WITNESS OF THE BODY

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Introduction Michael L. Budde.........................................................................................................................vii1. Christian Martyrdom: A Theological Perspective Lawrence Cunningham.................................................................................32. Early Church Martyrdom: Witnessing For or Against the Empire? Tripp York...........................................................................203. The Primacy of the Witness of the Body to Martyrdom in Paul Stephen Fowl...........................................................................434. Witness, Women's Bodies, and the Body of Christ Joyce E. Salisbury.................................................................................635. The Judgment of the Eucharist at the Trial of Joan of Arc Ann W. Astell............................................................................826. Persecution or Prosecution, Martyrs or False Martyrs? The Reformation Era, History, and Theological Reflection Brad S. Gregory.....................1077. Destroying the Church to Save It: Intra-Christian Persecution and the Modern State William T. Cavanaugh............................................1258. Martyrs and Antimartyrs: Reflections on Treason, Fidelity, and the Gospel Michael L. Budde.........................................................1519. Is Anything Worth Dying For? Martyrdom, Exteriority, and Politics After Bare Life D. Stephen Long and Geoffrey Holdsclaw...........................17110. "Threatened with Resurrection": Martyrdom and Reconciliation in the World Church Emmanuel M. Katongole............................................19011. Flashpoints for Future Martyrdom: Beyond the "Clash of Civilizations" Eric O. Hanson..............................................................204Contributors...........................................................................................................................................227

Chapter One

Lawrence Cunningham

We offer thanks to God for their victories and by renewing their memory we encourage ourselves to emulate their crowns and victories.... Saint Augustine, The City of God, VIII.27

Introduction

Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is not much read anymore except by those interested in matters of historiography or lovers of eighteenth-century prose (and sonorously wonderful prose it is). This neglect is understandable because Gibbon is not a read for the faint of heart. After he published volume 1 in 1776, six more volumes would appear, until he finished the project in 1788 with the seventh one, provoking the Duke of Gloucester to exclaim: "Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mister Gibbon?" Despite the fact that in my long-distant school days Gibbon was out of bounds for me—since my church had put his works on the Index—I enjoy dipping into Gibbon not so much for history but for the sheer pleasure of his rounded Ciceronian prose and his pugnaciously expressed judgments, of which I will provide an example soon.

Gibbon, in chapters 15 and 16 of volume 1, derides the pride of place that the Christian church had given to its earlier martyrs. Gibbon's negative brief can be economically summarized: there were not as many martyrs as the church proclaimed; some who did die were clearly fanatics; and subsequently, Christians themselves were, in their various wars, responsible for more deaths than were the Romans. Gibbon's judgment, of course, was colored by the extravagant claims of hagiography with which he would have been familiar (the Legenda Aurea was still read in pious circles in his day), as well as the sixteenth-century exploration of the Roman catacombs, in which, it was thought—erroneously—all of those buried there were martyrs. Bones of deceased Romans were sent all over the world as putative relics of martyrs. Of course, beyond these testable facts there was the seeming hypocrisy of a church trumpeting martyrdom while ignoring its own bloody hands in the Wars of Religion.

Gibbon, of course, did not deny that the Christians were persecuted. What he did deny was that the number of martyrs was great; second, he asserted that the phenomenon of death under persecution ought not to be overemphasized from a historical point of view or overly praised from within the Christian tradition. Gibbon thought that too much of early Christian history in general, and martyrdom in particular, was seen through the rose-colored lens of piety. At the end of the first volume of his great work, he has a concluding paragraph that is both beautiful in its sonority and economical in stating his thesis:

We shall conclude this chapter by a melancholy truth which obtrudes itself on the educated mind that, even admitting, without hesitation or inquiry, all that history has recorded or devotion has feigned, on the subject of martyrdom, it must still be acknowledged that the Christians, in the course of their intestine dissensions, have inflicted far greater severity on each other than they had experienced at the hands of the infidels.

At the other end of the doubting spectrum, asserted rather than argued historically, would be Frederick Nietzsche's claim, in various of his works, that the Christian martyr died out of ressentiment and a will to power. Nietzsche saw the martyr as an example of self-exaltation who embraced death in order to possess power after death. Famously, he turned a line from Jesus into a summary of his own take on martyrdom: "Everyone who humbles himself, wills to be exalted."

Some of Gibbon's or Nietzsche's jibes echo similar ones made by those in Roman antiquity who were antagonistic to the claims of the early Christians. As Robert Wilken demonstrated two decades ago, the Christians were not followers of what the pagans considered a religion, but fell under the Roman rubric of the superstitious. Wilken makes it clear that, from the perspective of the Romans, it was unthinkable to consider the followers of Jesus Christ religious; they were merely the victims of some fanatical ideas that put them outside the realm of religio. Book Fifteen of the Annales by Tacitus, one of the classical non-Christian sources for the study of Christian martyrdom, actually uses the word superstitio in describing the growth of Christianity from Palestine into Rome, with the subsequent persecution that happened under the reign of Nero.

The Latin word superstitio, to quote that gold standard dictionary for Latin, Lewis and Short's A Latin Dictionary, is "excessive fear of the gods, unreasonable religious belief ... different from religio, a proper reasonable awe of the gods." It is clear from the sources that that famous dictionary provides that the word superstitio was a very pejorative term; thus Seneca's declaration (Epistle 123): superstitio error insanus est.

Now, it was bad enough to be considered superstitious from the Roman perspective, but what was worse from that perspective was the fact that this superstition made the Christians resistant to many claims of Roman...