St Maximilian of Tebessa and the Jizya

While the social and intellectual basis of voluntary martyrdom is fiercely debated, scholarship on Christian martyrdom has unanimously distinguished between “martyrdom” and “voluntary martyrdom” as separate phenomena, practices, and categories from the second century onward. Yet there is a startling dearth of evidence for the existence of the category of the “voluntary martyr” prior to the writings of Clement of Alexandria. This paper has two interrelated aims: to review the evidence for the category of the voluntary martyr in ancient martyrological discourse and to trace the emergence of the category of the voluntary martyr in modern scholarship on martyrdom. It will argue both that the category began to emerge only in the third century in the context of efforts to justify flight from persecution, and also that the assumption of Clement’s taxonomy of approaches to martyrdom by scholars is rooted in modern constructions of the natural.

Cyprian of Carthage offers a particular interpretation of the tradition of martyrdom as sacrifice and a share in the sacrifice of Christ, which his disciples and intellectual heirs develop in relation to the passion of Cyprian himself. The sacrificial martyrdom of Cyprian, the Bishop, becomes the answer to three different controversies – that between Christians and pagans for the need for appropriate ritual in the consecration of a city and the maintenance of its peace, that between the martyrs and the hierarchy as to the source of grace, and that between Donatists and the Catholics on the location of the Church. In this essay, I explore the sacrificial discourses surrounding Cyprian's death in relation to each of these controversies, in Cyprian's own correspondence, in accounts of Cyprian's martyrdom, and finally in the sermons of St. Augustine on Cyprian.

2006

Text and the Material World: Essays in Honour of Graeme Clarke, edited by Elizabeth Minchin and Heather Jackson. Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology and Literature 185. Uppsala: Astrom Editions, 2017

This is the submitted draft of my BA(hons) Theology Dissertation, which I received a First for. In this paper, I survey the development in the martyrological thought of the Catholic Church between 1073 and 1099, emphasising Gregory VII and his contemporaries, Urban II and the Chroniclers of the First Crusade. I employ a framework of distinguishing between explicit designation of martyrdom and implicit employment of martyrological language. I conclude that Gregory's views on martyrdom, since explicit language is lacking in his correspondence, are largely implicit but are also to be found in his contemporaries (i.e. the Mathildine Scholars) and that explicit martyrological language during the era of the First Crusade and their Chroniclers, in agreement with Jonathan Riley-Smith, does not come to the fore until the French Monastic Chroniclers, especially Guibert De Nogent, remaining largely implicit until then.

Many studies of early Christian martyrdom have noted the phenomenon of voluntary martyrdom. However, most scholars, drawing on criticism of the practice found in the Martyrdom of Polycarp and Clement of Alexandria, dismiss those who provoked their own arrest and death as deviant, heretical, or numerically insignificant. This article argues instead that the earliest Christian martyrologies celebrate voluntary martyrdom as a valid mainstream Christian practice, which faced only isolated challenge in the first three centuries. Furthermore, pagan sources support the view that voluntary martyrdom was a significant historical as well as literary phenomenon. As there is no reason to conclude voluntary martyrdom was anything other than a valid subset of proto-orthodox Christian martyrdom, more attention should be paid to this phenomenon by early Christian historians.

Bulletin for the Study of Religion, 2012

This paper investigate recent scholarship on early Christian martyrdom. It discusses the shift away from the study of the origins of martyrdom to an interest in martyrdom and the body, Christian identity formation, and martyrdom and orthodoxy. It further discusses the need for a reappraisal of the evidence for early Christian martyrdom and the renewed attention that questions of dating, authorship, and provenance have received.

Journal of the Australian Early Medieval …, 2007