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‘Playing the Man’ the Courage of Christian Martyrs, Translated and Transposed

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Rachel Moriarty
Rachel Moriarty*
Affiliation:
La Sainte Union College of Higher Eduction, Southampton
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Extract

The aged Bishop Polycarp was burnt to death in the arena at Smyrna in the afternoon of 23 February 155 (or 156), in front of a hostile crowd. The terrible story was lovingly recorded, copied and passed round the churches; it is probably the first non-biblical record of a martyrdom, and survives by itself and in Eusebius’ History. As Polycarp entered the arena Christian eyewitnesses heard a voice from heaven, saying in Greek, for all to understand, . The first word means ‘be strong’; the last shares a root with two other Greek words, which means courage, and which means a male person, a man. We shall consider later how Polycarp’s contemporaries understood this; centuries later, about the 1880s, an Anglican academic clergyman, Joseph Lightfoot, who was soon to be a bishop himself, translated Polycarp’s story into English. He found an apt English idiom: ‘Be strong, Polycarp,’ he wrote, ‘and play the man.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 34: Gender and Christian Religion , 1998 , pp. 1 - 11
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1998

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References

1 The Martyrdom of Polycarp, ix; text, translation, and notes in Lightfoot, J. B., ed. Harmer, J. R., The Apostolic Fathers (London, 1891 and later edns), pp. 186–99 Google Scholar (introd. and Greek text) and 203–11 (translation); originally translated in Lightfoot, J. B., The Apostolic Fathers, Part II, 3 vols (London, 1885), 3 Google Scholar. The story appears in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, IV, xv, 17.Google ScholarPubMedsee below, n. 15 for versions.

2 Hall, Stuart G., ‘Women among the early martyrs’, SCH, 30 (1993), pp. 1–22 Google ScholarPubMed.

3 See Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler, In Memory of Her (London, 1983); Clark, Elizabeth A., Women in the Early Church (Wilmington, DE, 1983); Ruether, Rosemary Radford, Sexism and God-Talk (London, 1983); Jantzen, Grace M., Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar. There is a valuable selection of material in Ann Loades, ed., Feminist Theology: A Reader (London, 1990), esp. her introduction.

4 Loades, Feminist Theology, introduction, pp. 1–11: she quotes (p. 3) Lerner, Gerda, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York, 1986), pp. 236–67 Google Scholar. See also Vogt, Kari, ‘“Becoming male”: a Gnostic and early Christian metaphor’, in Borreson, Kari, ed., Image of God and Gender Models in Judaeo-Christian Tradition (Oslo, 1991), pp. 172–87 Google Scholar.

5 Soskice, Janet Martin, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar, and McFague, Sallie, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (Philadelphia, PA, 1982)Google Scholar. For a valuable recent account of the whole field see Stiver, Dan R., The Philosophy of Religious Language: Sign, Symbol and Story (Oxford, 1996), esp. pp. 112–33 Google Scholar.

6 Cameron, Averil, ‘Virginity as metaphor: women and the rhetoric of early Christianity’, in eadem, ed., History as Text (London, 1989), pp. 181–205 Google Scholar; eadem, , Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: the Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1991)Google Scholar.

7 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, in discussion after a lecture, ‘Ecofeminism: first and third world women’, given at La Sainte Union College, Southampton, 25 May 1996 Google Scholar.

8 LXX quotations are from Swete, Henry Barclay, ed., The Old Testament in Greek according to the Septuagint, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1887)Google Scholar.

9 Sophocles, Electra, 1.983; Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 1116a15-1117b 21, in Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford, 1925), III.8; Aristotle, Politics, 1260a22, in Newman, W. L., The Politics of Aristotle, 2 vols (Oxford, 1887), 2, pp. 20 Google Scholar (Greek text), 219–20 (notes); other examples are quoted in Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, new edn, ed. Henry Stuart Jones and Roderick McKenzie (Oxford, 1948).

10 Clement of Alexandria, , Stromateis, iv, 8, and vi, 12 Google Scholar, in Roberts, Alexander and Donaldson, James, ed. and trans., Coxe, A. Cleveland, rev., The Ante-Nicene Fathers, 8 vols (Grand Rapids, MI, 1962), 2 Google Scholar, pp. 4192-201 and 5031; and see also Clark, , Women, p. 18 Google ScholarPubMed; Ruether, Rosemary Radford, ‘The liberation of Christologv from patriarchy’, in Loades, , Feminist Theology, pp. 138–48 Google Scholar; Vogt, , ‘Becoming male’; and Jantzen, , Power, , Gender and Christian Mysticism, p. 53 Google Scholar.

