In Our Time - Early Christian Martyrdom

Episode Date: May 26, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the accounts by Eusebius of Caesarea (c260-339 AD) and others of the killings of Christians in the first three centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus. Eusebius was writing in a time of peace, after The Great Persecution that had started with Emperor Diocletian in 303 AD and lasted around eight years. Many died under Diocletian, and their names are not preserved, but those whose deaths are told by Eusebius became especially celebrated and their stories became influential. Through his writings, Eusebius shaped perceptions of what it meant to be a martyr in those years, and what it meant to be a Christian.The image above is of The Martyrdom of Saint Blandina (1886) at the Church of Saint-Blandine de Lyon, FranceWith:Candida Moss Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of BirminghamKate Cooper Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of LondonAndJames Corke-Webster Senior Lecturer in Classics, History and Liberal Arts at King’s College LondonProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, in 303 AD, the Roman emperors began the great persecution of Christians, and it was eight years before they restored their right to worship. In those years, many died, some of them forgotten,

but some preserved to this day by right. such as Eusebius of Caesarea, who lived through it. And in his writings, Eusebius shaped perceptions of what it meant to be a martyr in those first 300 years of Christianity and what it meant to be a Christian. With me to discuss early Christian martyrs are Candida Moss, Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham,

James Cork-Webster, Senior Lecturer in Classics History and Liberal Arts at King's College London, and Kate Cooper, Professor of History at Royal Holloway University of London. University of London. Kate Cooper, we're covering 300 years, but can you outline how Christianity had spread from its first roots with the apostles? Christianity famously goes from being 12 people originally to being roughly 10% of the population of the Roman Empire in the year 300. And it seems that how Christians achieved the incredible growth rate from a handful of people to roughly 6 million was by telling stories.

The times, as it were, must have been ready for it, though, weren't they? It's a great question. Why did the Roman Empire convert to a new religion in the early 4th century? It's a multicultural empire with dozens, perhaps even hundreds of cults of different gods who had been the local gods of areas that had been successively conquered by the Romans during their expansion? And why was it that a minor cult of Judea was the one to eventually take over the whole empire? What's distinctive about Christianity is it's a part of Judaism that becomes an offshoot and gets expelled from Judaism as you might say a heresy late in the first century. At the time of the Jewish wars, there's a kind of purge within Judaism of anybody who's.

seen to be dangerous or subversive. And one of the groups that gets purged most decisively is the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, whom they believed to have been the Messiah, the Christ. Christians weren't the first people to die for a cause. Can we switch to and say who else had died for the cause? Dying for a cause was one of the most important ideals in the Roman world. It's an idea that they had inherited from the Greeks.

You know, you think of Socrates giving his famous speech in Plato's apology just before his execution. And you think also, remember the Roman army. You know, this is a culture where people being willing to die for the common good is the bread and butter of life, or maybe the olive oil, of life. And in Judaism, there's a specific importance of this ideal because the Jews had spread out into areas beyond Judea, but they had carried their own God with them. And under the Hellenistic kings, the followers of Alexander the Great, in the third and second centuries BC, there was an attempt to quash this tradition of Jewish. exceptionalism, Jews refusing to add the gods of Olympus into their own religious worship. And this was something that the Jews saw as idolatry and it was something that they couldn't bear. Can I come to you, Candidna, and I take up an idea that's been raised already.

What ideas in the Roman Empire led them to the idea, which has been mentioned, but was a very strong idea of a good death? This is a really common idea. sometimes skeptics look back at early Christian martyrs and people like Sigmund Freud describe them as something like a suicide cult. They don't quite understand why would people do this? And as Kate was saying, the idea of dying for something, of dying a good death with self-control, without displaying any sign of pain or fear, that was something that people thought about, because this is a world in which roughly 50% of people die before they reach the age of five.

And so people are thinking about death. Everyone knows about it. Everyone sort of lives a little bit on a knife's edge. And so you have philosophers like Socrates, you have the Stoics, you have whole clusters of philosophers dying, these sort of very self-controlled, composed, and to us, very avoidable deaths. But death and how you die is seen to be the kind of capstone on your life and a kind of testimony. So you have women dying as evidence of their innocence, for example. And ideas like this that are sort of fermenting around the ancient Mediterranean,

this is something that everyone understood. Everyone understood that there should be something that you should be willing to die for, whether it was country or city or your virtue or your family. And into this, steps the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. The kind of death he dies is unusual. He's executed as a common criminal in this horrendous, excruciatingly painful way. And ordinarily, if the religious movement's leader died like this, his followers would just sort of dissipate. They would think, well, is a sign that he was wrong or God was angry with us, but that doesn't happen with Christianity. What happens with the Jewish followers of Jesus is that they come to see dying for God,

being executed by the dominant regime as a sign that you have God's favor, that God is with you. It really kind of flips the cultural script. And when you combine that with the idea of the good death that Kate was talking about, then you have a very potent idea that suffering for God is an achievement and that if you suffer like Jesus, if you imitate his death, that that is an accomplishment that could even bring you salvation. In those first three centuries, Canada, was it a capital offence to be a Christian? We have a vague idea that Christians were always being persecuted in those 300 years. It wasn't like that, was it?

