The Early Martyr Narratives

Neither Authentic Accounts nor Forgeries

Éric Rebillard

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780812297607
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

From Eusebius of Caesarea, who first compiled a collection of martyr narratives around 300, to Thierry Ruinart, whose Acta primorum martyrum sincera et selecta was published in 1689, the selection and study of early hagiographic narratives has been founded on an assumption that there existed documents written at the time of martyrdom, or very close to it. As a result, a search for authenticity has been and continues to be central, even in the context of today's secular scholarship. But, as Éric Rebillard contends, the alternative approach, to set aside entirely the question of the historical reliability of martyr narratives, is not satisfactory either. Instead, he argues that martyr narratives should be consider as fluid "living texts, " written anonymously and received by audiences not as precise historical reports but as versions of the story. In other words, the form these texts took, between fact and fiction, made it possible for audiences to readily accept the historicity of the martyr while at the same time not expect to hear or read a truthful account.In The Early Martyr Narratives, Rebillard considers only accounts of Christian martyrs supposed to have been executed before 260, and only those whose existence is attested in sources that can be dated to before 300. The resulting small corpus contains no texts in the form of legal protocols, traditionally viewed as the earliest, most official and authentic records, nor does it include any that can be dated to a period during which persecution of Christians is known to have taken place. Rather than deduce from this that they are forgeries written for the sake of polemic or apologetic, Rebillard demonstrates how the literariness of the narratives creates a fictional complicity that challenges and complicates any claims of these narratives to be truthful.

CHAPTER 1

The Earliest Narratives and Their Reception

In order to study the production of martyr narratives at its inception, I establish which texts may securely be considered the earliest extant narratives. It is not my intention that this initial group of texts be viewed as a “canon,” nor even as a closed list; it is simply a group of texts that both deal with martyrs executed before 260 and are attested before 300.¹ (Although other martyr narratives were very likely composed before 300, comments regarding these are necessarily speculative.) Accordingly, in the first section of this chapter I describe and apply new criteria of selection. In the second, I examine the earliest known contexts of reception of these texts in an attempt to close the gap between their first external attestation and their production.² I find that these contexts are all located within the period that opens with the edict of Decius (250) or in that which follows the persecution of Valerian (258–60). In each case, it is a period of peace insofar as the traditional narrative of the persecutions is concerned. This finding suggests that we should consider whether the production of the texts was motivated by factors extrinsic to the persecution and execution of the martyrs whose stories are told.

The Earliest Narratives

I will treat only narratives concerning those whom Eusebius calls the “ancient martyrs,” that is, martyrs executed before 260, when Gallienus repealed Valerian’s edict of persecution.³ The reason for this initial limitation is that texts concerned with the victims of the Great Persecution—there are no records of executions of Christians between 260 and 303⁴—were written in a very different context. Indeed, even if we are careful not to overemphasize the effects of the “Constantinian revolution,” the number of victims executed and the freedom of cult granted to the Christians by Constantine, not to mention the privileges he accorded to the Christian clergy, significantly transformed the nature of the memory work on Christian martyrs.⁵

Our criteria should not permit assumptions about authenticity and date of composition. I use a two-step process: first, there needs to be external evidence for the existence of a narrative; second, there needs to be sufficient evidence that one of the extant texts could be the narrative attested in the external evidence. For the reasons stated above, the external evidence of composition must predate 300.⁶ As all narratives about the “ancient martyrs” written in other languages are translations of an earlier Greek or Latin original, I therefore consider only Greek and Latin narratives.

Greek Narratives

No external evidence attests to a Greek narrative before Eusebius does in the Collection of Ancient Martyrdoms that he compiled for the writing of his Ecclesiastical History.⁷ Eusebius’s collection is now lost, but references to it in the Ecclesiastical History allow us to reconstruct its content. Eusebius’s Collection included narratives for Apollonius, Carpus and his companions, Pionius, Polycarp, and the martyrs of Lyon and Vienne.⁸

The only extant Greek narrative about Apollonius (BHG 49) presents details that belong to a tradition different from that known to Eusebius, and the same is true of the Armenian version (BHO 79), which is a translation of a different, lost Greek text.⁹ Neither BHG 49 nor BHO 79 can, therefore, be included among the earliest narratives.

Until the discovery of BHG 293 by Aubé in 1881, the text known to Eusebius about Carpus and his companions was assumed to be lost. While Aubé himself was quite cautious about the identification of BHG 293 as the text known to Eusebius,¹⁰ Harnack affirmed that BHG 293 was both the original version and the text Eusebius used.¹¹ In 1920, Franchi de’ Cavalieri discovered a narrative in Latin, BHL 1622m, which he thought to be a translation of a Greek text that was closer to the original than BHG 293.¹² Lietzmann presented a series of arguments against Cavalieri’s appraisal of BHL 1622m, and, when Delehaye revisited the dossier in 1940, he concluded that the narrative known to Eusebius was lost.¹³ A conservative approach, therefore, does not include BHG 293 among the earliest narratives.¹⁴

In the case of Pionius the situation is relatively straightforward. Eusebius included in his Collection of Ancient Martyrdoms a text whose content matches that of the only Greek narrative known to us (BHG 1546).¹⁵ There is, however, a discrepancy in the dating of the martyrdom: Eusebius seems to date the martyrdom to the reign of Marcus Aurelius while BHG 1546 dates it to the persecution of Decius.¹⁶ There are other inconsistencies in this section of Eusebius, such as the mention of Metrodorus, but these may be due to the dossier—Eusebius found the text in a collection of material related to Smyrna.¹⁷ Thus, this is no solid ground for rejecting BHG 1546, and I count it among the earliest narratives.

