{"id":1485,"date":"2013-04-08T12:33:00","date_gmt":"2013-04-08T12:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/04\/martyrdom-complex.html"},"modified":"2013-04-08T12:33:00","modified_gmt":"2013-04-08T12:33:00","slug":"martyrdom-complex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/04\/martyrdom-complex.html","title":{"rendered":"Martyrdom Complex"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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Candida Moss says Christians need to get over their martyr complex. Her new book, \u201cThe Myth of Martyrdom<\/a>,\u201d identifies two significant problems with how we imagine Christian martyrs. The first involves our ancient past: simply, Christians did not suffer persistent (or even frequent) persecution from the Roman authorities. Many of the ancient Christian martyrdom accounts amount to pure fiction, and all of them have been embellished to address concerns from periods much later than the lives of their heroes. Second, our martyrdom legacy has led Christians to see ourselves as the righteous \u201cus\u201d against the demonic \u201cthem,\u201d fueling everything from combat against heresy to outright combat in the Crusades to FoxNews and the \u201cWar on Christmas.\u201d Moss writes so elegantly that you\u2019ll find people reading her book everywhere from libraries to beaches; it is that informative and entertaining.<\/span><\/div>\n
Moss, already full Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame just five years past her Ph.D. (Yale), has earned her rank with two earlier academic studies of martyrdom accounts. Because I am providing a more traditional review of \u201cMyth of Martyrdom\u201d in another venue, my focus here lies with her account of how martyrdom shapes contemporary imagination.<\/span><\/div>\n
Moss\u2019 historical case is essential for her cultural reflections. Historians have long known that early Christians wrote \u2014 and wrote and wrote \u2014 about martyrs, but evidence from outside the movement simply does not confirm this picture. Moss goes beyond this stark problem by providing detailed analysis of the Christian martyr stories. While some believe Christian martyrs were somehow unique, Moss shows how ancient martyrdom accounts imitated noble deaths in Greco-Roman and Jewish tradition. Moreover, she demonstrates that even our most reliable Christian accounts reveal their own ulterior motives: fighting heresies that emerged after the careers of the martyrs, supporting the orthodox hierarchy, and even promoting tourism, as Christianity rapidly developed a tourism industry involving the relics of the martyrs. Christian martyrdom narratives indeed celebrated faithful heroism, but they always fostered other agendas as well.<\/span><\/div>\n
Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Candida Moss says Christians need to get over their martyr complex. Her new book, \u201cThe Myth of Martyrdom,\u201d identifies two significant problems with how we imagine Christian martyrs. The first involves our ancient past: simply, Christians did not suffer persistent (or even frequent) persecution from the Roman authorities. Many of the ancient Christian martyrdom accounts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2251,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nMartyrdom Complex<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Candida Moss says Christians need to get over their martyr complex. 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