Opening the Canon of Martyr Narratives: Pre-Decian Martyrdom Discourse and the Hypomnēmata of Hegesippus

Scholarship on early Christian martyrdom has long relied on a canon of narratives published in collections of texts. This article probes the shortcomings of this canon through the test case of the "apocryphal" martyr narratives of Hegesippus, a later second-century writer known through Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History. As seen in collections of martyr narratives published from 1901 to 2017, as well as Adolf von Harnack's programmatic surveys of the genre, texts were canonized based on historical reliability (especially through claims to eyewitness testimony), on being stand-alone texts, and on describing persecution by Roman imperial agents. Since most scholars now reject older paradigms of historical reliability and genre, and investigate discourses rather than events, Hegesippus's narratives—which were not eyewitness accounts, were embedded in a longer text, and involve Jewish persecutors—should enter the canon. The article concludes with two suggestions about how Hegesippus can enrich current scholarship. First, Hegesippus shows that the term martys did not unambiguously mean "martyr" until at least the third century. And second, Hegesippus's famous martyrdom of James the brother of Jesus features distinctively Pythagorean traits, constituting a different kind of philosophical martyr than the Stoic or Socratic martyrs of canonical narratives.