"My Share of God's Reward": Exploring the Roles and Formulations of the Afterlife in Early Christian Martyrdom (review)

L. Arik Greenberg's monograph examines the development of martyrological currents within Hellenistic Judaism and early Christianity, giving special attention to how these texts explore the concept of the afterlife. He asserts that whereas writers describe postmortem rewards in diverse ways, these formulations nevertheless function to provide martyrs with compensation for their suffering. To support his thesis, Greenberg first argues for a genealogical development of martyrological discourse: Greco-Roman noble death traditions informed Hellenistic Jewish martyr stories, and these two currents became models for early Christian writers. He then offers a diachronic reading of second-century through fourth-century Christian martyrologies to show that "world-affirming" approaches to suffering and death in earlier texts give way to an attitude that increasingly prioritizes life after death.

Greenberg's first chapter observes that early Israelite literature lacks a developed concept of the soul, imagines death as a form of punishment, and conceives of life after death as a gloomy, shadowy existence cut off from Yahweh. This Deuteronomistic world view clearly cannot account for later martyrological thought. Instead, Greenberg asserts that Hellenistic Judaism experimented with noble death traditions by valorizing sufferers as righteous and according them with rewards through some type of postmortem existence. The second half of this chapter asserts that Christian martyrologies drew on the Socratic legacy. This noble-death tradition is essential for Greenberg, who defines martyrdom as a volitional act done through pious obedience to instruct others.

The second chapter examines New Testament views of suffering and postmortem existence. Greenberg thinks that this literature begins to connect suffering and "witnessing" with views of personal immortality, variously conceived as the immortality of the soul, spiritual resurrection, or physical resurrection. Although these beliefs do not culminate in a spirit of "world-denial," Greenberg claims that they compose a constellation of ideas for later martyrologists who choose to move in this direction. Writers from the second through fourth centuries thus radicalize New Testament teachings by envisioning martyrdom as an escape from the "death" of this world and an entrance into eternal life.

The third and fourth chapters trace this development. Greenberg begins with an examination of the patristic writers St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Origen. He notes that for the first three writers, suffering was one path to God, but that they dampen their zeal for voluntary martyrdom, either by offering alternative routes to immortality or by revaluing the notion of martyrdom itself. Origen, however, makes the most overt links between the transvaluation of life and death, and personal immortality. Greenberg finds a similar trend within the martyr acts, with experimentation among early texts giving way to more rigid views of martyrdom as a form of witnessing that culminates in death and the attainment of a personal, heavenly reward.

By tracking the rise of martyrologies in conjunction with late-antique conceptions of afterlife, Greenberg has not only offered a valuable demonstration of Jewish and Christian indebtedness to Greco-Roman thought but also provided important evidence for the theological diversity of pre-Constantinian Christianity. Some assumptions and arguments, however, call for further clarification and exploration. For example, situating the martyrological texts within a broader sociohistorical matrix would add depth to Greenberg's recognition of diverse approaches to martyrdom. Why do some authors deploy one strategy over another, and what do the overlapping and crisscrossing features of these discourses reveal about early Christian attempts to negotiate social space? To appeal to "official and widespread persecution" (p. 223) is questionable and does not sufficiently explain the diverse range of views on martyrdom (e.g., Testimony of Truth, Cyprian, Prudentius' Peristephanon). Moreover, Greenberg's appeal to historical reliability (pp. 5, 150-51, 199-200) is perhaps unnecessary for his argument. Even texts written close to the time of the martyr's...