9 - Martyrdom and inspiration

Summary

The Christian Church owes its survival of almost three centuries of intermittent persecution during the critical period of its formation and growth, and its emergence at the end of that time as a movement powerful enough to establish a position of total dominance in the Roman Empire, to its clear and uncompromising idea of martyrdom. This was a tradition that it had inherited to a large extent from Judaism, like itself a martyr-religion in the sense of a religion that actively and systematically trained its adherents collectively (as distinct from the individual heroes produced by Greco-Roman philosophies, such as Socrates, or the Stoic dissidents in the early Empire) for a vocation to witness to their faith not only at the cost of, but actually by means of, suffering and death. For Christians, however, the conviction that the martyr was the ideal disciple held an even more central place in belief and practice, for it was rooted in the event that stood at the heart of the Gospel, the death of Jesus. Their doctrine of martyrdom was, indeed, largely derived and developed out of the response of the orthodox Jewish resistance movement to the persecution under Antiochus Epiphanes, but there are significant differences of attitude between such writings as Daniel, 2 Maccabees and 4 Maccabees, on the one hand, and the New Testament and second-century Christian literature on the other. The former tend to be primarily defensive.