Who were the martyrs in the first four centuries?

Answer 1

AnswerThere is little direct evidence as to who among the Christians was martyred in the first four centuries, due to exaggeration on both sides. Edward Gibbon ('The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire') said the scanty and suspicious materials of ecclesiastical history seldom enable us to dispel the dark cloud that hangs over the first age of the church. Origen, the third-century Church Father, writing of the total number of Christian martyrs up until his own time, stated that there were not many and that it was easy to count them (Contra Celsum 3.8).

Christian tradition says that the twelve apostles were all martyrs, some of them executed in a bizarre fashion - for example Peter crucified upside down. However, there is no contemporary evidence that Peter ever went to Rome, nor that he was either beheaded (the older tradition) or crucified. There is no evidence in The Bible or elsewhere of the martyrdom of any of the apostles.

Acts of the Apostles gives Stephen as the first Christian martyr. H J Schoeps was the first to point out that the attacks on James and Stephen are interchangeable, and occur at the same point in the narratives of Acts and Recognitions. Robert Eisenman also draws parallels between the trial, vision and execution of James to the trial, vision and stoning of Stephen in Acts. This suggests that the martyrdom of either James or Stephen is derivative and that the martyrdom did not really occur. Josephus (Ant 20.5.4) tells of "Stephen, a servant of Caesar" who was beaten (and perhaps killed) just outside Jerusalem by a band of robbers. Josephus' account of the other Stephen has so many parallels to that of in Acts of the Apostles that the greater doubt should be cast on the martyrdom of Stephen. Moreover, Raymond E. Brown ('An Introduction to the New Testament') finds the scene involving Stephen's trial and death to be truly significant because the death of Stephen in Acts matches so closely the death of Jesus in Luke's gospel. He says that we can never verify the existence and martyrdom of Stephen or the killing of James, son of Zebedee by Herod Agrippa.

It does seem that Clement of Rome, Polycarp and Ignatius were second-century martyrs. Ignatius did not 'offer' himself for martyrdom but his surviving letters refer to a "lust for death", and he apparently asked the Christians in Rome to do nothing to save him.

In his work, Ad Scapulam, Tertullian described how, around 185 CE, all the Christians of a town in Asia presented themselves to the Proconsul Arrius Antoninus and demanded the privilege of martyrdom. The proconsul told them that if they wished to die, they could hang themselves or throw themselves from the precipices.

St George, who died in the early 4th century, is known as the "great martyr" in the Orthodox world. His legend grew in the 6th century and by the 12th century, he was reputed to be a dragon-slayer.

A breakaway fourth-century Christian group, the Donatists spawned a terrorist organisation called the Circumcellions, who avidly embraced martyrdom. When they were not attacking other Christians, they sought out and attended pagan rites in order to denounce them, hoping to provoke the Romans to make them martyrs.

Over a period of some four centuries, there were undoubtedly hundreds, at least, of martyrs for the Christian faith, but few of their names have survived. Those the martyrdoms of those whose names that have survived are often disputed on sound grounds. In most cases, we will never really know who the martyrs were.