It absolutely wasn't like that. You're right. As Kate mentioned, until the end of the first century, what we call Christians were to Roman administrators indistinguishable from Jews. There was no name Christian until about 90 AD. And so the idea that Christians were under attack makes no sense because no one's calling themselves a Christian. And then our first evidence for this comes sort of in the first decades of the second century, we have these letters between the Roman Emperor Trajan and the governor of, Bethanya Pontus in modern-day Turkey, Pliny. And Pliny writes to Trajan and he says, I have these two

enslaved women who are Christians. I've tortured them as is customary when we're dealing with enslaved people to find out what Christians are doing. I'm somewhat concerned about the effect that Christians are having on the local economy, especially like sacrificing temples and things like that. And they were very obstinate. And my position is I'm going to give them a number of chances to recant, but if they're very obstinate, then surely they're worthy of death. And I'm running to you to find out what to do. And what does that tell us as historians? It tells us that at the beginning of the second century, no one knows what to do with Christians. So it's definitely not a capital offense. I think the first time we can talk about Christians

sort of running a foul of Roman legislation is the middle of the third century when the emperor Odysseus issues in Edek where he wants everyone to participate in a loyalty test. Now, this wasn't about Christianity. It's for everyone. And Romans aren't going out there by Romans, I mean, Roman authorities aren't going out there in checking that you've done this. But for Christians, they couldn't participate in this loyalty test. So what probably happens is if you're in a business conflict, someone knows you're a Christian, then they might come forward as a matter of sort of personal rivalry. If you have to swear an oath and religion is everywhere in the Roman Empire, you're constantly running up against religion. If you're keeping your money in a bank,

it's probably a temple. So swearing oaths is something that Christians aren't supposed to do, but is a part of everyday life. And in that kind of situation, Christians might find themselves under scrutiny. James, James Cork-Webster, following up on what Canada's been saying, it seems to me that the Christians needed to keep a low profile because the enemies were in the same room as they were just giving them away as it were. Yeah, I think this is right, Melvin. I mean, there's two important things to think about here.

One is the way the Roman world works and the other is, you know, kind of what we think about what it meant to be a Christian, to call yourself a Christian. So the first thing is, you know, we have this image, I think, of Rome as a kind of monolithic empire, kind of imposing its policy across the empire with a huge bureaucracy. And in fact, Rome's empire is basically run on a shoestring.

They have a very minimalist attitude to government. They send a governor with a skeleton staff to run the provinces, and he has minimal resources with which to do it. So really, you know, a governor is pretty overwhelmed by all the stuff that's waiting for him. And so, you know, we shouldn't think of kind of Rome, kind of really enacting policy in the provinces most of the time, but as being reactive to issues that are brought before them.

Candida said, you know, in that sense, it's Christians are perhaps a little bit less afraid of the government than they are kind of people around them, people in their local communities, neighbours, friends, business associates that might try and use their Christianity against them. So, so one thing to think about is Roman government. And the other is, is Christian identity. Again, you know, I think we, we tend to think about identity sometimes in a kind of monolithic way that you are a Christian and that's all you are and that defines everything. you do in that moment. But identity, you know, we all have multiple different identities that we kind of foreground different hats that we wear at different times. And we know that early Christians

did the same thing. So they might foreground their Christian identity in one context with other Christians and foreground a different identity in a different context. So for example, we know that there were plenty of Christians, possibly most Christians who were perfectly happy sacrificing to the Greco-Roman gods because we have other Christians complaining about it. And And so for those Christians, they presumably weren't that worried about being asked to swear an oath. So again, what it meant to be a Christian varies a little bit depending on who you are. Are we beginning to see martyrdoms? So are we talking about deaths of people because they are Christians.

So Christians do die and they write up these stories as them having died because they were Christian. the perspective of the persecutors that the emperors, the provincials of nature might be slightly different. I think if you'd ask Pliny, well, Pliny says, right, these Christians have come before me.

