CLAS / PHIL 2610 Paganism to Christianity

Reading Handout 10. Persecution and Martyrdom

Reading for Thursday March 21, 2002

Reading: Chadwick pp. 23-31; 116-24

Lane and MacMullen 18.1-14 (pp. 218-239)

Norlin Reserve: Passion of Perpetua or at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/perpetua.html

This week we turn to a distinctly Christian genre, martyr acts. The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas was written in North Africa in 203 AD. The previous year, the emperor Septimius Severus had initiated a persecution which had swept across North Africa and forced the capture of a group of Christians in Carthage. Most famous among these was a young woman named Vibia Perpetua. Perpetua was of aristocratic lineage and highly educated. She put her education to work by permanently recording her experience for posterity. In her Passion she relates the story of her captivity, the visions she and her fellow captive Saturus had while under arrest, and the manner in which she persuaded the guards to treat her and her fellow captives with a minimum of dignity. All of this is framed in a narrative of the actual execution during a public spectacle offered for the birthday of the son of the emperor, Geta. This document is one of the few works we have written by a woman in antiquity and represents probably the best testimony of any ancient text about the feelings and interests of an ancient woman. Read carefully so as to distinguish what Perpetua says from the words of the anonymous author who added the beginning and end to her text.

Questions

1. Why did the Romans feel compelled to persecute the Christians? What religious motivations were there for the persecutions? Did Roman governors like killing Christians or did they do so because they were ordered to?

2. How systematic were the persecutions? Was there a change in the nature and scale of the persecutions over time?

3. Did Christians actually seek martyrdom? What led the Christians to endure persecution with such steadfast courage? Is there evidence of a Christian backlash against persecution?

4. What were the concerns of the average woman in North Africa as portrayed in the Passion of Perpetua? What does the Passion tell us about how Christianity affected family relations?

5. What do the visions of Perpetua and Saturus tell us about how Christians perceived their own contests with Roman authority? What do they tell us about their conception of the afterlife?

6. How did the church survive the persecutions? What were the most significant impacts on the church? What would Christianity be like if it had not been for the persecutions?