thirty years between 1918 and 1948 more Christians died for their faith than in the first 300 years after the Crucifixion.”1 In early Christianity, it did not cease in the age of Constantine: Christians promptly began to persecute their fellow Christians. Beyond the Roman Empire, others fell victim to intermittent purges by the kings of Persia: elaborate stories of their martyrdoms continued to spread in the fifth century. The old patterns died hard. During the 850s, fifty Christians were martyred at Cordova in Spain in a long sequence of arrests and hearings which were forced to the attention of the Muslim cadi.2 The detailed Latin narratives of their martyrdoms described their trials as if they still took place before a “consul” armed with the fasces, or rods of authority. Their pattern reminds us how much endured in these occasions across the centuries: the concern of the judge to find a compromise; the effect of one martyrdom on other “volunteers”; the careful recording of events by men in prison; the enthusiasts’ “rash itch for destruction”; the idea of martyrdom as a prizefight by “warriors”; the moderate views and evasions of the Christian majority; the prominence in martyrdom of well-born girls. There was also the publicity for violent suffering: when Flora, a Christian virgin, was released after torture, “I gazed upon the skin of your holy neck,” wrote the future archbishop of Toledo, “torn by the blows of the whip and the wound which had bared your lovely hair and which you deigned to show me personally.”

As a result, the ideal of martyrdom has remained alive in world history, since its first formulation by Jews in the mid-second century B.C. Christianity has never lost it, and it was probably through contact with Christians, not Jews, that early Islam picked up its analogous language and theology for those who die for the faith. The legacy is still tragically fresh. In the war against Iraq, the Iranian dead are publicized as martyrs whose instant reward has been granted in Paradise. Dreams of a martyr’s glory impel boys to volunteer, as Christians once volunteered for trial. They risk gassing and chemical burns, the modern heirs of the fires and wild beasts.

In the early Church, martyrdoms were exceptionally public events, because Christians coincided with a particular phase in the history of public entertainment: they were pitched into the cities’ arenas for unarmed combat with gladiators or bulls, leopards and the dreaded bears.

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