You can't have mentioned the Roman magistrate Pliny before. He says, look, these Christians have come before me and he says, whatsoever it is that they actually believe in, the Latin word is Quala cumqueur. He sort of sets it to one side. Whatever it is they believe in, it's pretty clear that they're troublemakers,

right? They're stubborn and they're obstinate. So Pliny is sort of less interested in their the kind of details of the Christianity. And he just sort of knows that there are a group of kind of people he considers low lives who are gathering together. So yes, we do have martyrdoms from the Christian perspective, and we certainly have them by this period. The sparking of martyrdom literature,

so the kind of the famous stories of martyrdom, comes a little bit later. Some would say later in the second century, some would say third century. It isn't the full frontal assault that Constantine takes advantage of. That's exactly right, Melvin. Yeah, we'd be better speaking of early Christianities than early Christianity, which sort of gives this impression of a universal monolithic group. In fact, we just have lots of scattered small communities all across the empire that meet with very different circumstances depending on where they're living. In the second century, lots of people are considered to be subversive basically because

they have the habit of meeting in groups. And meeting in groups is considered to be a dangerous thing on the part of the Roman administration. In fact, Pliny the Younger actually writes to Trajan asking for permission to set up a company of firefighters in the city of Nica Media. And he gets the response, no, we don't want people meeting together because if they start meeting together to prepare to fight fires, the needs. next thing you know, they'll be talking politics. There were six years, starting about 300 and the way, there was massive persecution. Candida, can you tell us what fate Christians could expect in those six years and give us some examples?

This is what people mean when they talk about the persecution of Christians. And if we're talking about the great persecution, how you die depends very much on the cruelty of the individual administrator before whom you appear. So on what scale was this happening and who was driving it? Normally we credit this to the Emperor Diocletian, who has sort of four edicts that come out in a little over a year that starts with destroying places of worship and Christian books. He was also destroying the books of other supposedly subversive groups. Then he wants to arrest the clergy.

Then he calls an amnesty as long as everyone sacrifices. But then in his fourth edict, he demands that everyone, men, women and children, that they all have to pass this sacrifice test. And this is the first time we see the Romans actually sort of pursuing people, because before they weren't dedicating resources to this. What's happening to them when they've caught them, and how many have they caught, and where are they caught? The numbers are greatly inflated,

but certainly Christians are dying in the hundreds and thousands, especially in the eastern part of the empire. It's not just a question of an individual betraying you. and we can imagine that entire households are being betrayed. Some of the much later stories inflate the numbers into the tens of thousands of people dying at one time. When you say dying, you mean being murdered, being killed, being murdered. And when we think of how Christians died, we think of them in the arena being thrown to lions. That's the expression, thrown to the lions.

If you were a citizen, you would hopefully be beheaded. Many were put on public display. and these are, if you've read the stories, very emotional and powerful stories that get increasingly detailed over time. And some of them are tortured at length. And here we're seeing people being arrested merely because they were in possession of Christian books. It's perhaps worth emphasising as well that during the Great Persecution, the Christians are not the only group that are targeted. So we also have a very famous text called the Edict Against the Maniches,

who are another minority religious group. And this is really important because it's a reminder that, though there is a sort of change in scale at this point in the Great Persecution, it's not just against the Christians. It's a more widespread attempt on the part of Diocletian and his co-emperors, the Tetrax, to try and do something about the difficult political times they were living in. And they target those minority groups that they see as being in something. sense disloyal.

Don't you, can you introduce the listeners to Eusebius, and his writings, his massive writings, he became the great storyteller of the Christian martyrs? So can you tell us what story he was telling and what we can learn from that? Yusebius is the self-proclaimed, admittedly, first Christian historian. He's really the first person after the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles has been written hundreds of years before. Yusebius is writing in the early 4th century. and he's the first person to sit down and tell the story of early Christianity.

So Kate started this program by talking about the rise of Christianity, and it's Yusebius that really is the first person to try and tell that whole story. He's not just interested in recounting what happened in those 300 years. Really what he's doing is using the past 300 years of Christian history to try and make something happen in his own day. And in Eusebius's case, he really wants to tell a story of early Christian history that suits his own purposes in the early 4th century. He wants to gentrify it. That's exactly right.

