Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions by Candida R. Moss (review)

Candida Moss’s first book proved that she is less interested in adding another thing to our stack of knowledge than in tugging at established scholarship on the bottom of the pile. This book topples what we thought we knew and, in the process, proposes new ways of reading martyrdom literature and thinking about the place of the martyr in ancient Christianity.

At first glance, this is a geographically-focused survey examining the diverse practices, theologies, and traditions of pre-Decian martyrdom in Asia Minor, Rome, Gaul, North Africa, and Alexandria. The geographical arrangement “should not be taken too literally.” It is intended as “an attempt to do justice to regional variations of Christianity” (20). In Moss’s view, such “regional variations,” especially as they are expressed via martyrdom literature, have not been taken seriously. When they are, then traditional accounts of the development, spread, and purpose of martyrdom literature have to be re-thought. Hand-in-hand with Moss’s analysis of regional variations is an account of the crumbliness of widely-accepted chronological footholds—the foundations upon which histories of Christianity are constructed. If martyrdom literature performs ideological work, then it need not be read as the byproduct of events or even “yoked to any historically verifiable persecution” at all (166).

Moss questions the common assumption that the concept of “martyrdom” is fixed (that it must involve a choice) and that the origin of martyrdom can be found by pairing “the modern definition of the martyr” with “the definition inferred from ancient literature” (2). Her first chapter, “Cultural Contexts: The Good Death and the Self-Conscious Sufferer,” argues that we impose a modern understanding of martyrdom upon our sources when we seek linguistic origins of martyrdom but fail to consider broader discussions of suffering and death in the ancient world. In reviewing Greco-Roman and Jewish texts that might be read as antecedents to Christian martyrdom literature, Moss seeks to provide a context, not a genealogy. This approach further allows her to demonstrate how textual investigations of Christian martyrdom are unduly limited when they focus solely on “martyr acts” and neglect other genres, such as the apologetic literature and apocryphal acts of the apostles that she addresses in later chapters.

If the introduction and opening chapter provide the questions and context, then the second chapter, “Asia Minor: Imitating Christ,” provides the keystone. Moss discusses Ignatius’s famous letters, but her focus is the Martyrdom of Polycarp. “More ink has been spilled over the dating of the Martyrdom of Polycarp than over any other early Christian martyr act,” Moss writes, but “if it was not composed in the second century, then the model for the emergence of early Christian martyrdom must necessarily be rethought” (58). On the basis of “historical, literary, and conceptual reasons,” Moss argues that Polycarp may not have been composed until “as late as the middle of the third century” (62). Polycarp did not inaugurate “the genre and ideology of martyrdom” so much as enter “into a preexisting debate about the nature of martyrdom and the status of martyrs, a debate that assumes the existence of the cult of the saints, the collection of relics, catechesis for martyrdom, the Catholic Church as a distinctive entity, the practice of voluntary martyrdom, and the high estimation of the martyrs” (72).

All four subsequent chapters support Moss’s re-dating of Polycarp out towards the Decian horizon by demonstrating how texts from other areas of the Roman world were in no way influenced by Polycarp and, in fact, use martyrs and martyrdom to pursue very different ideological agendas. In chapter three, “Rome: Contesting Philosophy,” Moss looks at Justin Martyr’s Apologies in order to show how “philosophical categories and conventions structure martyrological discourse in Rome” (80). For Justin, “martyrdom serves as proof of the veracity of Christianity, the true philosophy,” but the “sacrificial metaphors” and “scriptural allusions” found in Polycarp are nowhere to be found (99). Similarly, in chapter four...