For Polycarp, Boudewijn Dehandschutter has established that the text excerpted by Eusebius is the text known through the menologia tradition and not an independent, earlier version.¹⁸ As four of the six manuscripts within this tradition also contain the colophon (as well as two other manuscripts that represent two different traditions), there is no reason to postulate that the colophon is a later addition.¹⁹ Hence, I consider BHG 1556–59 to be the text known to Eusebius.²⁰

No text concerning the martyrs of Lyon and Vienne has been preserved except the Letter of the Churches of Lyon and Vienne that is found in Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History.²¹ Though he included the whole text and a small dossier of other documents in his Collection of Ancient Martyrdoms, Eusebius supplied only excerpts of the Letter in the Ecclesiastical History.²² This narrative will, therefore, receive only cursory treatment.

Latin Narratives

Augustine provides us with a terminus ante quem for several Latin texts just as Eusebius does for Greek texts.²³ Indeed, in some of his sermons, he refers to the practice of reading martyr narratives before preaching on the day of their feast, and he sometimes inserts short quotes from them into the body of his sermons.²⁴ Such a terminus ante quem, however, is more than a century later than the terminus ante quem for the texts known to Eusebius. As noted above, between 300 and 430 crucial changes occurred that affected the memory work dealing with Christian martyrs. We must, therefore, seek an earlier terminus ante quem.

Tertullian, who gathered much information about executions of Christians in his writings,²⁵ is sometimes said to have known both the Acts of the Scilitan Martyrs (BHL 7527) and the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity (BHL 6633). In the Ad Scapulam, Tertullian reports that Vigellius Saturninus was to his knowledge the first proconsul to put Christians to death in North Africa.²⁶ Saturninus is in fact the name of the proconsul responsible for the execution of the Scilitan martyrs in BHL 7527, but Tertullian names neither the martyrs nor their city, and as a consequence, his reference to Saturninus is insufficient to guarantee his knowledge of the Acts.²⁷ In the De anima, Tertullian mentions Perpetua and refers to one of her visions.²⁸ We can conclude that he had access to the account she wrote, but not necessarily to the Passion (BHL 6633) in which it was included.²⁹

The first testimony of BHL 6633 is provided by the Life of Cyprian, composed by Pontius, a deacon of the Carthaginian church, soon after Cyprian’s execution in 258.³⁰ It has long been noted that Pontius alludes to Perpetua and her companions in his preface.³¹ His text also evinces knowledge of BHL 6633. Indeed, Pontius anticipates his reference to Perpetua and her companions with echoes of the preface to BHL 6633: “It is proper to briefly record a few things, not because the life of so great a man could remain obscure from anyone, even of the pagans, but so that he be offered to those who come after us also, as a great and incomparable model in eternal memory, and thus that he be set forth in writing as an example to be imitated.”³² Documenta, litteris digerere, exemplum, posteri are words and expressions that appear at the very beginning of the preface to BHL 6633: “If the ancient examples of faith that bear witness to God’s grace and accomplish man’s edification have been set forth in writing so that by reading them aloud, by performing the deeds, so to speak, God might be honored and man strengthened, why should not new models equally suited to these goals be set forth? Indeed, these examples will eventually be ancient and indispensable for those who come after us, if they are reckoned of a lesser authority in the present time because of a prejudiced reverence for antiquity.”³³ It is clear that Pontius knew BHL 6633, and he therefore provides a terminus ante quem of 260 for this text.

It is usually thought that Pontius also knew and used a version of the Acts of Cyprian.³⁴ In his preface, however, Pontius clearly implies that it is not the case: he states that he writes the Life so that Cyprian’s martyrdom be known too, and when he mentions precedents for writing martyr narratives, he refers only to the Passion of Perpetua, and not to any narrative about Cyprian.³⁵ On the one hand, none of the passages presented as borrowings by Pontius from the Acts is conclusive.³⁶ On the other hand, the passing reference to Cyprian’s vision in the Acts, which assumes that it is well known, must point to the Life, which is the only actual record of the vision.³⁷ Thus, the Acts were composed after the Life, and there is no terminus ante quem for them other than Augustine.³⁸

Conclusion

The list of extant martyr narratives for which a secure terminus ante quem before 300 can be established is short. There are two Greek texts: BHG 1546, the Martyrdom of Pionius (MPion) and BHG 1556–59, the Martyrdom of Polycarp (MPol). To these we can add the fragments of a third text preserved by Eusebius in the Ecclesiastical History 5.1–4: the Letter of the Churches of Lyon and Vienne (BHG 1573). There also are two Latin texts: BHL 2041, the Life of Cyprian by Pontius (VCypr) and BHL 6633, the Passion of Perpetua, Felicity, and Their Companions (PPerp).

Earlier Contexts of Use

Is it possible to narrow the gap between the year of execution of the martyrs and that of the external attestation to the existence of a narrative? Few modern scholars would propose that the time of comp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on Texts and Translations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Earliest Narratives and Their Reception
• Chapter 2. Martyr Narratives and Court Recordings
• Chapter 3. From Forgeries to Living Texts
• Chapter 4. History, Fiction, Document, Testimony
• Conclusion
• Appendix A. Text and Translation of Aug. ep. 29*
• Appendix B. Materials for a Synoptic Edition of the Acts of the Scilitan Martyrs
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments