Daily Reading for March 7 • Perpetua and her Companions, Martyrs at Carthage, 202
Early Christians were all supposed to be martyrs—witnesses—although not all were expected to die. . . . The eagerness with which many early Christians sought a public occasion to give witness indicates that they had already been primed, indeed trained, for the opportunity. It is also likely that they already understood this giving witness in sacrificial terms, so that their witness became a ritual occasion—a sacrificial liturgy parallel to, and with some of the same effects as, the eucharist. Out of this ritual of exaltation in which a martyr became a saint grew the devotion to the saints in early Christianity, along with their relics and the public cycle of ceremonies devoted to their memories.
Early Christian authors, and the martyrs themselves, thus followed Jewish precedent when they construed martyrdoms as liturgical acts, offerings of themselves to God as redemptive sacrifices on their own behalf and on behalf of their congregation (and, indeed, of all humanity) that likewise provided a means for ascending to the throne of God in the manner of previous Jewish prophets and visionaries. What is new in early Christianity is the way in which these martyrdoms are understood as the appropriation of the identity of another through mimesis, thus accomplishing a mass or common exaltation in Jesus. The way of ascent and exaltation is thereby opened not just to a priesthood or restricted class of trained visionaries, but potentially to every Christian. . . . Martyrs, through their actions and the narratives about them, became the quintessential representatives of Christian identity. They blazed a trail into death and the kingdom of God and were understood to mediate God’s favors while they served the community and stood as exemplars of brave faith. . . .
The unordained, sometimes unlearned martyrs were frequently viewed as direct rivals of the bishops, as we see in the works of Cyprian of Carthage, whose authority was challenged by those preparing for martyrdom, or in the dream of Perpetua, in which the bishop abases himself before her as a sign of her higher authority as martyr. The social position of the martyrs, therefore, could be described as inherently ambiguous: selected by the divine will rather than by membership in a socially restrictive association, not required to be learned or even literate, not restricted to wealthy male citizens, martyrs were still, in most Christian textual sources, regarded as the most completely or faithfully Christian members of the church.
From “Martyrdom as Exaltation” by Robin Darling Young, in Late Ancient Christianity, edited by Virginia Burrus, volume 2 in the series A People’s History of Christianity (Fortress Press, 2005).