Martyrdom

In the print edition of First Things, Ephraim Radner has some sharp words for Candida Moss’s The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom : “According to Moss’s criteria, if an account of persecution or martyrdom is later than the purported events themselves (hardly easy to prove), if there is evidence of ‘editing,’ if more common literary forms are used in the telling, if there is a hint of theological sophisticated, and so on, the account itself is fairly worthless . . . . The rule is apparently to read skeptically the writings of the past, but not to doubt the imaginations of present-day scholars.”

Put the historical questions to the side, Radner notes, and it doesn’t make any difference. Christians are still surrounded by a “cloud of witnesses” of more recent vintage, martyrs from “Soviet Gulags, Chinese re-education camps, localized Islamic attacks, Latin American and African military regimes,” all “in the last fifty years alone.” Such a “set of examples is quite sufficient for present Christian self-understanding.”