Yeah, I like to think of this as smoothing off the rough edges of Christianity. So we have to imagine, as you said yourself, we started with a kind of very small group of poor fishermen, essentially, from parts of Judea in the east of the empire. And we're now at a stage where, as Kate said, we've got 10% of the population, 6 million Christians, and Christianity has spread to the upper echelons of society. So elite, highly educated, Greek-speaking Roman citizens. And I think for that demographic, there are lots of aspects of early Christian history that are a bit uncomfortable. Well, then you see, this makes a lot of stuff up and pretends that Christ was in constant communication with the king. ups the status quite considerably and it's all wrong. I know that's a distressing reductio for you,

but still, it's something like that. No, no, no, not distressing at all. I mean, you're right in one sense, but I think we just need to nuance a little bit what Yusebis is doing. So he's definitely, he's definitely kind of rebranding early Christianity, but what he's doing is cleverer than just making stuff up. What he does is, because Yusebis is also the first documentary historian, which is kind of amazing. So he's working with. text and documents. But what he's very, very good at doing is massaging those documents. So the way he frames them, the way he starts is quotations. So you've raised the amazing story of the Abgar correspondence, right, which is Jesus's correspondent with the king. So this is a story where

basically a foreign king called Abgar writes to Jesus and says, look, you know, I've heard that you're doing all these miracles. I'm pretty sure you're divine. I'm actually ill. So would you mind coming to my kingdom and healing me? And Jesus, according to this story, writes back and you see, says he has the letter and says, always nice to hear from a fan. I'm actually busy at the moment. We ought to get back to the martyrs, though, we can't do everything in one program.

Please finish this fake correspondence story. Of course. I mean, the correspondence is going to be important for the martyrs. So Eusebius finds this story, right? The story of a correspondent between Jesus and the King. And he knows that it's not true because he would have been able to tell that this is cobbled together from the Gospels.

But he includes it because, as you said, it allows him to sort of replace the low-status carpenter with an elite correspondent of kings. But here's why this is important for martyrs, because as Candidus said earlier, there is this phenomenon of imitatio Christi. So the martyrs are in some sense imitating the death of Jesus. So Eusebius, in trying to rebrand Christianity and rebrand the martyrs, has to start by rebranding Jesus. So actually retelling the story of Jesus and shifting attention away from his death on the cross

and towards his correspondence with the king is actually important for the way that he goes on to retell the stories of the martyrs. Thank you. Can you tell me who are the most compelling of the martyrs, what happened to them, and take us from there? The first of Eusebius' stories is of a figure called Ignatius,

who's living in the very early second century. He's the bishop of the city of Antioch, and he's turned into the authorities, and what's important about him is that he's ferociously ready to die for the faith. And Eusebius gives long quotes from the letters that Ignatius writes to the Christian communities talking about how excited he is to have the opportunity to die for the cause and to see himself as imitating Christ. and returning to Christ by dying for the faith. How does he die? While Eusebius is very excited about his willingness to die, he can't find a narrative of his actual death.

What about Blundita, for instance? So the next great martyr in Eusebius is another bishop, Polycarp of Smyrna, who's a leader of the people, and when he's turned into the Roman authorities, He says that he's ready to die, he wants to die, and it's clear that he's been inspired by Ignatius, that he sees this as an imitation of Christ. And then Polycarp goes to the funeral pyre and he's burned at the stake. And Eusebius says that the smell of his flesh burning was like the smell of a loaf of bread being baked. And it was the smell of paradise.

Do we know the date of that? He says it's under Marcus O'Reilly. who was emperor from 161, so probably early 160s. Also under Marcus Aurelius is a fascinating martyrdom that Eusebius tells of the murders of the city of Lyon in eastern France. Interestingly, there's a Greek-speaking Christian community in Lyon. And something really important has happened in the interim, which is that under Marcus Aurelius, there's a law passed, Senateist Consultum in the 170s that allows for people who are staging gladiatorial games to buy prisoners from the local governors. And this, because of this, they can use the prisoners as fodder

in the games. Basically, are you suggesting these prisoners are Christians? Well, some of them are, and we know this, because the story of the martyrs of Leone, in 177, specifically says that the Christians are, you know, they're gathered together, they're put into prison, and then they're taken out to be martyred in the arena. So they have a public death that's not just a public execution. It's a death as part of the gladiatorial games, which means a crowd, not of hundreds standing around a gallows or a funeral parr, but a crowd of thousands in the arena. So it becomes a big public spectacle.

And what's fascinating about this is, again, Eusebius takes this idea of the imitation of Christ, and he says that the humblest person in the group, an elderly slave woman called Blandina, she's taking care of the group as a kind of spiritual mother. And then when she is, the time comes for her execution, instead of being thrown to the beast, she's hung on a cross, like as Jesus had been, which is a standard criminal execution in the Roman period. And he says that she hung there on the cross as it in the same way that Jesus had done. So this idea of the imitation of Christ really takes flesh in the way. this story and the marriage between the noble death and the idea of the imitation of Christ just comes to perfection.

