Training Camp

In her 2001 Pere Marquette Lecture Robin Darling Young ( In Procession Before the World: Martyrdom As Public Liturgy in Early Christianity (The Pere Marquette Lecture in Theology, 2001) , pp. 1-2 ) notes that martyrdom in the early church highlights the clash between “opposing religious societies” that “represented two distinct societies’ divergent sacrificial systems – one customary, the other a new interpretation of an ancient and exclusive practice dedicated to making a sacrifice to the God of Israel.”

Christians, Young argues, didn’t stumble into martyrdoms; they trained for them: “early Christian communities trained for their own, quasi-eucharistic sacrifice of martyrdom and expected it; they did this by imitating examples from life or from literary works; they scrutinized their own behavior for conformity to traditional expectations; they envisioned themselves to be fighting a cosmic battle upon which hinged the salvation of the world and their own participation in the heavenly court and temple.”

Romans didn’t see it coming: “Of all this battle and sacrifice, of all their training and would-be imitation of the warrior-Messiah, the Roman civil servants had no clue.”