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Early Christian Martyrdom

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the lives of martyrs in the first three centuries of Christianity and how Eusebius presented their stories once the Roman Empire became Christian.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the accounts by Eusebius of Caesarea (c260-339 AD) and others of the killings of Christians in the first three centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus. Eusebius was writing in a time of peace, after The Great Persecution that had started with Emperor Diocletian in 303 AD and lasted around eight years. Many died under Diocletian, and their names are not preserved, but those whose deaths are told by Eusebius became especially celebrated and their stories became influential. Through his writings, Eusebius shaped perceptions of what it meant to be a martyr in those years, and what it meant to be a Christian.

The image above is of The Martyrdom of Saint Blandina (1886) at the Church of Saint-Blandine de Lyon, France

With:

Candida Moss
Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham

Kate Cooper
Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London

And

James Corke-Webster
Senior Lecturer in Classics, History and Liberal Arts at King’s College London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Available now

53 minutes

Last on

Thu 28 Apr 2022 21:30

LINKS AND FURTHER READING

CONTRIBUTORS








READING LIST

L. Stephanie Cobb, Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts (Columbia University Press, 2008)

Kate Cooper, 'The Voice of the Victim: Gender, Representation, and Early Christian Martyrdom' (Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 80:3, 1998)

James Corke-Webster, Eusebius and Empire: Constructing Church and Rome in the Ecclesiastical History (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Eusebius (trans. G.A. Williamson), The History of the Church (Penguin, 1989)

Jan Willem van Henten and Friedrich Avemarie, Martyrdom and Noble Death (Routledge, 2002)

Aaron Johnson, Eusebius: Understanding Classics (Bloomsbury, 2013)

Paul Middleton, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Martyrdom (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020)

Paul Middleton, Martyrdom: A Guide for the Perplexed (T&T Clark, 2011)

Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (HarperCollins, 2013)

Brent Shaw, ‘The Myth of the Neronian persecution’ (Journal of Roman Studies 105, 2015)


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  • Thu 28 Apr 2022 09:00
  • Thu 28 Apr 2022 21:30

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