Can I, could I just come in here, Melvin? Yes, Jim, yes. So what I wanted to say is Kate here's touched upon one of the things that's really distinctive about some of Eusebius' martyr stories and Christian martyr stories more generally, which goes back to what we were saying earlier about ideas of noble death in the Roman world, which is that, you know, Candida talked about kind of elite women. like Lucretia and the way that they would die or philosophers. One of the things that the Christians are quite keen on claiming is that within Christianity,

it's not just the people that you would expect to be able to die well who die well, philosophers, elite men, even elite women. But it's actually all aspects of society. So one of the things that's so interesting about Blandina, who caters raised, is that she is a slave. And in the Christian martyr stories, the claim is that they're really saying, look, in our community, it's not just the people. people you'd expect. It's also the lowborn, it's women, its children, its slaves, who are equally capable of dying in a noble and philosophical way. Was this big persecution from 303 to 309, was this attempt to sort of not only subdue,

but almost eliminate the Christians? I think the great persecution has to be understood as an attempt not so much to eliminate a specific group as to put the empire on a new basis of divine favor. They're going through a civil war is brewing, and in fact it's going to be a really bloody civil war. And the idea of getting the empire into the right relationship with the gods, get everybody sacrificing, get rid of all of the, everyone that you can of the kind of religious rabble.

And it's very hard to do because, of course, you know, there are so many subversive groups in the empire. We know of a few, the ones essentially the ones that Eusebius thought were interesting and important. We hear a lot about. But sadly, we don't have, for example, a Manichaean historian of the 4th century who's explained what happened in the persecution of the Manichies or indeed probably dozens of other groups. I also think it's important to emphasize here that, you know, I don't think the Romans thought that would have to eradicate the whole group because the idea that a whole group wouldn't sacrifice was just a bit of an anathema to them. So in general, Roman administrators just assumed that,

you know, well, why wouldn't you sacrifice? So, you know, in their heads, they would, they would think, well, we won't have to get rid of all Christians, because presumably most Christians will be happy to sacrifice. It's just a few hardliners who won't. And they might have been right in that. It might well have been the case that lots of Christians were willing to sacrifice. So probably I don't think it would have been envisaged in terms of eradicated. more just kind of bringing people into line. But I think that's where the storytelling comes in because you have already from the late second century,

you have the Christian apologists who are writing about why Christianity is the morally best religion. And one of the things they refer to again and again is the fact that Christians are willing to die for the faith shows that they're morally superior people. They're more serious about their religion. And if they know of Christians who are, in a sense, quietly getting on with things and sacrifice if they have to, they're not going to be sharing the story of those Christians because, frankly, they're not that impressive. The people who are impressive are the ones who are really willing to give everything for the faith.

I agree with Hayden James that it's really about bringing the Christians to heal. They don't think they have to exterminate them. And I think it's important to distinguish between the sort of realities and legal structures, of persecution and legislation against Christians, and as Kate said, the power of the stories themselves. So the stories of martyrdom and even the historical incidences of martyrdom, they were enormously powerful in their own day, hearing the stories of martyrs, thrown to wild animals, burned alive, and hearing that they stood there and they sung psalms, and they stood quietly and patiently, As Kate said, with Blandina, when they look at Blandina, they see Christ crucified for them in her body.

And the text says that she leads the people who were there to Christ. And that's a very powerful moment. So we don't need that many martyrs for martyrdom to have this hugely important, outsized presence in the Christian imagination. And that doesn't have to be tied. Have you any idea how many martyrs there were? I think this is impossible to say because what we're digging through is 1500 years of people beefing up the numbers and telling more stories in order to make their versions of those stories have more of an impact. And so as people are copying these stories, they are elaborating them, they are adding in more martyrs. And so it's very difficult to come back to the specific numbers for any particular time period.

If you're looking for a number, you'd probably be thinking in the second century of dozens or maybe hundreds of individuals being killed across the whole century, at least of those who, you know, if you take all of the sources that we have and put them together, it's not a large number. It's not until the fourth century that you start to get, you know, during the great persecution of 303 to 311, there's this great updraft. of executions. Christians probably were not the only people being executed, but certainly we know that Christians were executed in the hundreds and thousands rather than in the, you know, rather than in the tens and twenties. So did they become part of the games, as it were, their games they had to such as bread and circuses? The sacrifice of Christians was on this Saturday, as it were. Well, it certainly from the time of Marcus Aurelius onwards, Christians are, their valuable fodder for the for the games and in that sense it does become a form of entertainment

and something that the romans the roman authorities seem to have missed is that because of course the roman authorities the roman authorities were not reading christian literature and so what they don't know that you know they think that the christians are being humiliated you know they see the crowds laughing at them as they're being executed what they don't know is that the christians themselves are circulating stories that are giving a completely different meaning to these deaths. And those are the stories that are eventually going to get carried forward and are going to become the master narrative, you know, the narrative that we hear. Are these the stories of individuals or of the idea?

