Bowersock’s 1993 Wiles lectures, delivered at Queen’s University of Belfast, are the second set in that series given on a subject concerned with ancient Christianity. The first was the justly famous Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety of E. R. Dodds, delivered in 1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1965).
With his focus on the narratives which we call “saints’ lives,” Bowersock looks at that borderline in narrative between what we call “history” and what we call “fiction.” B.P. Reardon has stated, “… narrative fiction is not a clearly defined category of literature … An important variant of th[e] question [at what point does history become fiction] is, At what point does hagiography—which is ideologically directed biography—become fiction?”
Bowersock sees martyrdom as a peculiarly Christian response to the world of the Roman empire with its intertwined forces of social, religious and political practices and beliefs. How martyrdom came to be a Christian practice and when it arose are matters that are the subject of his first chapter. In dealing with the creation of the idea and terms of martyrdom, Bowersock goes to great length to eliminate any Jewish or pagan antecedents of the practice. Why he finds it so necessary to exclude such antecedents is only made clear later. Indeed despite the vehemence of his arguments, the evidence is scanty on both sides of the discussion.
I find it especially surprising that Bowersock does not consider the arguments of A.A.R. Bastiaensen, a distinguished scholar of the Dutch Nijmegen School, who is the editor of a recent collection of acta and passiones martyrum.
1) that they did not imitate the pagan glorification of heroic victims of tyranny (e.g., the trial and death of Socrates, or the so-called acta martyrum paganorum or exitus virorum illustrium), for most of these have political rather than religious motives.
2) that they were not a continuation of the Jewish veneration of martyred prophets (e.g. the lives of the Maccabees or the death of certain prophets). Despite similarities in language and thought, the veneration of Jewish martyrs collected about a specific place (of death or of burial) and always remained a matter of private devotion; the veneration of the Christian martyrs was always a fact of the Church as a community. This kind of community activity is lacking for the stories of the Jewish martyrs. It is clear that the Christian acta arise within the community and under the direct influence of the events.
3) the martyr is not identified with Christ through testimony inspired by the passion of Christ as narrated in the New Testament, nor is the martyr identified with Christ by a place in the eucharistic service. True, the martyr’s sufferings are a glory to the martyr, but are not the substance of the martyrdom. Although the martyr is associated with Christ, and the martyr has a presence in the liturgy, the reading of acta is not tied to the eucharistic service, since these reports were intended to be heard by the catechumens as well, and thus the tie to the sacrifice of Christ is less apparent.
Bowersock approaches the problem of Maccabees and its relation to Christian martyrdom from a historical point of view. Remarking that the scholarly communis opinio now sets the accounts of the Maccabees (Books 2 and 4) to a period of the second or first century BCE, Bowersock states that both accounts could come from the period after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. He further notes that no one would suggest that these books are in any way contemporary with the events they narrate (viz., middle of the second century BCE). In this way, within the compass of a few pages, a suggestion becomes a fact. Why is it important for Bowersock to set the date of the Maccabean narrative so late, even though he offers no solid evidence to support this? It is necessary to his argument because he believes that the whole conception of martyrdom came into existence in the early years of the second century CE, probably in “western Asia Minor (Anatolia)” (17).
It is not clear why it is necessary that the idea of martyrdom be purely Christian. Certainly it seems a more convenient and easier hypothesis to assume that the notion of martyrdom was a general one wherever the authorities clashed with the adherents of a revealed religion. To deny Jewish influences on the concept of martyrdom seems equivalent to denying an influence of Judaism on Christianity in general. At the same time, however, it is certainly clear that the horrible drama of Christian martyrdom was played out in and for a public that considered the execution of religious criminals popular entertainment.
As Bowersock observes (23), the period from which we have texts of martyrdom range from the second to the early fourth century CE. Once official toleration of Christianity became government policy, the need for such texts by the congregation of Christians for their edification and strengthening ceased to be a concern. Examining these texts we discern certain features that reflect the literary culture of the early Empire. These texts seem to share characteristics of what we now call anachronistically the “ancient novel.” Bowersock sees (24) as the transitional work from which martyrology and later hagiography developed as that curious piece of historical fiction now known as the Clementine Recognitions.
If this view is correct, then the early texts of martyrology are “potentially important documents for the taste and nature of Christianity when Rome still had its empire and empowered its far-flung bureaucracy to process recalcitrant Christians within the legal system of the age” (25). In this way, the martyrologies reflect a different world from that of the New Testament Gospels. It now becomes clear why Bowersock wishes to strip the martyrologies of any Jewish antecedents. While he admits that the Gospels arise out of Hellenized Judaism, the martyrologies are centered in the “non-Jewish Graeco-Roman society of Asia Minor, Greece, and North Africa” (26).
Crucial to the Christian experience of martyrdom seems to be at least in part official transcripts of the legal proceedings against them.
In addition to the remarks exchanged in the legal hearing, these Acta may also contain writings of the martyrs themselves (as in the case of Perpetua) as well as contemporary narration of the events of the punishment. Such documentary material, Bowersock states, “allows the historian to integrate the martyrdoms within the larger fabric of society and administration in the Roman empire” (28), which leads him to the conclusion, already adumbrated by him earlier, that the Christian martyr acts have more reference to Roman ways of thinking about religion and administration than to the Semitic world out of which Christianity arose. The interrogations and protocols that are presented take a form that is entirely fitted to Roman practice and are totally removed from Jewish ideas of martyrdom.
The question of whether the personal reports of the martyrs represent the actual writings of the martyrs is still unsettled. Bowersock suggests that the incorporation of references in the Acts of Pionios to himself and his companions in the first person plural points to a prior document by the martyr himself. Yet such references already appear in documents outside Bowersock’s tradition.
The place of martyrdom and the life of the martyrs are curiously tied to the world of the city, and thus to the world of holiday and spectacle. In a sense, the trial of the martyr offers an opportunity for the witness to the faith to speak to an audience of other city-dwellers, much as Bowersock suggests, the sophists and wise men did in earlier times. Here the martyr does reflect the world of the New Testament, especially that of Paul in many of the famous scenes in Acts. The death of the martyr in the arena is, Bowersock notes, closer to the world of the athlete and gladiator. In the last vision of Perpetua, God himself appears as the director of the games in which the martyr will perish, and it is he who delivers to her the reward of victory over the devil ( Passio Perpetuae 10).
Yet, as Bowersock observes in his final chapter, the Christian defiance of the state differs from the suicides of the Roman aristocrats, described in such moving detail to us by Tacitus. Such a personal affirmation of freedom is foreign to the martyrs, who offer themselves up to a public death. The death of the martyrs must bear cheerful witness to the faith before the disbelievers. Yet Bowersock argues that the tradition of suicide among the Romans was a powerful incentive for Christian martyrdom (72). Once there is a serious prohibition of suicide (as that found in Augustine), the age of martyrdom is at an end.
Since the book is based on four lectures, the discussion moves swiftly from supposition to fact, for the genre allows little space for close argumentation. It is, consequently, often more suggestive than convincing. Bowersock has raised more questions than he has answered, which makes the work exciting for scholars who are invited, in a sense, to continue the discussion of issues so clearly set out in so brief a compass.