A Theology of Martyrdom and Persecution (Episode 21).

This week’s episode dives into the question of what the early Church thought Martyrdom entailed. We shall expand on this over the next few weeks, but simply for now, it was much more “being a witness.”

The Martyrdom of St. Polycarp of Smyrna

You can find the episode at its normal haunt.

In this episode we will also have a look at a few authors, though make special reference to Candida Moss’s 2014 screed, The Myth of Persecution.

In some ways, Moss is just hijacking the insights of a much better writer (and historian), namely Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and particularly his chapter on the persecutions.

Interestingly, the historians who did the most work on persecution and martyrdom from the last generation, G. E. M. de Ste. Croix and W. H. C. Frend (the first from Oxford the second from Cambridge), while each cited once and twice by Moss, are largely neglected with regard to what Moss is trying to argue, namely that there really were no persecutions to speak of as regards the early church, it was all fantasy, and we should look at all these sources as little more than the grissly early church version of Amish Romances.

Moss’s shtick is little different than most liberal historians of theology, or even such feminist theologians as Karen King, who handle the evidence of the early church from the Orthoodox side (the Acat Martyrum, the heresiologists) so critically that they can quickly be dupped (as King was) by frauds, since all they themselves are doing is peddling fraud under a different guise.

For two decent reviews of Moss, check out first Ephraim Radner’s excellent take. Dr. Radner teaches at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto.

The second is from Glenn Moots at The Public Discourse. Both take the measure of Moss and find her wanting.

For those looking for better takes, you are best off reading W. H. C. Frends Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church, or G. E. M. de Ste. Croix’s collected essays that treat this in the posthumously published Christian Martyrdom, Persecution, and Orthodoxy.

This is a collection of his essays, including his well-known “Why Were the Early Christian Persecuted?” and “Aspects of the Great Persecution.”

Lastly, a book I recommend highly and for many reasons is Robin Lane Fox’s Christians and Pagans.

Lane Fox you can get for a reasonable price, de Ste. Croix and Frend you might have to do some shopping if you want them in a physical copy.

Finally, I should note, neither Lane Fox, de Ste, Croix, nor Frend were particular friends of Orthodoxy. Frend is formally the closest, having been an ordained Anglican cleric, but of a rather liberal bent. De Ste. Croix was an atheist and Marxist, but did have a dispositional soft spot for those he felt were oppressed.

Last of the three, Lane Fox is an agnostic. Yet you would find little in this authors that would lead you to think they had an axe to grind with the Church. Lane Fox actually finds much of moder Biblical scholarship and its dismissive attitude toward the textual witness of Christ and the early church befuddling. As I have heard from other classicists (not original with Lane Fox), classicists (those who study ancient Greece and Rome) would give their teeth and any number of fingers to have the just a fraction of the wealth of sources that Biblical Studies has. Most ancient manuscripts post-date the originals by centuries, and most of these are manuscriptes written not by purported eye-witnesses, but by second- and third-hand authorities (think Plutarch).

Biblical Studies (where Dr. Moss cut here teeth) has a plethora of manuscripts, many dating from within decades of the autographs, and penned by eye-witnesses. But whereas classicists generally treat their texts with great reverence, most Biblical scholarship is little more than exercises in cynicism.

This isn’t to say that Homer is treated as history in the way Thucydides is, but that Homer does give us a good picture of how eighth-century Ionic Greeks thought about the gods and the past.