I mean, an individual like perpetua, for instance, where does she figure? And can you give us a bit of detail of what happened to her? And what significance did she have in the imagination and the impetus of the other Christians. Talking about perpetua of Carthage is really important because she is a martyr who doesn't fit the Eusebius model. She's

not one of the figures that Eusebius talks about in the fourth century. Instead, how we know about perpetua is because her community in Carthage in the early third century kept her prison diary in which

she talks about how she's expecting to go into the arena and have to fight with the beasts. And not only did they keep her prison diary, but they attached to it a narrative which claims to be an eyewitness account of her actual death and the courage with which she faced the animals and the serene gaze that she has when she looks out over the crowd and present. herself to die. She's a figure who we know... Which animals? Perpetua

is executed by a heifer, a female cow. And the narrative is very clear that it's important that it was a female animal. That's her death. Gord to death. Perpetua is gourd to death. But the writer

who explains the writer who gives the account of her death says that after she was gored, she was concerned about whether her clothing had come uncovered. She was anxious about her modesty, and she actually didn't realize that she had been gored and that she was bleeding.

She had gone into a transcendent state. And this is super important as well for understanding these martyr narratives. There's a belief that the most, moment of death is releasing the Christian into what we moderns would call a higher plane of consciousness. They think that they're being reunited with Christ. And in a way, it's almost like bringing the end of the world ahead because they know that their death is going to transform them and bring them in contact with the divine. So, So it becomes a very positive thing.

James, can you tell us how popular stories of Martyrton were in the 4th century? Were they written up, what they talked about, were they? You tell me. So all of those things really. I mean, we know that the stories about martyrs become, in essence, the most popular literature within early Christianity. And early Christian literature becomes the bulk of what is written and produced as Christianity. comes to dominate the world more widely. So yes, these stories are being passed on, both orally, and then once they're in written form, they're being circulated. We know that they are

eventually kind of stored in medieval manuscripts. We also know that there's a burgeoning what we call the cult of the martyrs. So there's a sort of worship develops around what are believed to be the relics of martyrs and the sites where martyrs are believed to be buried. And that comes with all sorts of complications and kind of interesting power dynamics as well. And there are books of martyrs, most famously later on, Fox's book of martyrs and so on. Exactly. So the phenomenon of collecting martyr stories, which Eusebius starts, that's one of the many ways in which he's cast a long shadow. And the tradition of not just gathering the stories of the martyrs,

but using the martyrs as mouthpieces for your own values is picked up again and again. And as you say, Fox's acts and monuments is one of the very famous examples of this in the conflicts between Protestants and Catholics. What do you think the impact of the martyrs stories was? What impact did it have? Let's move on from Constantine. Can you take up that question, please, Canada? At the time, as we said before, clearly these are inspiring stories that bring people to Christianity. and actually used to sort of initiate people into the religion.

They're sort of like advertising. But in the aftermath of Constantine's conversion, the opportunities for martyrdom sort of they become scant. And so people take up the martyrdom cause in different ways by becoming ascetics, you know, becoming monks going out into the desert and seeing that as a sort of form of martyrdom. but we also see picking up on what Eusebius is doing and understanding that in all situations, you can cast your opponent, whether there are a political opponent, a military opponent,

a doctrinal opponent, as sort of the heirs to the persecutor. So by the time we're in the Middle Ages with Pope Urban II, we can see Pope Urban the Second calling for a crusade and saying those who die in this crusade by killing other people that they will get the rewards of martyrdom. So Pope Urban Second is able to take this kind of martyrological script developed by Eusebius and use it and deploy it against these sort of political and religious rivals of what he sees as Christendom. And so we can see martyrdom developing in this way.

So this was a desired objective to be a martyr? Absolutely. I mean, if you can take another thing like fighting in a battle and you can say, fighting in this war and killing people will bring you the rewards of martyrdom, which means sort of immediate salvation, crowns in heaven. That's a way to motivate people to do other things. And that's part of the throughline of martyrdom's history all the way from Eusebius up to Fox and beyond that you can use martyrdom and the idea of, of martyrs versus persecutors or Orthodox Christians versus heretical Christians or Christians versus Muslims to portray any conflict as a battle that is truly the heir to the battle fought by the martyrs and ultimately by Jesus himself. James, you want to come in on this on the effect of martyrs, on the psychology of battle and the way people thought living a good life, part of living a good life. Best life could be a martyr.

