Conclusion

The Conclusion explores audiences’ encounters with martyr texts after fears of judicial violence have passed. The martyrs’ divine deliverance from pain may offer hope to later readers who—before widespread anesthetics—had little expectation for a pain-free existence. But divine deliverance—the miraculous intervention into physiological reactions—is also a stumbling block for many modern readers. The book concludes, then, with reflections drawn from recent considerations of narrative empathy, which offer insight into why readers may overlook or even reject the claims to impassibility made within these texts.

Narratives and Counternarratives

Chapter Five contextualizes the claims about the martyrs’ experiences by investigating ways this discourse of painlessness builds upon or resonates with existing discourses. Assertions of impassibility in martyrdom, for instance may reflect interactions with the broader discourse of Stoic philosophy. Additionally, the discourse of painlessness may reflect communal appropriation of certain eschatological expectations about resurrected bodies and future rewards. This chapter, furthermore, examines ways that Christian claims to impassibility subvert pagan constructions of Christianity. Pagans constructed Christians as suffering and in pain at their prosecutorial hands. Christian claims to impassibility, then, function as a counter-narrative, as a challenge to the description of pagan judicial triumph.

Divine Analgesia

Chapter Three surveys narrative techniques for rejecting pain as a locus of meaning in martyrdom. A number of texts explicitly deny the experience of pain altogether by employing the language of analgesia or anesthesia in their descriptions of the martyrs’ experiences of torture; other texts employ typical terms for pain but negate them; some narratives differentiate the experiences of the martyrs’ bodies from those of their spirits. Often texts attribute Christian impassibility to the presence and support of the divine. Finally, many texts thwart the audience’s visual imagination by preparing listeners to envision a grotesque murder, but then unexpectedly describing, instead, a beautiful body unharmed by torture. In these stories, torture does not harm Christians but, rather, it heals them.

Introduction

The Introduction focuses on the differences between ancient and modern experiences of martyr texts. In particular, it explores how ancient audiences might have received these stories: aurally within communal settings, particularly in church settings. It examines the ways martyr texts employ techniques of oral delivery to engage audiences emotionally. It differentiates the cultural contexts of modern and ancient audiences that affect the ways the texts can be understood: what cultural knowledge is required to engage fully with martyr texts?

Bodies in Pain

Chapter One examines the cultural and social experiences of modern audiences that inevitably shape their understandings of martyr texts. These modern experiences must be recognized as foreign to the ancient world. Even when categories or experiences are shared, the meaning attached to them may differ; this is, I suggest, the case for the categories “pain” and “suffering.” Thus, we must not only understand the different ways modern and ancient audiences receive the texts and the different cultural information available to each group, but also recognize that the two audiences had different understandings of the experience and significance of pain and suffering.

Whose Pain?

Chapter Four examines stories in which pain does function as a marker of meaning. In some texts, martyrs experience bodily pain apart from persecution; severing worldly ties, for instance, may be painful, but the texts do not associate this pain with persecution for the faith. In other texts, confessing Christians are insensitive to the pain of torture, but apostates are not: in these cases, the experience of pain is a marker of faithlessness. In still other texts, injury is transferred from the martyr to the persecutor. Suffering, therefore, is directly related to torture, but it is surprisingly located: the persecutor rather than the martyr experiences the physical trauma.

Text and Audience

Chapter Two explores the ways martyr texts carefully describe the physical assaults on the martyrs’ bodies—thereby activating the audience’s expectations for pain—but then immediately thwart that expectation by insisting the Christian martyrs were insensitive to pain. In addition, the texts include stories in which the tools of torture refuse to participate in the persecution of Christians, and stories in which the persecutors are unable to obtain their desired goals. Martyr texts also upend audience expectations by cursorily reporting the execution of the martyr or by obscuring the audience’s sightlines at the moment of death. This chapter, therefore, examines narrative techniques that engage listeners and then direct them toward particular—perhaps surprising—(re-)interpretations of events.