11 I am grateful to my colleague Stephen Greenhalgh, of La Sainte Union College, Southampton, for help with this.

12 Moffat, Both James in The New Testament: A New Translation, new edn, rev. (London, 1934)Google Scholar and Knox, Ronald A., in The New Testament Newly Translated into English (London, 1945)Google Scholar render this verse ‘play the man’; modern translations, including the New English Bible, the Jerusalem Bible, the Revised Standard Version, the Revised English Bible and the Good News Bible, prefer variants on being brave, valiant, and courageous.

13 In Foxe, John, The Acts and Monuments of these Latter and Perilous Days, ed. Townsend, G. and Cattley, S. R., 8 vols (London, 1837–41), 7, p. 550 Google Scholar.

14 Prof. Susan Wabuda in her paper To be promoted above the Angels: Hugh Latimer’s understanding of Martyrdom’, presented at the 65th Anglo-American Conference of Historians on ‘Religion and Society’, London, 3–6 July 1996, argues from Latimer’s letters that he saw and described himself as a martyr before his death. I am grateful to her, and to Prof David Loades and Dr Andrew Pettegree, for discussion on this point.

15 For instance, in Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, The Ecclesiastical History and the Martyrs of Palestine, ed. and trans. Lawlor, Hugh Jackson and Leonard Oulton, John Ernest, 2 vols (London, 1927, repr. 1954), i, p. 119 Google Scholar; Williamson, G. A., in Eusebius, The History of the Church (Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 171 Google Scholar – it remains in the 2nd edn, rev. and intro. Andrew Louth (Harmondsworth, 1989); and see, for instance, Lake, Kirsopp, The Apostolic Fathers (Loeb edition), 2 vols (London and New York, 1924), 2, p. 322 Google Scholar. Source-books which use the phrase include the standard selections: Bettenson, Henry, Documents of the Christian Church (originally 1943), 2nd edn (Oxford, 1967), p. 10 Google Scholar; Stevenson, J., ed., A New Eusebius, new edn, ed. Frend, W. H. C. (London, 1987), p. 25 Google Scholar.

16 See, for example, Pamphilus, Eusebius, The Ecclesiastical History, IV, xv, 17 Google Scholar, trans. Revd Crusé, C. F. (London, 1865 Google Scholar); Musurillo, Herbert, trans., The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford, 1972), p. 9 Google Scholar; and The Apostolic Fathers, 2nd edn, trans. Lightfoot, J. B. and Harmer, J. R., ed. and rev. Holmes, Michael W. (English edn, Leicester, 1989), p.viii Google Scholar.

17 ‘ The Martyrs of Lyons’, in Musurillo, , Acts, pp. 65–84 Google Scholar.

18 Ibid., pp. 76–7, 1. 30, 78–9, 1. 1.

19 Homer, , Odyssey, ix, 415 Google Scholar.

20 Musurillo, , Acts, pp. 74–5 Google Scholar, 1. 18.

21 Ibid., pp. 78–9, 1. 30; Frend, W. H. C., Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Oxford, 1965), p. 19 Google Scholar, sees the Maccabees text as earlier than this martyrdom, but others place it later.

22 See Shaw, Brent, ‘The passion of Perpetua’, P&P, 139 (May, 1983), pp. 1–46 Google ScholarPubMed; Jantzen, , Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism, pp. 49–51 Google Scholar; Cameron, , ‘Virginity as metaphor’, p. 194 Google Scholar, and Schottroff, Luise, Lydia’s Impatient Sisters (London, 1995), p. 113 Google Scholar and n.

23 Musunllo, , Acts, p. 119 Google Scholar; Clark, , Women, p. 101 Google Scholar; Jantzen, , Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism, p. 50 Google Scholar, where this phrase is attributed to Musarillo (sic).

24 Lewis, and Short, , A Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1879, and later edns), under masculus, II Google Scholar, A.

25 The Latin text of the hymn ‘Deus, tuorum militura’ (with an edited translation) appears in Hymns Ancient and Modern, Historical Edition (London, 1909), no. 200, as well as in the Latin Breviary, where it is the regular hymn for the feast-day of a single martyr, ‘commune unius martyris’ (see, for instance, the Benedictine, Breviarium Monasticum, pro omnibus sub regula S. Patris Benedicti militantibus, 2 vols [lBruges, 1930], 1, p. 28 Google Scholar*). The translation quoted is from The English Hymnal (Oxford, 1906 and later edns), no. 181, ‘O God, thy soldiers’ crown and guard’.

26 The New English Hymnal (Norwich, 1986), no. 218; the translation is attributed to ‘J. M. Neale 1816–66 and editors’, whose names are listed on p. vi of the introduction.