Candid's hit the nail on the head that what's important about the kind of the afterlife of the martyrs is the multivalency of it really, that they are, they become these kind of figures who can be appropriated and used by others in ways that not only kind of neglects the reality of their own experience, but is sometimes in conflict. So I think what Yusebius recognized and what other people throughout the ages are recognized is that, you know, the martyrs have a kind of curious charisma that they're powerful because of the sort of moral authority that they've gained by being willing to die. And if you can appropriate that, particularly in the text, and kind of claim it for yourself, then you found a particularly powerful way of getting your message across. And we see that in a whole bunch of different ways. Another thing we see is again and again, we see people using an idea that Eusebius himself had used, which is putting words into the mouths of martyrs. This idea of martyrs as the noble carrier of the great message

is one that's going to have an incredible history into the Middle Ages and beyond. When did martyrs, the idea of there being martyrs, become an established part? when was being martyr being part of the church's character? I think I would say that it's there right from the start, Melvin. I mean, that, you know, as we've been saying, that the central kind of central principle of early Christianity

is that there is this founder figure who died, who suffered in some sense unjustly. And what's amazing is that even in the earliest narratives of Jesus' lives in the Gospels, they have Jesus saying to his followers, you are also going to be persecuted, right? You are also going to suffer. So this is kind of put there as the central expectation right at the start of Christian literary history.

And in a way, what you can see in every successive Christian generation is their attempt to figure out how that prediction, that prophecy, applies to them. So I think in a very real way, you never have Christianity without martyrdom. Well, thank you all very much. That was fascinating. Thank you very much to Canada Moss, James Cork Webster and Kate Cooper,

and to our studio engineer Donald MacDonald. Next week, it's the Davidian Revolution in 12th century Scotland and David the first reputation as the perfect king. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What was left out that you wish you'd been able to put in?

Something I think is really important is the way that the idea of martyrdom takes off at just the moment that Christianity is becoming an imperial religion, a religion of power rather than a religion of outsiders. Eusebius is crucial in this because he's the first historian writing at the time of Constantine's piece of the church. And it's it's like he's trying to warn people. This religion can't just become a religion of earthly power. It can't forget its roots as a kind of countercultural tradition. So I think that almost countercultural idea of martyrdom is something that James is right to say that it's something that goes back to the very beginning of the church. But in some ways, I think

the church of the first three centuries is a mixed bag. And Eusebius is really, he's curating. When he goes looking for documents and collecting them, he's trying to figure out what's really important here. And it's fascinating that when he's looking for things that are important, the two things that he thinks are most important, are one, asceticism, the idea of living as if the end of the world were tomorrow, giving up earthly things in favor of expectation of the end time. And the second thing is another way of showing your loyalty to this expectation of a return to God. And that's this idea of witness even in the face of death. Candida, what about you? I would definitely agree with what Kate just said and what I would throw into the mix would be the social status of early

Christians. They're portrayed as being mostly women, enslaved people, tradespersons. And when you think about what the life of enslaved people was like in the Roman Empire, they were constantly being threatened with execution and crucifixion. It was a joke that would be thrown their way. And they weren't just punished for doing things wrong, they were punished at the whims of despotic slaveholders. And so when you think what life is like for people living in that kind of marginalized situation, enslaved people lived under the shadow of the cross before Christians did. And so the kind of the gamble of following Jesus and embracing martyrdom, which as James said, was there from the very beginning that if you follow Jesus,

you will probably die as a martyr, that really made sense. When you think about martyrdom, some people think that it makes no sense. Why would people do this? But when you think about the eternity of post-mortem existence, many marches will say this, that it's worth the pain of a single hour rather than face the flames of hell. And so I would say that what's been left out is that modagem makes sense. And I think sometimes that gets lost. Yes, was it was it a driver? Come to you, James, or back to stay with you, Canada. Was it a driver of the growth of Christianity? In the beginning of the program, spoke about Christianity consisting of a few dozen poor, and often illiterate Jews around the Sea of Galilee. And the end of our discussion, 300 years later,

there were 10% of a mighty, mighty Roman Empire. Six million was a figure put forward. And did martyrdom help to drive that growth? Absolutely. I think that these stories were inspiring to people. I think the way that the martyrs behaved in these stories, when they heard them read, those were the ideals that everybody valued.

Everybody valued their composure, the serene gaze that Kate referred to. Everyone valued that. and as horrified as they were by the things that were done to the martyrs, they were enthralled and inspired by their courage. So when they heard those stories, they were inspired to spread them, to become Christians themselves, and to celebrate martyrs with others.

