Martyrdom in the Early Church

The word martyr began as an ordinary courtroom word: a witness, someone who testifies to what he has seen. The apostles were witnesses of the Resurrection, and when their testimony brought them before magistrates and executioners, the word took on the meaning it now carries. A martyr is one whose testimony to the risen Christ is sealed in death. The first was St. Stephen, stoned outside Jerusalem while he prayed for his killers — dying, as the book of Acts tells it, in the very image of his Lord (Acts 7:59-60).

Rome did not persecute Christians constantly or everywhere; the persecutions came in waves, some local, a few empire-wide, over nearly three hundred years. What the state demanded was usually small: a pinch of incense before the emperor's image, a single act of public loyalty to the gods of Rome. To refuse looked like stubbornness over a trifle. But the Christian saw in that pinch of incense a denial of Christ, who had said, "Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven." The martyr's refusal was not a death-wish but a confession — a witness that would not be unsaid.

The pagans expected persecution to frighten Christians into silence. Instead the Church grew. Watching this, the North African writer Tertullian threw the paradox back at Rome: "The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed." The courage of the dying preached more powerfully than any sermon, and the ranks closed faster than the sword could thin them.

The Church honored her martyrs from the first. Christians gathered at their graves — often in the catacombs — kept the anniversary of each martyr's death, and called that day his birthday: the day he was born into heaven. Over the martyrs' tombs the Eucharist was offered, and from this grew the enduring custom of placing the relics of a saint within the altar, so that every Eucharist is still celebrated, in a sense, upon a martyr's grave. The martyrs were the first saints the Church venerated, and the roll of the communion of saints begins with them.

The martyrs did not court death, and the Church discouraged those who rushed toward it presumptuously; martyrdom was received as a grace, not seized as an achievement. Yet those given the grace met it with a startling peace. St. Ignatius of Antioch, carried to Rome to be thrown to the beasts around the year 108, wrote ahead begging the Christians there not to rescue him: "I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ." To suffer with Christ was to be joined to Christ.

When open persecution ended in the fourth century, this white-hot witness did not disappear; it changed shape. The Church would speak of a "white martyrdom" of daily dying to self, and the flight of the Desert Fathers into the wilderness was understood as martyrdom's direct successor. And blood-martyrdom itself returned again and again — under Islam among the new martyrs of the Turkish yoke, and in the twentieth century among the new martyrs of the Soviet persecution. The age of the witnesses has never really closed.