User:Pseudo-Richard/Christian martyrs

Despite the widely perceived image of early Christians as martyrs, relatively few were actually executed. The Romans preferred to use legal sanctions and social pressures to compel Christians to sacrifice and participate in emperor worship. Often the focus of the persecution was on the clergy, many of whom were imprisoned and tortured. Many Christians chose to renounce their faith, leading to subsequent schisms over whether such Christians should be allowed to rejoin the Church. One emphasis of the Christian teaching is faithfulness to the point of being willing to be persecuted for one's faith, even to the point of martyrdom. Many of the early Christian martyrs were beatified as saints, starting a tradition of venerating martyrs.

Barnes
Barnes Constantine and Eusebius Harvard University Press, 1981 reports 660 killings in Alexandria alone. Boer's Short History of the Early Church states "The persecution was utterly severe. At its end, if a church leader did not have the marks of the whip or other forms of torture on his body, he was suspected of having betrayed the faith. Thousands died and thousands more went through life maimed, blinded or disfugured by torture." Williams' Diocletian and the Roman recovery gives a thorough review, with descriptions of tortures with boiling lead etc, quoting Eusebius on axes made blunt by beheadings, and quotes the following incident: "''A little Christian town in Phrygia was surrounded by soldiers, who set it on fire and completely destroyed it, with its whole population - men, women and children - as they called on Almighty God. Why? Because every one of the inhabitants, including the town prefect himself and the magistrates, all declared they were Christians and that they utterly refused to commit idolatry."''

MacMullen
"even the numbers it actually got hold of and put to death were 'only a few, from time to time, and very easily totalled up'. In an explanatory note (p 134), MacMullen states "The role of martyrs, however, must be considered against their small numbers, “hundreds rather than thousands,” says Frend (1965) 413, and, to the same effect, Grant (1977) 5; further, heresies produced martyrs, but (except perhaps for the Montanist, in the conventional picture) were not helped thereby."  So perhaps more people died, but they were not considered "mainstream Christian", but splinter groups such as Montanist and Marcionites.
 * MacCulloch, p. 173 "few died outside a small group of leaders".
 * , p 441

"The worst affected provinces, where Christians were numerous and the persecutors zealous, seem to have been Bithynia, Syria, Egypt, Palestine, and Phrygia. The total number executed cannot have exceeded a few thousand. ... The Roman State was out to compel Christians to sacrifice, not exterminate them."  It also states that many clergy were imprisoned and tortured, often severely. The page then gives examples of civil authorities finding nonviolent ways for Christians to get around the rules, concluding: ''"Often it was only the very noisy Christians, who shouted at the tops of their voices that they had never sacrificed and never would, who were maltreated - and then only to silence them and drive them away as if they had sacrificed." '"Elsewhere, the atrocities reached a climax in acts such as this"''

Hopkins
Keith Hopkins writes on the difficulties of the source matter

Gibbons
Gibbon offers perhaps the earliest treatment of the subject, and his methods are as modern as Hopkins'. Gibbon makes the same point as Hopkins, though on a more particular matter: "The more ancient writers content themselves with pouring out a liberal effusion of loose and tragical invectives, without condescending to ascertain the precise number of those persons who were permitted to seal with their blood their belief of the gospel." (Womersley ed., 1.578) Gibbon's solution was to tally the number of martyrs mentioned in Eusebius of Caesarea's Martyrs of Palestine seems to produce a total of all martyrdoms in Palestine. Some arithmetic transforms it into a total for the entire Empire. This figure has been accepted as a baseline in most modern trials at the question, including those of G.E.M. de Ste Croix, W.H.C. Frend, and Rodney Stark.

Unfortunately, the underlying assumption behind Gibbon's reconstruction&mdash;that Eusebius gives a full tally of the martyrs in Palestine&mdash;is invalid. As Timothy Barnes outlines in his Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), the selection of cases in the Martyrs is personal and limited: "Eusebius' Martyrs of Palestine is not quite what its conventional title seems to imply. Its author did not set out to give a complete list of Christians in Palestine who were executed for their faith between 303 and 311. Eusebius himself entitled the work "About those who suffered martyrdom in Palestine," and his intention was to preserve the memories of the martyrs whom he knew, rather than to give a comprehensive account of how persecution affected the Roman province in which he lived." (p. 154) Barnes proceeds to put the point more finely: "It is more than doubtful, therefore, whether the Martyrs of Palestine can be safely made the basis for any general estimate of how may martyrs perished during the persecution between 303 and 311. The selection of material is personal: the Martyrs is less a history of the persecution in Palestine than a memorial to the friends of Eusebius who dies for their faith." (p. 155)

Clark
A small number of Christians were executed; others were imprisoned, tortured, put to forced labor, castrated, or sent to brothels; others fled, or managed to go undetected; some renounced their beliefs."

Clarke
"Eusebius, in a catalog of martyrs, lists ninety-one victims in Palestine over the years 303–11 during the Great Persecution (Clarke, p. 657) His figures are not complete (Clarke, pp. 658–59), but have been used to estimate the total number of martyrs across the empire (Clarke, pp. 657–58, e.g. W.H.C. Frend, Martrdom and Persecution (Basil Blackwell, 1965; rept. Baker House, 1981), p. 536)."

"That constitutes our best statistical guide to actual deaths in one province as some sort of model for elsewhere in the east. But other governors may have been even more vigorous in their pursuit of Christians – and the presence of the imperial court, whenever it progressed, undoubtedly stimulated action in its immediate environment. And there is one important caveat to make on Eusebius’ own figures. He is not necessarily giving the full tally but recording for posterity those with whom he was personally conversant:"

"It is meet, then, that the conflicts which were illustrious in various districts should be committed to writing by those who dwelt with the combatants in their districts. But for me, I pray that I may be able to speak of those with whom I was personally conversant, and that they may associate me with them – those in whom the whole people of Palestine glories, because even in the midst of our land, the Saviour of all men arose like a thirst-quenching spring. The contests, then, of those illustrious champions I shall relate for the general instruction and profit."

"Indeed, the narrative at various points casually discloses unnamed (and unnumbered) companions of confessors and martyrs (presumably not personally known to Eusebius), for example, Mart. Pal.(L) 1.1 (companions of Procopius, sent from Scythopolis to Caesarea), Mart. Pal.(L) 3.3 (‘Agapius and his companions’), Mart. Pal.(L) 7.1 (unnamed confessors on trial, approached by Theodosia of Tyre), Mart. Pal.(L) 8.4 (unnamed Christians from Gaza and their companions, mutilated) etc. We cannot, therefore, be in any way certain that even for Palestine we have fully reliable statistics as some yardstick. (Clarke, op. cit., pp. 658–59.)"

de Ste Croix
"Between 64 and 250, there were only isolated, local persecutions; and even if the total number of victims was quite considerable (as I think it probably was), most individual outbreaks must usually have been quite brief."

"No estimate of the total number of martyrs can be profitably attempted, but the considerations brought forward here reinforce the arguments of those who have maintained that in the Great persecution, at any rate, the number was not large."

Schaff
"The number of martyrs cannot be estimated with any degree of certainty. The seven episcopal and the ninety-two Palestinian martyrs of Eusebius are only a select list bearing a similar relation to the whole number of victims as the military lists its of distinguished fallen officers to the large mass of common soldiers, and form therefore no fair basis for the calculation of Gibbon, who would reduce the whole number to less than two thousand. During the eight years of this persecution the number of victims, without including the many confessors who were barbarously mutilated and condemned to a lingering death in the prisons and mines, must have been much larger."