James, what would you have said that you hadn't time to say? Well, I think at the risk of throwing the cat among the pigeons a little bit, I mean, I guess the thing that I would like to talk a little bit about, a little bit more is the sort of the variety, the range of different views on martyrdom within early Christianity. Because, you know, everything we said is correct, but it often reflects the kind of the views of a particular, groups within Christianity.

And as we've said, as you said, Melvin, Christianity was really messy. There's lots of different kind of different communities out there in different places. And, you know, it's fair to say that there are some Christian intellectual traditions that are less enthusiastic about martyrdom than others. And there are good reasons for this. So, you know, we know that martyrdom was one of the things that non-Christians spotted about Christians,

and they didn't always think highly of it. So most famously, Marcus Aurelius in his meditations, mentions the Christians at one point, and says, you know, we shouldn't go rushing blindly into death as the Christians do. And he sort of characterizes Christians this way. And there were some Christians that thought similarly that were also a little bit uncomfortable with the idea of martyrdom. And so what I think is really interesting to talk about is the way that those traditions kind of evolve in relation to each other and how ideas of martyrdom change.

Because Eusebius, for example, is well aware of these criticisms and sort of wants to address them. And so he's very keen to, even as he celebrates martyrdom, he's very keen to say, but we don't do it rashly. Right, you know, we are prepared to die and we do it for the right reasons, but like good philosophers, we do it only after we've considered that it's the right time to do it. In other words, Yusebius is saying, you know, we are martyrs, yes, but Marcus Aurelius would really have approved if he understood the way that we're martyred. Does Eusebius, was he ever challenged, or any of his theories, ever challenged? Yes, definitely.

I mean, Yusebius actually is technically found to be a heretic in the later church. So in other words, it was believed that he thought the wrong things about the nature of God, essentially. And so many later generations sort of condemn Eusebius for the way that he talks about the relationship between Jesus and the divine. And similarly, he's criticized for the way he talks about Constantine. So subsequent generations often see him as being a kind of lackey of Constantine. I personally don't think that he was, but this is something that he's criticized for. So Eusebius definitely sort of goes in and out of favour over the sort of thousand years that follow. But what's amazing is, despite him being popular or unpopular, he's such a seminal thinker that even when people disagree with him, they're still talking in the categories that he defined for early Christianity.

He basically sets the whole tone of how we talk about early Christian history. So even his opponents are followers of Eusebius, whether they like it or not. He's really a gatekeeper, is Eusebius. If you think about what a librarian in an early medieval monastery is going to look for, the first book they want after the New Testament, or after the books that make up the New Testament, is that Eusebius, and then they'll look for the books that Eusebius mentions. He absolutely lays the groundwork for how later generations understand the church.

Is there any way you can calculate in terms of martyrs? Was it predominantly male martyrs, female? If we go back to the apostles, we have 12 males there. Was it mainly men who are persecuted? Is there any way we can explore that? One way you could look at that is to look at the apocryphal acts of the apostles, which are a group of narratives that we're, We now believe to be fictional that were written in the second and third and fourth centuries remembering the early days of the apostles.

And they specifically explain how each of the 12 apostles went to be murdered. They're very excited about making this connection with martyrdom. But something that's very interesting about these stories is in almost every case, there's at least one woman. and sometimes there are a dozen women who come into the story originally as listeners and followers of the apostles, but they then become martyrs themselves. So there's an idea that in a way almost the perfect Christian listener is going to be a woman. I don't know what to make of that. I mean, it is important to say that in many ways the most striking unusual thing of,

our early Christianity is the constant interest in women and the female experience that is there right from the earliest texts and continue. And it is something distinctive to Christianity. And it's, you know, the predominance of female martyrs in, or the sort of presence of female martyrs in all our texts is, is one example of a much more wide-ranging interest in the female voice. Well, thank you all very much. It was terrific. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. is produced by Simon Tillotson. I thought it was going to be like, we have such a great friendship that we can talk about things that I can't talk about

with anyone else, even my wife. I can talk to you about things that I can't talk to my wife about. Because when I tried to talk to my wife about work, she just rolls her eyes. I thought you're going to say, like astronauts, we're the only ones who've been to the moon and no one else has seen what we've seen. I'm Louis Theroux,

and if like me, you enjoyed listening to John Ronson's Things Fell Apart, You might also like this conversation where I ask him all about how he made it. Funny, so you're conflict-averse, I'm conflict-averse, yet we spend our lives putting ourselves in very conflict-heavy situations. Why is that, Louis? That's how things fell apart with John Ronson and Louis Theroux on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.